Lost in (Bad Faith) Translation: The Word That Became a Weapon

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Written By Ranty Em

Let me describe a debate I've been watching play out online. A debate that is completely, utterly pointless. Not because the subject doesn't matter (it matters enormously), but because the two sides are not, in any meaningful sense, speaking the same language.

The argument goes something like this:

Person A: I don't hate Jews. I just hate Zionists.

Person B: But I'm Jewish and I call myself a Zionist.

Person A: Then you support ethnic cleansing.

Person B: No I don’t. So now I'm defending a position I don't hold, against a definition I didn't use, of a word you defined without me?

Person A: FREE PALESTINE!

And there it is. A conversation that was never going to go anywhere, because one party has quietly redefined a word to make sure the other party is perpetually vilified. Congratulations. You've just invented a very tidy new form of bigotry and wrapped it in the language of political principle. 

Let's talk about what Zionism actually means to the people who use the term to describe themselves – and why we need to be speaking the same language to get to a positive outcome for Palestinians and Muslims and Israelis and Jews. PS: If you only care about the freedom and dignity of one of those groups, your bigotry is showing.

The word you think you're using

Here's the definition as the ADL, most Jewish communal organizations, and the majority of self-identified Zionists would give you: Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.

That's it. That's the base definition. It doesn't say anything about occupation policy. It doesn't say anything about settlements. It doesn't say anything about the rights of Palestinians. It says: Jews, like other peoples, have the right to a homeland of their own.

Being a Zionist is distinct from supporting the policies of the government of Israel. Zionism is a big tent movement that includes people across the spectrum from progressives, moderates, and conservatives. There are Zionists who are critical of Israeli policies (Hi! Just your friendly, outspoken Likud and Netanyahu dissenter over here!); and there are Zionists who rarely voice disagreement with the Israeli government. There are Zionists who advocate for peaceful coexistence with Palestinians (Hi again!), and there are Zionists who believe in some sort of bigoted supremacy. 

To put it bluntly, the Jewish Center for Justice reiterates a simple truth: Zionism does not demand specific borders. Thoughtful debate about borders, settlements, land disputes, and justice for all is not only allowed within Zionism. It's essential to it. 

So when a Jewish person says "I'm a Zionist," they are, in most cases, saying: I believe Jews have the right to exist in our ancestral homeland. That's the whole sentence. Not "and therefore Palestinians don't matter." Not "and therefore I support every military action the Israeli government takes." Just: We have a right to be here. We have been here consistently for thousands of years. We have a right to defend our right to be here. 

Here's where survey data gets interesting and inconvenient for the "most Jews are Zionists" framing. A 2026 survey by the Jewish Federations of North America, the most detailed study of its kind conducted by a major Jewish organization, found that only 37% of American Jews actually identify as Zionist by label. Meanwhile, 88% said they believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, which is, by almost every traditional definition, the core position of Zionism. The gap between those two numbers tells you everything about what the word has become in public discourse. Pew Research Center’s own major survey of American Jews deliberately avoided the word "Zionism" altogether, which is itself a telling editorial decision.

The TL;DR? A large proportion of American Jews hold beliefs that are Zionist by definition, but won't use the label because it has been so thoroughly weaponized that they don't want to spend their lives explaining what they don't mean. The redefinition isn't just confusing the debate. It's intentionally perverting it to foster more outrage, more Jew hatred, and less dialogue. And it’s working.

Here's where the discourse has gone completely off the rails.

Someone else's dictionary

I know what some of you are thinking (because people have been aggressively saying it to me for years). This is a semantics issue. Words shift meaning over time. Language is contested. Who decides what a word means anyway?

Fair point, in the abstract. Language does evolve. Meanings do shift. But here's the thing about calling this a semantics issue: It treats the consequences as theoretical. They are not.

When a word gets redefined specifically to make a group's identity into evidence of their own guilt, the consequences show up in the real world. Jewish students harassed and hounded off campuses. Jewish journalists and creatives doxxed. Jewish-owned shops and synagogues vandalized. Jews murdered on a beach during a religious celebration. These are just some of the examples. None of these actions were about protesting Israeli politics. This isn’t just outside an Israeli embassy. They’re screaming “Zionists!” while undeniably targeting Jews, regardless of their views on Israel.

These are not semantic events. They are physical ones. And they are happening in part because the word "Zionist" has been successfully weaponized as a replacement slur, with enough political cover that people don't even recognize it as one. Jews are being attacked and targeted, Zionist or not. 

Words matter because they shape what people believe is justified. And what people believe is justified shapes what they do. That's not semantics. That's how bigotry works.

A significant strand of contemporary pro-Palestine activism, particularly online and particularly in Western countries, has taken the word "Zionism" and quietly loaded it with an entirely different set of meanings. In this version, Zionism means: ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, the erasure of Palestinian identity, and the belief that Jewish rights supersede all others. It's been reconstructed as a synonym for supremacism.

And then those same activists turn to Jews, whether they identify as Zionists or not, and say: you're complicit in those things. You cosigned it.

I want to be very clear about what this rhetorical move is. It's not political analysis. It's not even coherent critique. It's the linguistic equivalent of deciding that "feminist" means "man-hater" and then acting shocked when feminists object to being called man-haters. You don't get to redefine someone's identity label without their consent and then hold them accountable to your definition. That's not an argument. That's a trap.

When a person says "I'm okay disliking Jews because most Jews are Zionists and Zionism is evil," they have built a machine specifically designed to make antisemitism sound like a principled political position. And if you can't see that, I'd ask you to spend thirty seconds considering how you'd respond if someone said "I'm okay disliking Palestinians because most support resistance and resistance means terrorism." 

Where this redefinition actually came from

Here's what makes this worth paying attention to: the version of "Zionism" currently circulating in Western activist spaces didn't emerge organically from grassroots Palestinian advocacy. It has a paper trail. And that trail leads to organizations with a documented interest in conflating Jews with Zionists, not to expose a political position, but to justify targeting Jewish people.

Take Hamas. The original 1988 Hamas charter is about as explicitly antisemitic as a founding document can get. It cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a well-known fabricated conspiracy text, as if it were evidence. It calls for the killing of Jews. It blames Jewish people collectively for both World Wars, the French Revolution, and international organizations including the United Nations.

Then in 2017, Hamas released a new charter. And here's where it gets interesting. The new version claimed to distinguish between "Zionists" and Jews, stating that its conflict was with the Zionist project, not with Jews as a people or religion. Looking through the new charter, Hamas had essentially swapped the word "Jew" for "Zionist" while repeating the same antisemitic tropes. The underlying goals and the denial of any Jewish right to the land remained unchanged. As the Jerusalem Institute of Justice put it, the revised language didn't abandon antisemitic ideas. It repackaged them in terms more palatable to diplomatic audiences.

And it worked. The rhetorical move from "we oppose Jews" to "we oppose Zionists" gave Hamas a presentable face for Western consumption, while the 1988 charter, which Hamas never formally revoked, remained on the shelf. 

Hezbollah ran the same play, and the American Jewish Committee has documented it in detail. In Arabic-language communications, Hezbollah leaders speak of destroying Israel and killing Jews. In the languages of the countries where they seek influence, they present themselves simply as anti-Zionist. In the Arab world, the AJC notes, the terms "Jew," "Israeli," and "Zionist" are used interchangeably, which means the supposed distinction collapses entirely in practice. The scholar Robert Wistrich, who spent his career studying antisemitism, described Hezbollah's ideology as fusing traditional religious anti-Judaism with Western conspiracy theories and Third Worldist anti-Zionism. The label changed. The hatred didn't.

And here's a contradiction worth sitting with. I regularly hear the same people say two things in the same breath: "not all Palestinians are Hamas" (FACT.) and then, in the very next argument, defend Hamas's actions as legitimate resistance. Pick one. If Palestinians are not reducible to Hamas, then Hamas does not speak for Palestinians. Which means defending Hamas is not defending Palestinians. It's defending Hamas. A terrorist organization that has, as many Palestinian activists have documented, repeatedly used Palestinian civilians as the raw material for its own political project. You cannot simultaneously argue that Palestinians deserve to be seen as individuals with complex views and then treat Hamas as the authentic voice of those individuals. The logic doesn't hold. The only thing it does is let people feel righteous about supporting a group they'd never defend if it targeted anyone else.

None of this means that everyone who uses the word "Zionist" as a pejorative is a Hamas sympathizer. But it does mean that the specific rhetorical frame, where "Zionist" becomes a stand-in for a globally powerful, malevolent force responsible for the world's ills, has a documented source. It didn't arise independently. It was deliberately constructed by organizations that couldn't openly say what they meant and needed cover.

The paper trail is longer than most people realize.

It started with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet propaganda machine meticulously engineered the distinction between antisemitism, which it publicly denounced as a "bourgeois racial ideology," and anti-Zionism, which it framed as a "progressive political struggle." This wasn't accidental. Anti-Zionism is perhaps the most sophisticated form of anti-Jewish bigotry precisely because it was designed to masquerade as political criticism. The Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns produced hundreds of books and thousands of articles smearing Israel, Zionism, and with them, Judaism and the Jewish people, forging in popular consciousness false links between Zionism and Nazism, fascism, racism, genocide, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid.

When the United Nations was drafting a convention on eliminating racial discrimination, the Soviets floated an amendment inserting Zionism into the listed forms of racism anyway, in part to see how far a "big lie" could go. It became UN Resolution 3379 in 1975. It was eventually revoked, but the framing had already traveled.

Hamas and Hezbollah picked up the template, updated the language, and distributed it for a new era. The current campaign borrows wholesale from the global anti-Zionist propaganda campaigns the USSR ran in the wake of the Six-Day War is hardly innovative — it's just cheaper and faster to distribute now.

When that framing migrates into Western activist discourse and gets adopted without examination, it's not solidarity with Palestinians. It's the laundering of someone else's propaganda through the washing machine of progressive politics. The people who suffer most from that are the Palestinians whose legitimate cause gets tangled up with the agenda of groups that, as writer Mo Husseini and Realign for Palestine Founder Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (among others) have both said plainly, do not actually care about Palestinian lives.

The standard we apply to everyone else

I want to be explicit about something, because I do this myself and I think it matters to say it plainly: criticizing Israeli government policy is not antisemitism. Full stop.

I criticize Israeli settlement expansion. I criticize the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. I criticize specific military decisions. I can do all of that and still believe that Jewish people have the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland, that Israel has the right to exist and defend itself, and that holding individual Jewish people responsible for the actions of a government they did not elect and may actively oppose is bigotry.

Here’s a consistency test I’d recommend everyone try — and notice, as you read it, how the word “Zionist” is doing the work of making a double standard sound like a principle.

You don’t ask Chinese Americans to answer for the actions of the Chinese Communist Party. You don’t demand that Iranian Americans denounce the ayatollahs before they’re allowed a seat at the table. You don’t hold Russian Americans collectively responsible for what happens in Ukraine. No one stands outside a Chinese restaurant with a sign demanding that the owners personally condemn Xi Jinping’s treatment of the Uyghurs before they’re considered morally acceptable human beings.

But somehow, a Jewish person at a dinner party is expected to have a prepared statement on Israeli military policy ready to go, or be presumed complicit. A Jewish student on a college campus has to prove their political credentials before they’re treated with basic decency. The word “Zionist” is what makes this demand feel principled rather than bigoted — because if “Zionist” means “supporter of ethnic cleansing,” then asking a self-identified Zionist to account for themselves sounds like accountability. But when 88% of American Jews hold beliefs that are Zionist by the original definition, “I don’t hate Jews, I just hold every Zionist personally accountable for the actions of a government many of them oppose” is not a principled position. It’s a linguistic trap.

The demand for collective Jewish responsibility for Israel is not a higher standard. It is a different standard, applied to one group and one group only by Western progressive activists — and the redefined word “Zionist” is the mechanism that makes it look like something else.

You can believe the Israeli government has made catastrophic, indefensible decisions and still believe that the seven million Jewish Americans, the Jewish Israelis who have protested Likud and Netanyahu, the Jewish communities in London and Paris and Sydney and Buenos Aires, are not its employees. They are not its representatives. They do not carry a proxy vote for its policies. They are people.

Criticize the government. Advocate loudly for Palestinian rights. March, write, organize, demand accountability. All of that is legitimate political activity.

But the moment you extend that critique to the collective — to all Jews, to Jewish identity itself — you have left the territory of political argument and entered something much older and much uglier. And “Zionist” is just the current passport they’re using to get there.

The conclusion that should be obvious

This is also, for what it’s worth, a media literacy problem. When a word is strategically redefined so that a group’s own identity becomes evidence against them, that’s a propagandistic move. It doesn’t matter which side does it. The structure of the manipulation is the same. And the question we should always be asking: Whose definition are we using? Who decided? When? Why?

You can hold every one of the following things simultaneously. In fact, if you want peace, you probably have to:

  • Palestinians and Israelis have legitimate historical grievances and the right to self-determination.

  • Criticism of Israeli government policy is not antisemitism.

  • Most Jews who call themselves Zionists are expressing a belief in Jewish self-determination, not Palestinian erasure.

  • Redefining “Zionist” to mean “supporter of ethnic cleansing” and then applying that definition to millions of Jews is antisemitism, regardless of your stated intentions.

You don’t have to agree with everything the Israeli government does to believe Jews have the right to exist in their homeland. You don’t have to agree with Hamas to care about Palestinian lives. These are not contradictory positions. They’re just complicated ones.

And complicated, I know this might come as a shock, is where real solutions live.

If you want to go further — to the people who are actually building something, and where to put your energy if you’re serious about helping — that’s Part 2.

Additional Resources

On the redefinition of "Zionist" and its Soviet origins

On antisemitic conspiracy theories and how "Zionist" functions as a code word

On collective Jewish responsibility and the double standard

Ranty Em
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Coalition or Collapse: Progress Isn’t Political Cosplay