What is Zionism? The movement college protesters oppose, explained.

“Zionism” - the word is everywhere at pro-Palestinian protests. Lists of rules in campus encampments say “No Zionists.” Signs compare Zionism to racism or fascism.

Many Jewish leaders and Jewish students say those uses of the word are antisemitic, that it is being used as a synonym for Jews, or for opposition to the state of Israel because it has a Jewish character.

The modern movement of Zionism, which began in the late 1800s, has had many definitions and aims. Some religious Zionists say it refers to the Jewish yearning in the Bible for Zion, or Jerusalem. More secular Zionists saw an unspecific word meaning Jewish self-determination, freedom, the desire to be masters of their own destiny. Today’s settler movement sees the expansion of Jewish control into the West Bank as a demonstration of Zionism.

What does it mean today?

The Post interviewed a range of people, from student protesters and experts on antisemitism and Zionism to student advocates for Zionism. They see the word, the history it represents and the current struggle in the Middle East in distinctly different ways.

What is meant by ‘Zionism’?

“What is it today? If you ask 50 people you’ll get 50 different answers, because Zionism never meant any one thing,” said Britt Tevis, a postdoctoral fellow in Holocaust and antisemitism studies and a lecturer at Columbia Law School.

Many of the protesters, said Tallie Ben Daniel, the managing director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which is a big presence in the protest movement, use the word to describe how they see the current policies and leadership of the state of Israel.

JVP sees Zionism as a movement whose aim “is to deny the rights of Palestinians and the humanity of Palestinians,” she said.

“For us, we want to be clear: the form of Zionism that has survived and has power now is an expansionist, right-wing, genocidal form,” Ben Daniel said. “The people in power in Israel right now … want to annihilate the Palestinians and get all the land for Jews, and there is no thought there could be coexistence.”

That definition distresses Jewish students who offer a far different definition of the word, like Jordana Levine, a Jewish senior at the University of Michigan who co-founded a pro-Israel group called Facts on the Ground. A Middle Eastern studies major, Levine says disputes about the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and subsequent Israeli retaliation have ended all her friendships with Arab students in her major.

“Zionism just means: The right to self-determination in our historic homeland. But a lot of people don’t understand it’s not exclusive from having a Palestinian state,” she said. “It doesn’t mean Jews have a right to remove all Palestinians from the region. It’s not mutually exclusive.

“We want self-determination for Palestinians, too. We just need Hamas not to be the authority [in Gaza].”

What did ‘Zionism’ mean when the conflict began?

Core daily Jewish prayers, 12th-century Jewish poets and the Israeli anthem all refer to a longing for “Zion,” said Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Shared Society and head of its Religion and State program. The word is used, with different meanings, dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible.

Theodor Herzl, considered the founder of the modern movement in the late 1800s, was a secular, Jewish, Austro-Hungarian writer and activist. He came to believe antisemitism made it impossible for Jews to assimilate in Europe and that they needed their own state in their biblical homeland.

Racist laws against Jews and the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s led to tens of thousands of Jews immigrating from Europe to Palestine, which was then under British control, causing clashes with Arabs there. But the Holocaust, and the deaths of millions of Jews in Europe, united Jews around the world and then later some key global leaders behind the idea of partitioning Palestine.

The U.N. General Assembly in 1947 passed a partition plan to create an Arab state, a Jewish state and international control over Jerusalem. Israel declared itself a state, kicking off an attack by multiple Arab nations, the start of a war that saw Israel take land from what in the U.N. partition plan was a Palestinian state. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes, an event known in the Arab world as the “nakba,” or catastrophe.

“It was an anti-colonialist movement,” Tur-Paz said. “It was saying: Give self-determination to the natives who were banished from this land many years ago.”

In those early years, there were many “Zionist” ideas about how the Jewish people would live together, and Zionist factions. Today, Tur-Paz says, Israelis generally don’t see the word “Zionism” as implying specific policies or borders.

“Ask all Jews in Israel, are they Zionists? Yes. This is why they are here, why they live here, why they want a free, equal, modern state,” she said. “Protesters use [the word] as if it’s a specific political party, or an extremist project; historically and phonetically and religiously, it’s untrue. To do high-tech is a Zionist act. To build buildings. To be a teacher. To grow lettuce - all of those are Zionist acts.”

But to others, Zionism lived out has meant expanding Israel in areas Palestinians also consider their rightful land. James Zogby, a Palestinian American writer who co-founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the more extreme definition of Zionism, a right-wing pursuit, “won out.” He points to Herzl’s 1896 book “The Jewish State,” that says, in Palestine, Jews “should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

That condescension defines Zionism, Zogby said.

Can people oppose Zionism without being antisemitic?

Protesters note that Jewish activists have been prominent at many pro-Palestinian college encampments, and that there are Jewish groups protesting Israel’s actions toward Gaza and decrying Zionism. Protesters generally say they are attacking a state they see as inherently racist and anti-Palestinian, and don’t see themselves as aiming at Jews in particular.

Teji Vijayakumar, Columbia University’s student body president and a senior who has been involved in the pro-Palestinian protests, said that “being anti-Zionist does not make you antisemitic.”

“You don’t have to hate or disrespect Jewish people not to believe in a theocratic ethno-state that requires the death of many, many people who currently reside there,” she said.

Zogby, however, acknowledged that if the term Zionism is “substituted for Jewish people” or used to further an antisemitic trope, it is antisemitic.

Sam Nahins, 31, a Columbia senior and Jewish veteran who was counter-protesting at Columbia last week, said he’s not sure he buys some of the rhetorical distinctions.

At the protests, he said, “It’s common to hear: ‘We don’t hate Jews, we hate Zionists.’ But the majority of Jews are Zionist. So do they hate most Jews?”

“There’s a long history of using vague-ish language to hide antisemitism in the United States,” he said. “Now we are seeing it under the term of ‘No Zionists Allowed.’”

Tur-Paz, too, sees antisemitism in anti-Zionism.

“We don’t do everything right, and we have a lot to work on and to change, but to talk against Zionism is to talk against allowing Jews to live,” she said.

Many nations have a religious character. Is Israel being singled out?

Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC, and former executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, rejected the idea that Israel is being unfairly singled out.

Israelis hold themselves out as “the only Democracy in the Middle East, that they represent Western values,” he said. “Either they want a standard that wants to be held to values and rights or they don’t. It’s not really a double standard if you’re setting the standard and failing to meet it.” Other nations accused of human rights abuses, such as China, Russia and Iran, he said, are facing sanctions and official U.S. government criticism, unlike Israel.

But Tur-Paz disagreed and said she sees evidence of antisemitism.

“We see this in the scope of the criticism that is directed against Israel and the Jews of the world and not against other countries that may be dictatorial, murderous, occupying, and do not receive any of the anger and criticism directed at Israel,” she said.