The love of Zionism in the West has always had a troubled relationship with genocide. Its origins as a political ideology lay in an era when European empires routinely justified the exterminability of what they considered to be inferior peoples and uncivilized barbarians.

The nineteenth-century European Zionist idea of implanting and sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious Palestine was a response to European racial antisemitism. But it was also premised, from the outset, on the erasure of native Palestinian history and the political significance of their centuries-old belonging on their own land.

After the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, Western philozionism was powerfully reinforced by a sense of guilt and empathy for the idea of a Jewish state. Now, philozionism has come full course to embrace genocide in Gaza in the name of defending this Jewish state.