Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 21, 2018

Zionism Is about a Nation, Not about a Race

The mistake of comparisons with either black nationalism or white supremacism.

A recent critique of Israel’s nation-state law cited the influence of Zionism on the thought of African-American theorists as disparate as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Stokely Carmichael, as well as the recent tendency of American white racists—or, as they euphemistically style themselves, “white nationalists”—to compare their own ambitions with those of the Jewish state. Critics of the new nation-state law now maintain that it itself renders Zionism irredeemably racist. To Chloé Valdary, this argument is based on a fundamental mistake:

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