Read on Twitter
When the left talk about 'Zionism' what they're usually referring to is a particularly hard right version of Zionism that embedded itself within the Israeli state from the outset...
More progressive forms of Zionism going back centuries (and articulated by Chomsky among others) are often considered redundant or irrelevant by the left...
And it's not hard to understand why - faced with the kind of Zionism that continues to manifest in the systematic killing and daily oppression of Palestinian civilians, and an apartheid system of discrimination embedded in Israeli law...
But it's also easy to understand why some Jewish people (beyond the small number of noisy cranks who weaponise antisemitism for political ends) take offence to the generic use of the term 'Zionists' by the left, and perceive it (however wrongly) as being a proxy for Jews...
In the UK, there's no question that the vast majority of Jewish people do believe that Israel has a right to exist, as an expression of Jewish self-determination, and at least within its pre-1967 borders...
These two truisms - that hard right Zionism is entrenched within the Israeli state but that there is more to Zionist ideology than this - are essential to grasp if we are to effectively resist the on-going use of antisemitism as a political football...
As well as the very real if relatively rare forms of antisemitic expression that become entangled with generic and derogatory references to 'Zionists'
