A massive 94% of Canadian Jews support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. However, according to University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym, who conducted the survey of 600 respondents, only 51% of those call themselves “Zionists.”
In the National Post this month, Brym took aim at those he says have weaponized his work, including the group Independent Jewish Voices and Avi Lewis, who is running for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party. Lewis and IJV have claimed, based on an apparent deliberate misreading of Brym’s study, that 49% of Canadian Jews are not Zionists.
Brym calls that “gaslighting.”
When asked “Do you support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state?” 94% of respondents answered “yes” – in a word, they are Zionist. However, in another question, about how they personally identified, 51% of Jewish Canadians affirm they are Zionist, 15% “express ambivalence” about referring to themselves as Zionist, 7% say they “don’t know” and 27% say they are not Zionist. Just 1% describe themselves as “anti-Zionist.”
Intellectually honest politicians and organizations should not engage in misrepresenting Jewish Canadians’ actual views and the diminishment of their overwhelming emotional, spiritual, familial and other connections to Israel and its right to exist.
Here is something we should be pondering: How has a word and an idea that reflects the manifestation of Jewish self-determination, freedom, actualization and civilizational achievement become so sullied that almost half of Jews hesitate or refuse to identify with it?
In some ways, it is understandable. Before Israel became a state in 1948, Zionism as a contemporary political movement was the outgrowth of Theodor Herzl’s late-19th-century idea of a separate Jewish homeland. Since 1948, and the existence of Israel as a nation-state, the term Zionism has been associated with a tangible country, with a military, a government, and the flaws and foibles that accompany all nation-states. Zionism has come to mean, in some eyes, a vast range of concepts, including actions, good or bad (but, for the purposes of Lewis and groups like IJV, almost always bad), of the government of Israel.
This contradiction between the strict meaning of the term as it is defined in the political sphere and the broad application of it by bad actors is part of the reason many Jews are hesitant to adopt the descriptor “Zionist.” Jews themselves may have limited knowledge around other forms and visions of Zionism that have existed, making it difficult for the average Jew to engage in a discussion that contextualizes modern-day Zionism and the fuller arc of Jewish history.
Given the challenges and anxieties around being Jewish in Canada (and everywhere else in the world) right now, perhaps it is unwise to criticize the hesitancy of half of Canadian Jews to self-identify with an unpopular term. This is especially the case when faced with nefarious discourses that align Zionism with racism, white supremacy and Naziism, and a lack of knowledge of how to respond to those charges.
This survey’s misuse seems like a line in the sand, though.
The defilement of the term “Zionist” to mean things it doesn’t mean is part of a larger trend to score political victories by moving goalposts and using language to obscure truth.
Generally, the anti-Israel narrative is founded on a sort of postmodern rejection of objective definitions and terminology. Terms like “apartheid,” “settler-colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” are redefined to encompass whatever those who weaponize the terms want them to mean.
When Jews, in the form of the Jewish state, are accused of genocide, a term that had to be invented to describe the Jewish experience of mass death, it makes arguing over the adoption of the label “Zionist” seem petty. But, if there is no consensus on something so foundational to the way many Jews define ourselves and our values, we put ourselves at a disadvantage in combating an abuse of language that reduces the human dignity of the Jewish people and, worse, can have literal life-and-death consequences.
If we are going to reverse this trajectory, which threatens not just Jews but truth itself, we need to contest the manipulation of language. By proudly reclaiming the term “Zionist,” which, apparently, 94% of Canadian Jews are but either don’t know it or won’t admit it, perhaps we can build some of the resilience and strength needed to combat the fight against more destructive and deceitful redefinitions of terms.
If we are going to defend the definition of the words we use to discuss the most vital issues of our time, “Zionism” seems like a good place to start.