Zionism in Israel 2025 = Racism
JVL Introduction
The author of this piece, Avrum Burg, is not just any critic of Israel.
He is from Zionist royalty if you will, a former speaker of the Knesset and a chair of the Jewish Agency who fought for “a secure, diverse and thriving Jewish People, united by our heritage and by our commitment to Israel, the homeland of the Jewish People and all of its citizens.”
Zionism now, he affirms, has nothing do with the ideas that motivated Herzl or even Jabotinsky. Today, it has become a blunt signal meaning one thing: without Arabs.
Zionism’s identity as racist is proudly embraced by the Israeli right wing.
But it is the quiet racism that cuts to the quick: “The real disgrace lies with the miserable centre and the apologetic left that have adopted the same stance in practice.”
AS the elections approach later in 2026, “Basic values of civic partnership have become ideological luxuries. Equality, citizenship, rights, reconciliation, justice and dignity have become forbidden words.”
Zionism was not destined to be racist, believes Burg. Some may wish to challenge him on that. But not on his stark conclusion: “The beating heart of Zionism in 2025 is discriminatory exclusion. There is no other word for it except racism.”
RK
This article was originally published by Avrum Burg's Substack on Thu 4 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
Zionism in Israel 2025 = Racism
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True and it’s so saddening that the people of Israel have let it happen. There will never be peace until Israel changes and accepts Palestinians have the equal rights to Jews. Terrorism breeds terrorism and the first act of terrorism happened on 22nd July 1946 with the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Wasn’t Zionism the movement to a Jewish State? A Jéwish State, and doesn’t that in fact have the potential seed for exclusion of non-Jews?
“ The beating heart of Zionism in 2025 is discriminatory exclusion. There is no other word for it except racism.”
Powerful Zionist lobbying has ensured that this racism against Palestinians has spread, with some honarable exceptions, through the western world. Israel is not banned from international football or Eurovision because that’s antisemitic but Russia for war with Ukraine is. Eight young Palestine Action supporters are dying in prison without media attention because Keir Starmer’s government has bowed to Zionist lobbyists.
Sadly I don’t see an end because nobody dares utter “that sentence”
I read an article a couple of years ago in the Times of Israel (or was it Haaretz?) about a young Palestinian female journalist who plucked up the courage, shortly after 7 October, to interview Israeli Jews in the coffee shops of Tel Aviv (she spoke fluent Hebrew). One woman seemed to speak for them all when she said, in terms, with her head in her hands “I thought that all this stuff about the Palestinians was sorted out years ago. I just wish they [the Palestinians] would go away!” by which she did not mean ’emigrate’, ‘vamoose’ clear off’ ‘اِذْهَبْ بعيداً’ she meant ‘not be a problem’ any more’. That’s what Nathan Alterman’s poem touches upon. Avrum Burg’s article is beautifully crafted. It was a pleasure to read. I have just one question for him: Surely to God you know far better than I do that the literature on the Israel-Palestine conflict is positively dripping with on-the-public record, nakedly unabashed remarks – not exclusively by The Usual Suspects but by people of all stripes – to the effect that from the very beginning of the Zionist ‘project’ there was simply no doubt, no ambiguity, that what the Zionists intended to have, come Hell or High Water, as an Arabfrei Jewish State. It was just a question of when. Israeli Jews will have their Arabfrei State. But ISRAEL HAS LOST ITS [RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR] SOUL. The Haredim will, in a generation or two, become the majority of the population. The economy will crash, Israelis will jump ship in droves (especially if Qatar and Saudi Arabia get all-singin all-dancin’ advanced F-35s) and the societal and psychological fabric of Israel will will be torn asunder. It didn’t need to be like that. The maximalist, supremacist Zionists are to blame. Jewishness and Judaism will weather the storm, as they always have done! But not in Eretz Israel. Maybe the Nandi in Uasin Gishu will, albeit tardily, offer them Nachtasyl 326 words
Ordinary experience shows that evil breeds evil when we or conditions allow it to. Israel isn’t ONLY a fundamentally racist state now (and for many years previously). It’s also genocidal to its core (in spite of the few incredibly courageous, altruistic Israelis who’ve done all they CAN to change the paths taken by other Israelis).
I don’t think Israel can reform itself on its own, the evil is too entrenched in the whole of its society.
Israelis have been betrayed by a reportedly racist education system fostering in them the same ghastly fascist beliefs and values as Hitler’s government nurtured in Nazi Germany. As was the case in Germany, those (eg faith leaders, doctors, lawyers and soldiers) who OUGHT to have fought for better human, religious and professional values generally didn’t. Too often they became the obedient helpers in the wrongdoing.
Some version of Israel may still have a future but it won’t look or act like the current Israel. It may not even be a state.
Avram Burg has a go at the miserable Zionist ‘left’ but fails to see that Zionism always had Jewish Supremacy, ethnic cleansing and exclusion at its heart.
This is an article based on self-deception and wishful thinking. It was the secular Herzl who sought an alliance with the religious and who wrote in his Diaries that ‘”We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country”
The ‘liberal’ Jabotinsky formed alliances with the Polish fascists and Mussolini. It was the ‘left’ Zionists who carried out the Nakba and who put Israel’s Palestinians under military rule for 18 years.
The suppressed American King-Crane Inquiry of 1919 told how
‘The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine’
There was never a ‘clean’ or non-racist Zionism. A Jewish State is inevitably a racist state. Once Labour Zionism conquered the West Bank/Gaza/Golan it was inevitable that a regime of terror and ethnic cleansing would arise. The only question was when.
When the settlers achieved their present critical mass it was inevitable that in conjunction with other parties of the right that Zionism would turn to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Our task today is simple. The replacement of what is the bastard offspring of European ethno-nationalism and fascism. No-one who is a socialist can be anything other than anti-Zionist.
One thing is certain and that is that even if the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed Israel is doomed by its own contradictions as a vassal state of the West. I would not put money on it surviving till its centenary.
I have to agree with something in each of these writings I disagree with something assumed by many, namely that Zionism was not originally racist. Zionism was racist from its inception, people just looked at the very inviting and comforting part of the proposal instead of reading the whole in a critical manner. Like falling in love with that lovely house, Roses round the door, Lavender in the border against the walls and shiny new paintwork. Lovely internal decoration too.
BUT! Inspecting the foundations tucked underground? No.
They were insecure, exploitative and racist. Herzl would not do the hard work of making productive land himself. He postulated that others would do it. People who were less well off. Those over exploited Jews who could not wait to escape the oppression, not only of non Jews, but of Jewish people too. There is also the racist assumption, in his pamphlet, that the people inhabiting the land will be willing servants, and manual labour, for the creation of Zion/Israel until they “leave.”
LEAVE! Why does anyone abandon their homeland?
Some leave for better opportunities, as did the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews trading within other states, settling in Europe. Many leave to survive. They leave when forced, evicted, or worse, burned out of their homes like the Scottish Crofters, or starved out Irish, replaced by more profitable sheep. They are killed, or leave because they are left with nothing, relatives or alternatives, because powerful racists have control of the land.
Which Palestinians agreed the Zionist endeavour?
A racist politician in a Powerful country with a racist attitude agreed that a Jewish state was a necessary thing, not because of kind thoughts, because racism extended to Jewry, as well as any other human being that did not have the same origins.