The terms Zionism and Racism are both sociological based linguistic abstractions, and as such they do not exist outside of the human brain and its means of communication with other human brains. Nor do the results of any actions which arise from these concepts being acted upon, directly effect anything outside of human activities. Abstractions, like words, do not do anything directly, they simply guide or misguided actions. That is the essence of all linguistic abstractions. Consequently, they are only problematic when they become a frequent source of intellectual confusion by those using and misusing them and by those who listen to them or read them. Therefore Zionism and Racism are no different in this regard and can be seriously confusing. The most obvious source of confusion arises from the fact that abstractions are routinely used in at least two different ways. Some abstractions, relate to some aspects of life that have multiple real material contents implied by (or within) them, whilst other abstractions have little or no real content outside of convention or imagination.
For example Zionism is a sociologically derived abstraction which refers to a particular form of political ideology (i.e. it is a collection of related and publically expressed ideas) and is actualized by a related colonial settlement movement (a collection of socio-political land-based human settlements). On the other hand, Race and Racism, as applied to the human species, are concepts based upon no real material (in this case biological) content. Race and Racism were elite-created conceptual abstractions that only became linguistically prominant and ‘established’ during the period of European Colonialism. They became identified with an ideological trend, which was conceptually manufactured to serve as an ideological fig-leaf in order to hide, excuse and justify, the dehumanised horror of the armed seizure of New and Old World Islands and continents from their former inhabitants. Race was a concept designed and manufactured to subdivide humanity into discrete groups on the basis of supposedly superior and inferior physical and intellectual abilities.
These European derived elite criteria for diferential comparisons with indigenous people were all sociologically derived differences. These criteria had no physical, biological or geographical relevance or validity at all. Indeed, in contrast to indigenous peoples the Europeans who invented these so-called superior and inferior ‘racial’ distinctions were actually less competent in non-European survival knowledge and skills, than the locals. The histories of that period also indicate that the invading colonists and their enablers were less capable in expressing their basic humanity, in relationship to the indigenous peoples on every continent or island they invaded. The colonisers had to learn what to eat, how to hunt and how to plant and preserve practically all the nutrition and safety protocols they needed, from the human victims of their colonialist invasions. Furthermore, it quickly turned out that all these global peoples could in fact (and did) interbreed, with each other. Within the human species, it turns out that the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells, that make up the human body, the morphological distribution of skeletal bones, internal organs and limbs, reproductive biology, blood circulation and blood types of global humanity, are all within a narrow biological spectrum of variations that are common to all human beings, wherever they eventually finished their migrations.
Therefore in reality – rather than bourgeois ideological fictions – there are no races! This fact is important in understanding the modern world we live in. There are no races, but there are extreme forms of social discrimination, exploitation, oppression and dehumanisation in all hierarchical mass societies, including so-called socialist, communist and religious hierarchical societies, but fundamental discrimination is not on the basis of some mythical concept of seperate races. Discrimination within hierarchical mass societies is primarily based upon access and control of the means for any community to survive. Logically, there would have to be actual races to be accused if racial discrimination. So in one important sense the Zionism equals Racism resolution is outdated linguistic nonsense, which people are using the terms as a form of political posturing. The concept makes no rational sense and represents only an irrational ideological dogmatic entrenchment of a 19th century abstraction constructed on the basis of a fabricated mythical form of human identity.
Furthermore, as there are no such things as ‘races’ the source of any actual discrimination, whether mild, severe or murderous, must have (and does have) a serious alternative motivation, which needs to be clearly identified and stated. What has happened in this intellectual spat over the Green Parties, Zionism is Racism resolution between elites of all sides of that debate, is that they have all failed to extract themselves from the 19th century anthropocentric paradigm of elite intellectual colonial discourse. Both sides have uncritically inherited a virtual reality version of human identity, based upon non-existent biologically different ‘races’. The idea of superior and inferior ‘races’ was created for specific elite purposes of colonising foreign lands and extracting resources from those who lived upon those resources. The continued use of these 19th century made up concepts reveals that our current generation of elites have not yet been sufficiently bothered to put the concept where it belongs – the museum of 19th century antiquities.
Yet revealingly, the elites who had examined the war crimes of that ‘total war’ period (1939 – 45) and produced the post-war Human Rights Acts had correctly felt no need to propose that the concept of a ‘crime of genocide’, was directly linked to the ersatz 18th and 19th century concept of race. Indeed, the sociologically determined and declared motivation causing the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehova’s Witnesse’s, Trade Unionists and Communists was openly declared by the National Socialist Party leader Adolf Hitler. It was Lebenstraum – the expansion of German borders to include Europe then the globe, and of course access to low cost raw materials and labour. True, there was still a strong actual discriminatory ideology within the most European nations, which had been carried within the anthropocentric narcisistic Abrahamic Religious monotheism of Judaism, Christianty and Islam. All those communities had been reassured by their religious ‘leaders’ of their ‘chosenness’ due to their imaginary superior God’s personal grace. True also that many of the elite Arian/Germanic peoples felt they had also a supplementary claim to be superior biological entities to the rest of their species, but at the time a Greater German Territory was the overiding National Socialist ambition.
The historical and religious record also indicate that territorial expansion tied to some mystical God’s chosen preference has been a constant theme of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, such expansion also remained the openly declared ambition of the Israeli Jewish elite from the onset of their orientation toward establishing a Jewish state in Palestine to the eventual declaration in 1948 of the state of Israel. Since the Palestinan people are not a different race of people, but an integral biological part of the human species, they are the target of Zionist occupation and genocidal levels of brutality predominantly for other specific reasons. The most important being that they just happened to be living – without a standing army to resist – in a fertile crescent region that the Zionist trend of Judaism wish to have for themselves.
Like the North and South American and African native peoples, centuries earlier, they could not fully resist the colonisers. In both cases (and others of the period), the issue at the base of the conflict was not primarily race, but fertile, resource-abundant space. Settler isms, North and South American Colonialism and Zionist colonialism, were not issues motivated by human skin tone or body morphology but by the geo-politics of land and resource acquisition. Zionism is not racism, but land theft and dispossesion just as Colonialism was in general. Zionism may include antiquated narcisistic ideas of superior and inferior races, but that oxymoronic anthropocentric fantasy is not its defining characteristic.
For Jewish Israeli’s the prior socio-political implications of the choice to embrace Zionism was to become militarised squatters on already occupied territory. For Palestinians their only political choice was to not oppose or to oppose and resist that Jewish colonisation. For the rest of humanity not directly involved, there are universal issues of human social and political rights, to consider. These latter were agreed and established after the Second World War, by the UN, which – for the safety of all peoples – not just the Palestinians – should be honoured and protected by and for all human groups. The emotional basis of the ideology of Zionism therefore is inhumane and discriminatory and its socio-political basis is land and resource predation and genocidal elimination of Palestinians. In practice, Jewish Zionism in Israel is the ideology of a modified hierarchical mass society system, organised to exclude from full participation in its social system all those who are not designated as Jews by birth or conversion. Israel, in practice is a 20th century version of an exclusive settler, colonialist society which like all those colonialist era projects sought to fundamentally displace and eliminate indigenous populations with settler populations, but only Israel has chosen to exclude all those individuals not identified as being part of one particular religion or ethnicity.
Whilst this article has primarily referenced the confusion caused by the misuse of the abstractions Zionism and Racism noted above, it is worth drawing attention to other 19th century abstractions which further confuse (intentionally or unintentionally) the discussion around the long running tensions between Israel and Palestine. This is use of the abstraction ‘antisemitism’. This abstraction arises from a term originally applied within the study of human religions and languages or philology. Within the larger Indo-European group of spoken and written languages identified in the 18th and 19th centuries, there is a sub-group of Afro-Asiatic family of languages which include Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Amharic and Aramaic, which were endemic in the eastern Mediterranean and were originally spoken in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and the middle east. The semites were thought to have been descended from a character named Shem and the Shemites (Semites in Greek) mainly comprised of ethnic Jews and ethnic Arabs. During the 19th and 19th century development of linguistics or philology, a semite was the term applied to any middle eastern people who spoke either Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Amharic or Aramaic.
So logically, being antisemitic in the 19th century would have been identified as exhibiting discriminatory behaviour toward all those who spoke one of the semitic languages such as Jews or Arabs. Whether we choose to be consistent with the 18th and 19th century orientalism of European linguistic scholars, or not, it seems a seriously inconsistent confusion to continue to use the 19th century term ‘antisemitism’ to refer to any irrational dislike of Jews when many Arab Palestinians might also still classify themselves historically or ancestrally as semites. An additional problem also arises from this 200 year old concept of semitism, because the term antisemitism is currently being used to label rational humanitarian based opposition by pro-Palestinian activists to the ongoing Israeli Zionist genocide conducted in Gaza and the West Bank. This opposition is being used as evidential proof of anti-zionists being motivated by antisemitism – a deliberate and inaccurate conflation or merging of the two abstractions. It then becomes ridiculously confusing. If Jewish people from Europe and elsewhere are entitled to consider themselves as descending from semites, then certainly indigenous Palestinians are entitled to do so. Logic would complain if those who were pro-Palestinian rights then claimed they were therefore exhibiting pro-semitic positions not anti-semitic ones.
This demonstrates the linguistic confusion in thinking and being that accompanies borrowed language and thinking uncritically reproduced in one generation from a previous generation or two as if history and understanding had stood still. In this way the mainstream left, right and centre intellectual tendencies who insist on perpetuating outdated and fictitious abstractions have got themselves and others who imitate them, into a tangled intellectual mess. In fact being (anti) against any act which is inhumane and considered as crimes against humanity, should be supported in the strongest possible terms, not automatically labelled as exhibiting a criminal attitude toward Jewish people. Consequently, the inaccurate term anti-semitism is being directed against rational opposition to Israeli genocide and crimes against humanity, as if such rational opposition was emanating from some medieval viral contagion which was spreading by physical contact. The global opposition to genocide in Gaza and elsewhere is a rational decision to recognise that the people of Palestine are part of the human species, like the rest of us, and that to express our humanity it is necessary to insist that Israel adhere to and abide by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and all the UN resolutions on this colonialist occupation of Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank.
A more up to date term to apply to the relative few individuals who have a phobic dislike of Jewish people with little or no rational justification for such intense would be the term Judeophobia, which was actually suggested by a 20th century Jewish academic. Although he also thought the term antisemitism was doing more harm than good to the uphill task of trying to minimise irrational prejudices against any group of human beings in our dehumanised hierarchical mass society structures and relationships, he was ignored. But here again, as in so many cases, the intellectual, political, and sociological establishment elites are focussed on the irrational mass manufacture of profit-producing commodities and services rather than any critical and self-critical review of the effect of human activities upon life on earth in all its manifestations. Sadly, we cannot excuse the left and the anti-capitalist left either for such neglect.
This milieu too are still verbalising and writing on the basis of 19th century levels of knowledge and understanding pioneered by Liberal, Socialist and Marxist critics of the capitalist mode of production. Moreover, nearly every day I read many of their thoughts and find they are still using terminology and concepts such as race and racism, anti-semitism and white supremacy which are all false and superficial categorisations applied to a socio-economic system based upon the ownership of capital in all its material forms. Land, means of production, banking and finance capital are global and the capitalist class (of all skin shades) are the supreme ruling and governing global elites and capital accumulation is clearly blind to colour distinctions. After the 16th century, capital ceased to be indigenous to European pale-skinned elites. For centuries now capital has accumulated in the bank accounts of persons of many skin colours, in any country or any nation that has adopted that mode of production and who have any advantage to leverage. The number of millionaires and billionaires in China, Africa and Asia of varying skin tones is a reality that overturns the colonial era ‘white man’s burden’ and authoritarian dictators come in all dark and light skin shades.
Those on the left who cling on to superficial 18th and 19th century crude anthropocentric categories and still reduce everything of crucial economic importance in the 21st century, to a superficial question of which skin colour dominates among the global elites, reveal more than intend. They demonstrate how little they understand about the socio-economic structure of capitalism and how little they understand about how non-human biological processes are the foundation of everything that lives, including themselves. Those crude categories and abstractions noted in this article, were first manufactured in the 18th and 19th centuries and are now – two centuries later – completely at odds with reality in the 21st century. The left who like to think themselves radical and progressive should be the first ones to abandon manufactured oxymoronic concepts and ideas such as racism, anti-semitism and white supremacy.
For it is actually the documented case, that those superficial sociological categories were proposed and perpetuated by the European bourgeois and petite-bourgeois elites, during their centuries of scramble for India, North and South America, Africa and elsewhere. However, the continued use of these ersatz bourgeois categories by the left, authentically reveal their users to be staunch conservatives in their language and thinking. When critically examined, the lefts of most political persuasions, fall well short of their own exagerated self-assessed abilities. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that whilst calling people racists when there are no races, when not challenging the fundamental intellectual contradictions inherent in the concept of anti-semitism, and by identifying the supremacy of the capitalism mode of production as white one, they are also ignoring much more.
On just as an important historic scale as the genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people, the ecocidal elimination of other essential species such as forests, insects, animals, microorganisms, algae, fish and birds, receive only passing comments and after thoughts. The same neglect occurs in the failure to critically analyse the entire history of the hierarchical mass society system – which prior to the domination of capitalism – over-extracted, over-produced, over-consumed and over-polluted. Moreover, it did so in order to accumulate surplus-product and surplus-value to enrich all previous elites. This latest pursuit of wealth for a mixed skin global elite is preparing the socio-economic prerequisites for further wars and genocides over which elite controls the ever- decreasing useful resources. Current and future conflict over these dwindling resources, (water, fertile unpolluted land, tolerable temperature regions) will do to other peoples what was done to indigenous peoples in the colonial era past. Tellingly, what was done to the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Africa and Asia, in previous centuries is still being done to the Palestinians.
The lefts active perpetuation of the outdated abstraction civilisation to describe the trajectory of the hierarchical mass society form since its inception in ancient Sumer and Egypt, along with its past and current genocidal inhumanity, is to commit the same intellectual error as clinging on to the anachronistic abstractions race, anti-semitism and white power. Those and many other elite promoted ideological abstractions are all elite fabrications intended to confuse and mislead non-elite humanity about the prior and contemporary negative role of hierarchical mass society structures. They serve to mask the elites production practices which continue to destroy and atrophy the planets foundational biosphere.
Many on the left remained shackled to their inherited habits and dogmatic forms of thinking, when in reality the prospects for life on earth have fundamentally moved on and they now have nothing to lose but their intellectual chains. The decline and eventual,fall of this modern hierarchical mass society ’empire’ of commodity fetishism and dehumanisation continues whilst left, right and centre politicians can only think of how best to ensure ‘the hierarchical mass system’ is kept going by reforming it’s most outrageous extremes and by themselves becoming its new governers and ‘influencers’; their ambition extends only in one direction, it is to become an alternative left, right, or centre vanguard elite.
Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026.)