The events of October 7 and the genocidal war Israel launched on Gaza in their wake have provoked a flurry of discussions over the nature of Zionism and the competing claims of Israelis and Palestinians to the territory of historic Palestine. Zionists tend to argue that such historical claims justify the existence of a Jewish state there, while left-wing critics of Israel often describe Zionism as a “settler-colonial” project that displaced the indigenous Palestinian population.

In a recent article for Jacobin, Ben Burgis argues against calling all Israelis “settlers” and questions the usefulness of the analytical opposition between Israeli settlers and indigenous Palestinians to make sense of what is wrong with Zionism. He claims that some Palestine solidarity activists are saying that Israelis should be displaced from the contested territory because their presence there is illegitimate. They are indulging in the “anti-Zionism of fools,” according to Burgis, by countering the “blood and soil” of Zionists with equally dubious claims on the part of Palestinians.

Burgis hopes this group of activists is relatively small, and he wants to set the record straight for the Left: the problem with Zionism isn’t that they are making illegitimate claims about the land, but that they assert that “anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived.” Burgis claims that the Left can forgo making a parallel argument on behalf of Palestinians and instead make more principled and universal appeal to equal rights regardless of religion, ethnicity, or ancestral origin.