Zionist racism and Palestinian dehumanization are the foundations of Israel’s moral character

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned a racist Jewish state as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe in Palestine —  implicitly superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population.  

  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the supremacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that one Israeli human rights organization—B’Tselem—has described as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Other groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance across all of historic Palestine constitutes apartheid, and in the eyes of some genocide scholars an unfolding genocidal process.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy. And it is a claim increasingly made by courageous Israelis who defy the powerful interests of a state committing genocide.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he said, “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred, and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy… How did we produce from among us the replicas of our persecutors?”

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of occupation, settlement, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy and dehumanization of Palestinians has become normalized, even valorized.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the early currents of ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a racist Jewish state in Palestine as a civilizing outpost of Europe. In Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European—implicitly superior to the “backward” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, or subordinated to the Zionist agenda. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained proto‑fascist elements, including: a belief in demographic engineering; a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations.

These elements do not make Herzl a fascist. But they place him within the intellectual family of European racial nationalism, a genealogy that later fed into the fascist ideologies that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. If one removes the Jewish identity component, Herzl’s framework shares structural similarities with other European ethnonationalist movements of his era—movements that came to dominate politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but a recognition that Herzl’s political imagination was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time, namely settler colonialism, racialized progress, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that promoted Jewish demographic dominance and territorial control over Palestinian rights.

The making of a supremacist regime

The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass displacement, village destruction, and the permanent exclusion of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment. Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed could never return to their homes, while their land was transferred to Jewish ownership.

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, and arbitrary detention. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” effectively making Israel an apartheid state.

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political dominance through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws.

Along with a similar report by Amnesty International in 2022, these claims of Israel being an apartheid state are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions, and are supported by research by human rights scholars.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through dehumanizing language. Israeli political leaders have long deployed rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of their humanity. They rarely refer to Palestinians as “Palestinians” at all, choosing instead the generic term “Arabs,” a deliberate linguistic move that denies a people their name, their history, and their nationhood. This erasure is reinforced by explicit dehumanization. Senior officials have repeatedly used language that casts Palestinians as subhuman or inherently threatening. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously described Palestinian children as “little snakes,” even calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. Such rhetoric is not incidental; it is part of the ideological machinery that makes domination thinkable and violence permissible.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and large‑scale military assault.  Also, settler violence, often carried out with impunity and the support if Israeli authorities, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza over the years. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Marion Kaplan, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases of forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass killing, and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and descendants have echoed these warnings, arguing that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories. Their testimony cannot be dismissed as it is rooted in lived experience and scholarly expertise.

For decades, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity in the international legal system. That era is ending. Cases before the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have forced a global reckoning with the legal and moral implications of prolonged occupation and systemic discrimination. Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since gone silent. Their earlier support for state violence—rather than for the universal principles of human rights—reveals a troubling willingness to subordinate anti‑racist commitments to ethnonational loyalty.

As critics have noted, this silence is a betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Parallels between Zionism and white supremacy

We must also confront the fact that Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, shares structural parallels with white supremacy. Both are systems of domination built on similar foundations. Each constructs a superior in‑group understood as uniquely entitled to land, sovereignty, and political power. Each justifies the dispossession of an Indigenous or subordinate population through narratives of civilizational advancement or historical destiny. Both rely on demographic engineering to secure permanent control, deploy stories of cultural or racial superiority to legitimize exclusion, and normalize segregation, unequal citizenship, and the systematic denial of rights. These are not incidental similarities. They reflect the underlying architecture of two regimes organized around maintaining the dominance of one group over another.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Arabs and non‑European Jews.

A society shaped by ethnosupremacy

Haaretz has documented how Jewish supremacy has fractured Israeli society itself, empowering extremist settlers and far‑right movements that now dominate national politics.  The Oslo era did not moderate these forces, it entrenched them. Settlement expansion accelerated, Palestinian territory fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and the logic of domination became normalized. Jewish self‑determination has been transformed into a system of supremacy that denies Palestinians equivalent rights.

This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly the consensus among scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism. Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish Jewish suffering or deny the trauma of antisemitism. It does not delegitimize Jewish collective identity or aspirations for safety. But it does demand a reckoning with the reality that no people can secure their freedom by denying another’s.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews. They are acts of fidelity to universal principles of justice.

As Sfard asked: How did we produce replicas of our persecutors? The answer lies not in Jewish identity, but in the corrosive power of Zionism, an ideology of ethnonational supremacy. The task now is to build a political order grounded not in domination, but in equality.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Zionism Is Canada’s Most-Successful Hate Movement

I don’t usually repost the writings in full written by others. But this article published on June 30, 2026 by Canadian journalist Davide Mastracci of the independent Canadian news outlet The Maple contends that Zionism has become Canada’s most successful and socially accepted form of hate motivated and supremacist politics. 

It argues that the ideology is inherently violent and colonial, and that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—including Israel's actions in committing genocide in Gaza—is a direct expression of that ideology. In Canada, Mastracci says, Zionism is not fringe but fully mainstream, embedded in political culture, media institutions, and civil society.

He also focuses heavily on the Jewish Canadians, claiming that Zionism has eclipsed Judaism as a defining identity for many Jews. Citing polling and patterns of political mobilization, he argues that support for Israel among Jewish Canadians is unusually intense and unmatched by any other community’s alignment with a supremacist, extremist movement. Charitable funding, political organizing, and participation in Israel’s military by Canadian Jews are presented as evidence of deep ideological commitment.

Mastracci attempts to expose Zionism as a normalized form of hate and supremacy that enjoys protection from Canada’s political and media establishment. He warns that Zionism is “on the attack,” that criticism of it is often treated as bigotry, and that resisting it is a moral obligation. He tries to shift public understanding by reframing Zionism not as a Jewish national project but as a dangerous, state‑sanctioned ideology that demands scrutiny and opposition.

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© The Maple 2026. All Rights Reserved. 

Zionism Is Canada’s Most-Successful Hate Movement

The Jewish-supremacist ideology motivating genocide has widespread support among Canada’s elites.

by Davide Mastracci
June 30, 2026 
www.readthemaple.com/zionism-is-canadas-most-successful-hate-movement/

From its inception, Zionism has been a violent, colonial ideology.

The State of Israel, founded through decades of Zionist migration and anti-Palestinian violence, is a perfect distillation of Zionism, not a departure from it. Zionism is Israel’s state ideology.

In the 78 years since Israel’s creation, which was finalized in an organized and systemic ethnic cleansing campaign, Israel has terrorized its neighbours, swallowed up Palestinian land and devoured its inhabitants, and is committing a genocide to destroy the lives of those who remain.

Israel is an explicitly Jewish supremacist state, and perhaps the only one left in the world where supremacy is openly, proudly, and formally enshrined in law, and expanding in its scope.

There’s a range of opinions within Israel’s political leadership, but all factions believe in supremacy enforced through some level of violence.

In short: Zionism is a hateful ideology guiding a state that has committed the worst crimes of the 21st century in its name.

That Zionism is a state ideology doesn’t make it less hateful than if it were relegated to the fringes. Instead, it just means it has succeeded to the fullest extent.

This is undoubtedly true in Israel. It’s also true in Canada in a different way: Zionism has achieved more explicit, mainstream support than any other openly supremacist movement at this point in time.

Zionism And Jewish Canadians

Zionism is so rampant in Canada’s Jewish community that it has effectively become more important than Judaism, though many, if not most, Jewish Canadians say the two are actually one.

Many anti-Zionists dispute this assertion in theological terms, but I don’t care about these debates, in the same way that theological schisms in Christianity are of no interest to me outside of the odd late-night Wikipedia search.

What I am interested in, however, is examining how much of the community falls on each side. By this measure, it’s evident that anti-Zionists are losing the battle.

Nearly three years of genocide, involving some of the most depraved acts of violence and cruelty witnessed this century, has reduced the support Israel receives globally, with a recent poll finding it to be the “world’s most disliked country.” Mass support for Israel among Jewish Canadians, however, has persisted.

An assortment of polling of Jewish Canadians conducted between February 2024 and November 2025 has found:

·    94 per cent “support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state”;

·    84 per cent are “emotionally attached to Israel,” the highest level since the survey began in 2018;

·    71 per cent don’t believe Israel is committing genocide;

·    64 per cent believe it’s antisemitic to say Israel is committing genocide;

·    61 per cent oppose an arms embargo on Israel;

·    55 per cent categorize Israel’s actions in Gaza as either self-defence (34 per cent) or hostage return (21 per cent), compared to 24 per cent as either war crimes (10 per cent), ethnic cleansing (4 per cent), or genocide (10 per cent);

·    53 per cent disagree with the claim that “Canada should do more to protect civilians in Gaza”;

·    48 per cent (a plurality) believe Hamas is to blame for starvation in Gaza, while just 17 per cent blame Israel — another 13 per cent believe there was no famine or even widespread hunger;

·    1 per cent identify as anti-Zionists.

The survey that found 94 per cent effectively support Jewish supremacy in Israel also found that “only” 51 per cent explicitly identified as Zionists, which led some anti-Zionists to declare victory. They were wrong to do so. As I quipped in response to reporting on the survey: “‘Poll: Vast majority of Canadian whites say Canada has right to exist as a white state, but half don’t identify as racists.’”

In addition, the community:

·    is represented by and made up of explicitly Zionist organizations, from synagogues, to schools, to camps, to community groups;

·    is the largest sender of charitable donations from Canada to Israel (at least $1.7 billion in donations were sent from 2018 to 2024, and an examination of contributors per year reveals them to overwhelmingly be Jewish charities);

·    supplies a stream of members as soldiers willing to die and kill for the Jewish supremacist State of Israel, a pipeline unlike any other that exists among Canada’s hundreds of demographic groups.

In May, nearly three years into the genocide, an estimated record-breaking 60,000 people marched in Toronto’s annual pro-Israel walk. I view this with the same sort of scorn as the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden organized by the German American Bund, which drew more than 20,000 people.

One difference does stick out, though: unlike any other genocide before it, including the Holocaust, the Gaza genocide has been live-streamed since day one and broadcast to all of us.

This hasn’t shattered Jewish Canadian support for Israel. In fact, it has strengthened the support and emotional attachment of many, as seen in the open radicalization of some prominent Jewish figures.

Zionism And The Broader Establishment

It’s clear Zionism has wide support among Jewish Canadians, to an extent unrivalled by other communities relative to whatever form of extremism and supremacy may exist among them. ISIS, for example, was broadly reviled by Muslims globally, and they fought, killed, and died to defeat it.

But this level of support for Zionism among Jewish Canadians isn’t enough to call it the most successful hate movement in Canada. That claim becomes justified upon examining how Zionism is treated by Canada’s elite in politics, media and civil society.

In June 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney called for the establishment of a “Zionist, if you will, Palestinian state,” which is about the same as urging German Jews be ruled by a new Nazi government after the Holocaust.

In March 2025, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said, “No one in Canada should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist. I am a Zionist.”

Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s opposition party, said in an October 2024 statement: “We won’t bow to the radical, woke, anti-Zionist Jew haters. [...] We unapologetically stand with Israel through fire and water.” The party’s deputy leader has explicitly identified as a Zionist.

The federal government, seven provinces and at least 20 towns and cities have adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which, according to a federal handbook, classifies opposition to Zionism as antisemitism.

A Senate study released in December 2024 included among its recommendations that “it is unacceptable in Canadian society to target Zionists or to deny them fair and equitable access to public spaces for the sole reason that they are Zionists,” effectively calling for the treatment of Zionism, a political ideology, as a protected category.

This framing has also been pushed in lawsuits launched by Jewish students against universities and backed by major Jewish community organizations.

The editor-in-chief of the National Post, the flagship publication of Canada’s largest newspaper chain, stated in a 2024 email to subscribers: “I feel privileged to be editor-in-chief of the National Post right now, leading a paper that has been Zionist in its commentary since it was founded 25 years ago.”

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s only other national newspaper, recently published an article from the editorial board arguing that Carney should have declared himself to be a Zionist in a speech he gave at a Toronto synagogue.

A co-founder and former head of an organization dedicated to combating hate groups has described themselves as a Zionist and written that Zionism is essential to Jewish identity.

So, to sum it up...

Zionism is not condemned by those in power; it’s openly supported.

Prominent Zionists feel no pressure to conceal their ideology in the way proponents of supremacy usually do; they are encouraged to share it, and applauded when they do so.

Zionists aren’t seen as proponents of hate; they’re treated as a victimized group to be protected by limiting the freedoms of others.

Jewish Canadians aren’t expected to condemn Zionism or Israel in the way Muslims were for extremist forms of Islam; non-Jewish Canadians are expected to support or at least not oppose Zionism because it’s positioned as an essential part of Jewish identity.

If another hate movement took over almost an entire community, it would be treated as a serious problem; Zionism is often defended precisely because it’s so widespread among Jewish Canadians.

The past three years have increasingly turned Canadians against Israel. This has resulted in those in power using increasingly heavy-handed attempts, many of them successful, to protect Zionism.

Zionism is on the attack, not retreat.

Zionists are coming for any and all of us willing to oppose their ideology.

The fight continues.

© The Maple 2026. All Rights Reserved. 

Israel is a supremacist colonial project founded on Theodore Herzl’s fascist Zionist ideology

Confronting the architecture of Zionist supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the belief that no people’s freedom can be built on the subjugation of another.

 
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

 

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the primacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that leading human rights organizations now describe as a regime of systematic domination and subjugation. Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea constitutes apartheid, persecution, and—in the eyes of many genocide scholars—an unfolding genocidal process.

Crucially, this critique is not new, nor is it limited to Palestinians or contemporary human rights organizations. Some of the most influential Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century—Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Asimov, and Sigmund Freud (among others)—warned explicitly against the creation of a Jewish state built on ethnonational exclusivity. They feared that a state founded on Jewish supremacy would betray Jewish ethical traditions, ignite endless conflict, and reproduce the very forms of chauvinism and racial hierarchy that had oppressed Jews in Europe for centuries.

Einstein denounced the early Zionist leaders and their militias as “fascist.” Arendt warned that a Jewish state would become “a Sparta”—a hyper-militarized, society obsessed with defence to the detriment of democratic values, and peaceful coexistence. Freud rejected the idea of a nationalist project in Palestine because he viewed religious and ethnic nationalism as a form of neurosis, and believed it would provoke Arab resentment, alienate the Islamic and Christian worlds, and fail to solve global antisemitism. And Asimov rejected the idea of Israel and ethnic nationalism, including Zionism, because he was a staunch humanist who believed humanity’s survival depended on moving past tribal divisions.

Their warnings were prophetic. They foresaw that a state built on privileging one group over another would inevitably become a machinery of subjugation that would irreparably damage Jewish society and culture, and inflict immense suffering.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy—and it is a claim increasingly made by Israelis themselves.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he wrote in Haaretz: “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred [towards Palestinians], and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy . . . How did we produce from among us the replicas of our [Nazi] persecutors?

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of brutal occupation, illegal settlements on Palestinian land, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy has become normalized, even valued. His words echo the earlier warnings of Einstein, Arendt, Asimov, and Freud, that a political project rooted in ethnonational dominance and subjugation of indigenous Palestinians would inevitably deform the society that built it, corrode its moral foundations, and reproduce the very patterns of exclusion and dehumanization that Jews themselves had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

The tragedy is not only that these warnings were ignored, but that the consequences have unfolded exactly as these thinkers predicted. A state built on the premise of supremacy has produced a political culture in which domination is seen as security, inequality of peoples as natural, and brutal violence as necessary for the Zionist project to succeed. The intellectual giants who opposed Zionism did so not out of hostility to Jewish survival, but out of a profound understanding of what happens when any people—especially a historically persecuted one—embraces the logic of ethnonational power.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, concepts of racial hierarchy, and the ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a Jews only state in Palestine as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe, seeing the indigenous inhabitants—Muslims, Christians and Jews—as inferior. In Der Judenstaat (The Jew State) and Altneuland (The Old New Land), Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European, one that would be implicitly superior to the “backward” and “barbaric” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, subordinated and possibly eliminated. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained fascist elements including: a belief in demographic engineering (ethnic cleansing); a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex of humanity; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations by force. These elements place Herzl within the intellectual genealogy of European racial nationalism and fascism. If one removes his Jewish identity he would very easily have found a home in Europe’s fascist movements.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but rather a recognition that Herzl’s political philosophy was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time—settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into Israeli state policies that privileged Jews over native Palestinians and forceful control over their territory and their rights.
 
The making of a supremacist regime
 
The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass ethnic cleansing, massacres, eradication of Palestinian towns and villages, and the permanent exclusion of refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment for the new Israeli state built on the blood and bones of historic Palestine’s indigenous people. Additionally, Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes could never return, while their lands and property was transferred to Jewish ownership. 

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system. One where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoying full political rights, and receiving state protection, and a second where Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land theft, and arbitrary detention and torture. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” 

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political supremacy through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws. These are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions.

Palestinian dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly used debasing rhetoric that strips Palestinians of humanity. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes,” calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. At the start of the Gaza genocide Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called all Palestinians “human animals,” advocated for a complete siege of Gaza after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Israeli political, military and religious leaders have variously described Palestinians as a “cancer” and "vermin"  to be exterminated.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, brutality, and large‑scale military assault. The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of Nazi German soldiers has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing during the Gaza genocide display attitudes towards their enemies similar to those of Nazi troops and Hitler Youth in the Second World War in that they have internalized the view that Hamas militants are “human animals.” Settler violence, often carried out with impunity, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza since the mid-2000s to today. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases: forced displacement; destruction of civilian infrastructure; mass killing; and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants have echoed these warnings with a moral authority that cannot be dismissed. Drawing on memories of Jewish ghettos, forced displacement, starvation, and the systematic stripping away of human dignity, they argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories under Nazi rule. These are not casual comparisons or rhetorical flourishes; they are the reflections of people who have spent a lifetime with memories of how atrocity begins—in language, in policy, and in the gradual normalization of cruelty. Their testimony carries a weight that is both personal and scholarly, a lived experience intertwined with decades of reflection on the mechanisms of genocide. Their testimonies cannot be dismissed, and should be seen as a clarion call to recognize the universal dangers of dehumanization before it hardens into something even more catastrophic.

Impunity as Israeli policy

For decades, Israel benefited from near‑total impunity in the international legal system for actions dating back to its founding—ethnic cleansing, mass killing, wars of aggression, military occupation, and the annexation of conquered land. However, that shield is finally beginning to crack, given that the world has awakened to the scale and visibility of Israeli state violence. The old narratives that once insulated Israel from accountability no longer hold. Proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have forced an unprecedented global reckoning with the legal and moral consequences of prolonged occupation, systemic discrimination, and the routine use of force against an entire civilian population.

Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since fallen silent. Their early endorsements of Israel’s violence—rather than of universal human rights—exposed a troubling readiness to subordinate anti‑racist principles to personal ethnonational loyalty. That scholars such as Dean Barbara Krauthamer of Emory University—a historian of African American life and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—along with Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the influential dean of Berkeley Law, and Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory’s renowned Holocaust scholar and the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, have all remained conspicuously silent as the death toll in Gaza has soared—and despite genocide declarations from their own colleagues, as well as findings from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other respected human rights bodies—reveals a profound betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Zionism is the cousin of white supremacy

Zionism and white supremacy share structural parallels that are evident in the ways they operate within the societies where they are present. Both Zionism (as practiced by Israel) and white supremacy in certain Western countries share the following: they construct a superior in‑group entitled to land and sovereignty; they justify dispossession of an indigenous population; they rely on demographic engineering (i.e. ethnic cleansing); they use narratives of civilizational superiority over other peoples; and they normalize segregation and unequal citizenship.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement and slaughter of millions of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Palestinian and non‑European Jews. This is not metaphor. It is the lived, legal, and political structure under which millions of Palestinians are forced to exist.

A society shaped by supremacy

The internal consequences of supremacy are not confined to the Palestinians who live under its control, they reverberate through Israeli society itself. Haaretz has documented in painstaking detail how the normalization of Jewish supremacy has fractured Israel from within, empowering extremist settler factions and far‑right movements that now sit at the centre of national political life. What was once dismissed as the ideological fringe has become the gravitational core of Israeli politics. The settlers who torch Palestinian homes, uproot olive groves, and assault children now shape cabinet portfolios, dictate coalition terms, and define the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Supremacy, once a tool of domination over Palestinians, has metastasized like a cancer into a governing ethos in Israel.

The depth of this transformation is starkly reflected in Israeli public opinion. A Haaretz poll published on June 3, 2025, revealed findings that lay bare the mainstreaming of exterminationist ideology within Israeli society. According to the survey, 47% of Israeli Jews supported “killing all Palestinians in Gaza," including infants; 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza; and 56% supported expelling all non‑Jews from every territory under Israeli control—all of which are crimes under international law. These numbers, reported directly by Haaretz, do not represent fringe extremism but a chilling portrait of a society in which supremacist ideology has penetrated deeply into the public consciousness. They expose a political culture in which mass expulsion and even mass killing are no longer unthinkable but openly endorsed by large segments of the dominant ethnonational group.

It appears that the post-Oslo era did not moderate these supremacist forces but instead entrenched them. After the world celebrated handshakes on the White House lawn in September 1993, Israel accelerated its political, with the promise of a negotiated peace masking a deeper structural transformation—the consolidation of a system designed to ensure permanent Jewish political and territorial dominance over the Palestinian people and the land that was meant to be their nation.

Critics writing in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera argue that what is described as “Jewish self‑determination” has, in practice, evolved into a system of Jewish supremacy that denies Palestinians any equivalent political, civil, or human rights. They point out that a state cannot claim to be both democratic and permanently structured around the dominance of one ethnonational group. The contradiction is not theoretical; it is lived daily by millions of Palestinians who experience military law, checkpoints, home demolitions, land theft, and the denial of basic freedoms, while Jewish settlers living beside them enjoy full civil rights, state protection, and political representation. 

This critique is not limited to journalists or activists. It is increasingly echoed by scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism, who argue that Israel’s political order exhibits the defining characteristics of a supremacy-based regime not unlike Apartheid South Africa, where differential citizenship, territorial fragmentation, demographic engineering, and the systematic devaluation of the rights of the indigenous population was the norm. Far from being a fringe interpretation, this analysis has become the emerging consensus across multiple academic fields. 

In this sense, the crisis facing Israeli society is inseparable from the crisis it has imposed on Palestinians. Supremacy is an unstable organizing principle that demands constant enforcement, constant fear, constant mobilization against an imagined demographic threat. It produces a politics of paranoia, a culture of dehumanization, and a public sphere in which violence becomes not only permissible but inevitable. To understand contemporary Israel, then, is to understand a society shaped—indeed warped—by the structures of supremacy it has built. And to understand the Palestinian condition is to recognize that these structures are not temporary distortions but the defining architecture of the state.

Toward a future beyond supremacy  

Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish the reality of Jewish suffering, nor does it erase the profound and enduring trauma of antisemitism. It does not question the legitimacy of Jewish collective identity, cultural continuity, or the aspiration for safety in a world where Jews have historically faced persecution. What it does is insist on a truth that should be self‑evident—the memory of historical trauma cannot be used to justify the infliction of trauma on another people.

To confront the architecture of supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the universal principle that no people’s liberation can be built on the subjugation of another. History shows, again and again, that domination is not a path to security but a guarantee of perpetual conflict. A political order that relies on the permanent disenfranchisement of millions cannot produce lasting safety for anyone, including the group it claims to protect.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews or threats to Jewish survival. They are acts of fidelity to the very principles that many Jewish thinkers, activists, and Holocaust survivors have championed for generations: justice, equality, and the recognition of people’s humanity. A political order grounded in equality is not a danger to Jews—it is the only durable guarantee of their safety.

Michael Sfard’s haunting question—How did we produce replicas of our persecutors?—demands an answer that goes beyond individual prejudice or political miscalculation. The answer lies in the corrosive power of ethnonational supremacy itself. Any ideology that elevates one group’s rights above another’s, will inevitably reproduce the very patterns of domination it claims to reject. Supremacy is not a shield; it is a poison.

A future beyond supremacy requires more than policy reform. It requires a dismantling of the structures that created it and a transformation similar to what took place after World War Two in Germany and Japan. It demands the courage to envision a shared future rather than a zero‑sum struggle, to replace domination with equality, and to recognize that the humanity of Palestinians is not a threat to Jewish existence but a precondition for a just and lasting peace. The path forward is not easy, but it is clear that only by dismantling the structures of supremacy can Israelis and Palestinians alike reclaim their full humanity. 

The task now is to build an Israeli political and societal culture that is grounded not in the ideology of Zionism—the domination of Jews over Palestinians—but one founded on the principles of human rights, equality of peoples, inclusion and co-existence.

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