Is Zionism not, to some extent, an excrescence of Judaism? Why the near-religious divide between Zionism and Judaism? And, am I permitted at all even to ask? ~ilana
NEW ESSAY IS “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1).” It is a feature essay on The Unz Review (where readers can comment and debate) and has appeared on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.
https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-chosenness-part-1/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/05/ilana-mercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-chosenness/
Excerpt:
Pro-Palestine commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, are religious about maintaining a bifurcation—a divide—between Judaism and Zionism. Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as humanistic, universal and pastoral, and Zionism as its opposite. In the commingled rumble of commentary over Zionism; Arab commentators have been conditioned, by necessity, to internalize the split and the exact fissure-lines, as though mouthing these were a protective amulet, a matter of survival; theirs, ours. It is, in a sense.
Why this near-religious bifurcation between Zionism and Judaism? Is Zionism, to some extent, not an excrescence of Judaism?
Biblical Chosenness is certainly a facet of Judaism. Does it relate not at all to the Jewish supremacy that animates Jewish-Israeli expression and express action? Are these not connected? If so, should the question posed, then, really be a Jewish-Israeli question? Or, perhaps a Judaism Question is more apropos?
And, am I permitted at all to even ask?
Composer of some of the best, most exquisite English prose, with insight to match, was novelist Anita Brookner. Through her Jewish protagonist in the novel Making Things Better (2002, p 22), Ms. Brookner writes that the gentleman’s Jewish “ancestral religion,” which he did not practice, “seemed to him an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness for which he could see no justification.”
Miss Brookner, a rare gem and a genius, was a secular, unaffiliated Jew like myself. “Although resolutely secular in outlook,” Ms. Brookner also conveyed what I have long-since felt. It is that “the mystery of the Holy Spirit,” expressed in good will, gratitude and graciousness, seems absent from the encounters we Jewish outsiders, lonely people, have had within our “ancestral religion.” (Loneliness is the theme that threads Brookner’s novels.)
Like Brookner, I do not speak ex cathedra of the vexation that is Jewishness. It is indubitably a delicate matter. And, although knowledgeable, I am not an “expert.” However, to deny that eddying around the Jewish child is a sense of, or talk of, Jewish specialness—this would be dishonest. Whether you choose to imbibe “Chosenness” or not—I chose not to—as a Jew, you are likely to have been raised hearing about “Chosenness.”
The supremacy fallacy, it would thus seem, issues surely not strictly from “Zionism,” but from “Chosenness.”
The Chosen-People belief is as old as the Hebrew Bible itself. It is thus in the “Chosen People’s” philosophical marrow. For what—pray tell?—are foundational, early teachings like Deuteronomy 14:2, if not a declaration of Jewish superiority for posterity?
For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.
Alongside all the commentators and broadcasters who insist on upholding the division between Judaism and Zionism; I, too, very much hope that Zionism is not an instantiation or an extension, on some elemental level, of Judaism. I really do.
There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to …
… READ THE REST. “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1)” is on The Unz Review (where readers can comment and debate) and LewRockwell.com .
Forthcoming: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?
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