No doubt about it. We live in a topsy-turvy world. How Kafkaesque can it get, when some of Zionism’s most fervent supporters have been politicians like Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton or — God help us — the Mad King of Mar-a-Lago?

How crazy has it become when “Never Again is Now” is the slogan of a right-wing organisation purposely inverting reality by calling the pro-Palestinian rallies “evil” when many Jews attend them? When even our governments, state and federal, have been guilty of confusing Zionism with Judaism, oblivious to, or all too willing to overlook, the longstanding tradition of Jewish opposition to the Zionist project? When even to criticise Israel for its history of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the appalling genocide it’s been carrying out before our very eyes can penalise anyone — even a Jew — for the drummed-up charge of antisemitism?

It’s a job and a half unpacking the confusion in all this, or refuting the persistent canard that Zionism is synonymous with Judaism, when mainstream Jewish organisations would have us believe it is, and, even more sadly, perhaps, believe it themselves.

Yet it’s incumbent on Jewish dissidents to speak out on this subject, even when we know that everything that can be thrown at us will be.

For it can get ugly. Baruch Spinoza, remember, was excommunicated by the Sephardic congregation he belonged to. This was due to his “evil opinions and acts” - in his case postulating the existence of God as Nature, and all the implications thereof. That was in the 17th century – more than a century before Zionism was born. But as has often been said, we Jews are a “stiff-necked”, stubborn people, who have clung to our faith and each other in the face of the deep European prejudice against us – our punishment for the crime for not accepting Jesus Christ as the messiah, not literally the son of God. For Jews, my mother once told me, believe that all children are the children of God. Whether this is doctrinally true I couldn’t say, so labyrinthine are Judaism’s theological underpinnings, but metaphorically at least, it works. If we were “chosen” for anything, it was upholding the Commandments – no easy matter, if the Torah and the Commentaries are anything to go by, and one in which we have been continually failing, which our Day of Atonement is all about.

Obviously, the paragraph above is my short, idiosyncratic, take on the religion I grew up in. But I’ve written it to give a glimpse of the complexities within the Jewish experience, how they’ve played out in history and how they are doing so today. Thus, there are echoes of the proscriptions against “evil opinions” in Spinoza’s day in the insistence that Judaism and Zionism — that is, love of the Jewish state — are one and the same. Likewise, Israel’s illegal “right” to defend itself has its origins, I would claim, in the defensiveness arising in response to a millennium of Christian discrimination and persecution against Jews, culminating in last century’s Shoah.

Thus arose the appeal of Zionism – a term first appearing publicly late in the 19th century, at a time when empires were crumbling and the call for ethnic nationalism had become ever powerful. But as Ilan Pappé and others have shown, Zionism not only had its Jewish exponents. There were, as today, Christian adherents, whose motives, if coincidental, were often less about Jewish liberation than solving the so-called “Jewish problem”, or among evangelicals, instigating the rapture, Christ’s second coming. For Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew working in Paris, the motive was the virulent antisemitism triggered by the Dreyfus case, leading him to believe that the only solution was for Jews, too, to have a state of our own. After penning two books — Judenstaat and Altneuland — and lobbying both the British king and the Ottoman sultan, he convened the first Zionist conference in August 1897. While overwhelmingly Jewish, the participants included Christians. Also attending were Jews, either sceptical of, or vehemently opposed to, the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

Zionism’s call for “a land without people for a people without land” was debunked from the start. Asher Ginsberg, known as Ahad Ha’am, for one, wrote two influential essays — “Truth about Eretz Israel” and “This is Not the Way” — in which he predicted that native Palestinians would be less than overjoyed about our erecting a Jewish state in their midst. Then, as he and others had warned, and the waves of Jewish refugees from Europe’s mounting antisemitism began arriving in British Mandate Palestine, the Palestinians rioted in 1920, 1921, and 1929. They rioted again in 1936-38 as fascism took hold in Europe. The British put a limit on Jewish migration, as did other Western democracies, Australia included.

The rest, as they say, is history. Hitler’s “final solution”, adopted in January 1942, sealed European Jewry’s fate. Doubts surrounding Herzl’s idea of a Jewish state in Palestine got little hearing after the Holocaust and, in the face of Palestinian protests and the opposition of surrounding Arab states, David Ben-Gurion declared the Jewish state of Israel. What followed was the Jewish War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba, the end point of which humanity, in horror, is witnessing today.

Yet Israel would have us believe that all this has been central to Judaism. “Next year in Jerusalem,” ends the Passover seder. Yet, like all religions, Judaism is riddled with contradiction. For most Jews, “Next year in Jerusalem” is not taken literally ; it relates to the nation’s liberation from Egypt in the second century BCE. Netanyahu and his supporters invoke the biblical Amaleks, the enemy of Israelites, when referring to Palestinians, overlooking Judaism’s evolution from a tribal religion to the ethical monotheism developed throughout the diaspora, ever since 585 BCE, the year of the Babylonian Exile.

It is here, in Rabbinic Judaism, with its Talmud and the later commentaries, that Jews became “people of the book”, with powerful notions such as “tikkun olam”, “tsedekeh” and “pikuach nefesh” central to its teaching. The diasporic experience changed Judaism from its tribal worship of Yahweh to one in which its deity became a god for all humanity, with Judaism the complex monotheism it is today. Zionism, in its inherently tribal nature, was the outlier. Many orthodox Jews and the socialist Bund, one of the largest Ashkenazi organisations of its day, vigorously opposed Zionism, and, throughout the 20th century, prominent Jews spoke out about the dangers inherent in establishing a Jewish-privileged state in Palestine – Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and I.F. Stone, to name a few.

Israeli scholars like Pappé or Tom Segev and others have characterised Zionism and its role in establishing Israel as a form of settler colonialism, in line with the British dispossession of indigenous peoples in what are now the US, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, Australia. The framework goes far towards explaining the West’s defending Israel, even it means contravening the very international laws and instruments the West put in place after World War II, not to mention basic Jewish injunctions. It risks, however, minimising the powerful appeal Zionism had for Jews themselves, consequent on the centuries of Europe’s vicious antisemitism and the millions lost in the Shoah.

Yet whatever the reasons for its establishment, the Zionist state has proved to be much as its opponents had predicted, a militaristic society bent on oppressing and ultimately obliterating another people whose claim to the land is equal to theirs, and in so doing has severed itself from Judaism itself. Zionism and Judaism are fundamentally different belief systems, although Israel and its enablers work relentlessly to make the rest of us think otherwise.

A topsy-turvy world, indeed. Time to set it right is long overdue.

[Ha’am and the fiction of “a land for a people for a people without a land”.] [Babylonian Exile, Aliyas, anti-state – Buber, Magnes etc.] [The rest is history.][settler colonialism – another strand of the complexity]