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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/31/what-polanskis-green-party-gets-wrong-about-zionism/
The Return of "Zionism Is Racism"
(Telegraph-UK) Batsheva Neuer - The charge that Zionism is racism did not begin with a critique of Benjamin Netanyahu or the Gaza war. It was created as a Soviet ploy during UN deliberations on racial discrimination in 1965. Over the next decade, together with Arab states and the Non-Aligned Movement, the Soviet bloc pushed to brand Zionism as a form of racism. When efforts to expel Israel from the General Assembly failed, the next best thing was to declare Jewish sovereignty itself illegitimate. In 1975, that is exactly what happened. In 1991, with the Soviet Union collapsing and the Gulf War reshaping international politics, the resolution was finally repealed, effectively acknowledging that the formula was a political disgrace. The poison, however, remained. Within a decade, it had seeped into civil society, where Israel was increasingly cast as uniquely illegitimate even during years of territorial compromise and diplomatic concession such as the Oslo Accords and Camp David. Then came the Durban Conference in 2001, where Israel was accused of genocide - decades before the current war against Hamas. The point of the groups responsible was never merely opposition to one Israeli government or another. The point was that Jewish nationhood itself was treated as a civilizational disgrace. Few other national movements have been subjected to this kind of sustained moral delegitimization and none with quite the same obsessive intensity. This has now migrated into a new accepted wisdom, where the old slogan is presented as enlightened morality. But the error in calling Zionism racist is conceptual. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people are entitled to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. For thousands of years, Jews around the world have turned toward Jerusalem in prayer. After Oct. 7, one might have expected at least some clarity about the kind of enemy Israel faces, and about why a Jewish state is all the more necessary. To call Zionism racist is to say that Jewish collective self-rule, alone among the world's national movements, is inherently suspect. It is to deny Jews their history, their present, and their future. The writer is a postdoctoral historian at INSS-Tel Aviv University.