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We are talking past one another on Zionism
A recent study of American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel has provoked much confusion in the Jewish establishment: Only 37% of Jews said they identified as Zionists, according to the data, but 88% said that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.”
Which, of course, is the standard definition of Zionism.
What’s going on? Responding to the study, Mimi Kravetz of the Jewish Federations of North America, which commissioned it, noted that large numbers of respondents conflated Zionism with “supporting the policies, decisions, and actions of the Israeli government.” Thus, Kravetz wrote, the 51% of Jews who do not identify as Zionists but support Israel’s right to exist:
are not rejecting Israel’s existence or the idea of a Jewish state. They are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose, and do not want to be associated with.
I agree with Kravetz’s analysis, but propose that we should take it a step further. Because the issue isn’t one survey. Americans, Jewish and otherwise, have been talking past one another about Zionism for years, and the ‘standard definition of Zionism’ hasn’t reflected reality for decades. And maybe those 51% of Jews are right.
Instead of Kravetz’s framing of “correct vs. incorrect understanding of Zionism,” it might be fruitful to see this as the difference between Zionism in principle and Zionism in practice.
Zionism in principle is what Nathan Birnbaum meant when he coined the term in 1890: the movement to establish a Jewish state (details TBD) in the historic land of Israel. That sounds fairly unobjectionable. There are states for French people, Ugandan people, Vietnamese people — so why not a state for Jewish people?
But Zionism in practice has turned out to be something altogether different. For at least 80 years, it has involved the dispossession of another population that calls the territory home, the second-class citizenship held by non-Jews in the Jewish state (which shows up in countless specific legal contexts), and, ultimately, various forms of discrimination, dehumanization and violence. Contrary to the way some on the Left use the word, Zionism is not only these things, but it has, historically, involved all of them.
I was raised to believe that all this was not intrinsic to Zionism, but was the unfortunate result of Arab rejectionism and terrorism, plus a few bad right-wing-nationalist apples in the Israeli population. I was educated in a pre-internet world by Jewish educators who presented a very partial view of Israeli/Palestinian history. I never learned this history from a Palestinian point of view. I never learned about the Nakba. I believed that terrorists hijacked airplanes because they hated Jews.
This understanding was always woefully incomplete and incorrect, but even as a young adult, it still made some sense to me. I was living in Israel when Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. I saw Rabin himself speak many times. I met with Israeli and Palestinian peace workers who believed, sincerely, that coexistence was finally at hand. Finally, the real Zionist dream would be realized.
Then Rabin was assassinated. And for most of the subsequent 30 years, Israelis elected right-wing and far-right governments. Settlements have swallowed large swaths of the West Bank. And for anyone under 30, this period of Israeli history is all they have ever known.
What is “Zionism” supposed to mean to that person? The dream of Herzl or the reality of Sharon, Netanyahu and Ben Gvir?
I’m not saying that this is a full depiction of recent history. It wasn’t only Bibi expanding settlements; it was Hamas blowing up buses and Yasser Arafat letting peace slip through his fingers at Camp David. I’m only saying that the “Zionism” that a Gen Z or young Millennial American has known for their entire life is totally different from the Zionism that I learned about in Jewish day school or saw in my own younger years.
So who is right about what Zionism really means? Those of us who cling to the classical definition in spite of its remoteness from reality, or those who define Zionism as it has actually been put into practice in the decades of Netanyahu’s rule?
Personally, I still cling to that dream, even if it is a delusion. And obviously, I am not alone. Organizations like J Street, the New Israel Fund, Truah, and many others still believe that Zionism can mean, or should mean, a Jewish and actually-democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. What’s left of the Israeli Left does too. Even Bono managed to issue a nuanced statement on Israel/Palestine accompanying U2’s surprise new release, which includes both a Yehuda Amichai poem and a song dedicated to peace activist Awdah Hathaleen.
But many of my close friends do not. And many intellectuals including Avraham Burg, Peter Beinart, and Shaul Magid have demonstrated that the dream was never reality; that it could not ever have been reality; that Zionism was ethno-nationalism from the beginning and thus inevitably leads to a politics of domination. In this view, the war crimes in Gaza aren’t an aberration from Zionism, but its inevitable expression.
I admit, I find it increasingly hard to disagree with this dim view of Jewish nationalism, especially as Israeli Jews keep voting for the Right.
Of course, I understand that many are not selecting an ideology so much as trying to keep their families safe from unrelenting violence. One can hardly blame a population for voting for security rather than peace when they are subjected to constant rocket fire from Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. Nor do I embrace the hyperbolic exaggerations of some on the hard left, which often slide into antisemitism.
But sometimes I wonder if I’m just clinging to a nostalgic, diaspora-tinted image of what a Jewish state could be. Where I could go to the symphony at the Jerusalem Theater and eat gourmet kosher food in the German Colony. Where I could sit in my favorite field and imagine ancient pasts. Where the patterns of my religious and cultural life were embedded in the society itself.
Maybe, like the nationalists further to my right, I am so besotted by these emotions that I am unable to see the reality of what Zionism really entails, particularly for those on the wrong end of its hierarchies. I would submit that many of us who maintain the classical definition of Zionism in principle, rather than adopt the historical one of Zionism in practice, may be similarly swayed by emotion.
At the end of the day, I despise right-wing ethno-nationalism (in the United States as well as in Israel) and its consequences, most recently the ethnic cleansing proposed for Gaza and the state-sanctioned pogroms underway in the West Bank. I feel ambivalent when I hear the Hatikva. But ultimately, there are 7.5 million Jewish people living between the river and the sea, and the large majority of them will not surrender their sovereignty. Neither will the 9.5 million Palestinians living in the same territory. Ultimately, there will still, one day, have to be some division of the land — if not this decade, then in the next one.
If this is Zionism, it is a Pragmatic Zionism, born of exhaustion. I have no utopian visions to offer, no dreams. What I yearn for is what Yehuda Amichai describes in Wildpeace, the poem that U2 just set to music:
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
The post We are talking past one another on Zionism appeared first on The Forward.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.