Our Wednesday News Analysis | How Zionism and Its Traditional Relationship to Antisemitism is Playing Out Today

The founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl. (Photo: E.M. Lilien, via Wikimedia Commons)

As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism… Ben-Gurion, above all others, sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. … By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’

Writing about Israel’s wooing of the far-right, even though they are deeply antisemitic, Robert Inklakesh, in ‘Nick Fuentes and the Israel Question: Inside the MAGA ‘Civil War’ noted that:

The Israeli strategy is nonsensical. They seek to ally themselves with the people who ideologically align with them, yet seem to forget that they are Jewish.

In fact, there is nothing nonsensical about this strategy. On the contrary, it is the logical outcome of Zionism. The fact that Israelis are also Jewish is irrelevant. In Israel, people are Jewish by race or nationality, whereas in the diaspora, they are Jewish by religion.

The strategy is only nonsensical when Jews outside Israel support Zionism when it’s clearly not in their interest to ally with a movement that works with antisemites. To understand what at first seems to be a crazy strategy, we must go back to the beginning of Zionism.

Zionism arose as a reaction to antisemitism, in particular the 1881 Odessa pogroms. But it was a reaction that marked it out from all other Jewish reactions, which fought to protect and extend Jewish rights in the lands where they lived...

Read more: How Zionism and Its Traditional Relationship to Antisemitism is Playing Out Today

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ISLAM VS THE WEST: THE FOUR BIGGEST FALLACIES ABOUT ISLAM EXPLAINED

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-11-03/islam-vs-west-four-fallacies/

By Jonathan Cook
Published November 3, 2025

Isn’t Islam inherently violent? What stopped the Islamic world from having an Enlightenment? Why are some Muslims so into head-chopping? And isn’t Hamas the same as the Islamic State?

Hamas’ nationalism and Israel’s Zionist nationalism echo each other.

Both view the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as their exclusive domain to rule. Both have an implicit one-state agenda. Despite Zionism starting as a secular movement, both draw on religious justifications for their territorial claims.

Ultimately, Hamas has concluded that mirroring Israel’s violence is the only way to free Palestinians from that violence. It must inflict such a high cost on Israel that it will choose to surrender.

A recent conversation with a friend highlighted to me how little most Westerners know about Islam, and how they struggle to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. This lack of knowledge, cultivated in the West to keep us fearful and supportive of Israel, creates the very conditions that originally provoked ideological extremism in the Middle East and ultimately led to the rise of a group like the Islamic State.

Here I examine four common misconceptions about Muslims, Islam and Islamism – and about the West. Each is a small essay in itself.

Islam is an intrinsically violent religion, one that naturally leads its adherents to become Islamists.

There is nothing unique or strange about Islam. Islam is a religion, whose adherents are called Muslims. Islamists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Islamic identity as a way to legitmise efforts to advance that project. Muslims and Islamists are different things.

If that distinction is not clear, think of a parallel case. Judaism is a religion, whose adherents are called Jews. Zionists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Jewish identity as a way to legitimise efforts to advance that project. Jews and Zionists are different things.

Notably, with the help of western colonial powers over the past century, one prominent group of Zionists had great success in realising their political project. In 1948 they established a self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel by violently expelling Palestinians from their homeland. Today, most Zionists identify at some level with the state of Israel. That is because doing so is advantageous, given that Israel is tightly integrated into “the West” and there are material and emotional benefits to be gained from identifying with it.

The record of the Islamists has been far more mixed and variable. The Republic of Iran was founded by clerical Islamists in a 1979 revolution against the despotic rule of the western-back monarchy led by the Shah. Afghanisan is ruled by the Islamists of the Taliban, young radicals who emerged after prolonged super-power meddling by the Soviets and Americans left their country ravaged and in the grip of feudal warlords. Nato-member Turkey is led by an Islamist government...

Read more: Islam vs the West: The four biggest fallacies about Islam explained

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ISRAEL CAN’T FLY US ALL OUT TO SOUTH AFRICA

Source: Al-Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/16/israel-cant-fly-us-all-out-to-south-africa

By Refaat Ibrahim
Published November 16, 2025

The paid forced deportation flights are the latest Israeli scheme in a long history of failed ethnic cleansing efforts.

Palestinians sit on a plane that has just landed in South Africa on November 13, 2025, after paying to leave Gaza [Screenshot via social media]

"That Palestinians are willing to fall for this flight scheme is unsurprising.

Two years of genocide have driven the people of Gaza to unimaginable desperation.

There are that many Gaza residents who would willingly board those planes.
And yet, Israel cannot fly us all to South Africa."

Earlier this week, a flight carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza landed in South Africa without documentation. The passengers were stuck on the plane for 12 hours before the South African authorities, who claimed Israelis had not informed them about the deportation flight, allowed them to disembark on humanitarian grounds.

The Palestinians on board had paid between $1,500 and $5,000 to a company called Al-Majd Europe to leave Gaza. A few Palestinians run the operation on the ground in coordination with the Israeli occupation authorities. At least two other such flights had already been made since June this year.

This is the latest scheme Israel is deploying to depopulate Gaza – a longstanding goal of its apartheid regime that goes back to the early 20th century.

Since the beginning of the Zionist movement, Palestinians have been perceived as a demographic obstacle to establishing a Jewish state. In the late 19th century, Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, wrote that the displacement of Arabs from Palestine must be part of the Zionist plan, suggesting that poor populations could be moved across borders and deprived of employment opportunities quietly and cautiously.

In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, a key Zionist leader who would later become Israel’s first prime minister, made clear he supported forced “relocation” and saw nothing “immoral” in it. Part of this vision was carried out 10 years later during the Nakba of 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in what Israeli historian Benny Morris has called “necessary” ethnic cleansing...

Read more: Israel can’t fly us all out to South Africa