Wikipedia’s main article on Zionism describes it as a movement based on “colonization,” garnering controversy both on and off Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia Flood blog noted that the Zionism Wikipedia article became slanted following “a spasm of edits by pro-Hamas editors subsequent to Oct. 7, when the article was reasonably stable and was not heavily edited. At the time of the ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ slaughter in the Gaza Envelope, it provided a balanced and neutral depiction of Zionism, noting criticism by anti-Zionists but not giving undue emphasis to it.”
The opening sentence of the Wikipedia article states: “Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside of Europe.” In 2023, the opening sentence defined Zionism as “a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports ‘the development and protection of the State of Israel.’”
Middle East historian Asaf Romirowsky, who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Association for Study in the Middle East and North Africa, told me that the sentence implies that “Jews are Europeans and they’ve colonized the land” and that “scholars who recognize the connection between the land and the Jewish people and the evolution that Zionism is Jewish nationalism based on ancestral ties to the land itself from Biblical times all the way to modern times, that would be the honest way to look at it.” Those who promulgate the narrative that Zionism is settler-colonialism try to “weaken the claim that the people and Israel are connected” and that Israel stole the land from the Palestinians is “ahistorical.” Tel Aviv University Vice Rector Eyal Zisser told me that “it’s not a matter of colonization, it’s a matter of feeling if any nation has its own right for self-determination and a state, Jews should also have this right and they should fulfill it in their historical homeland.” Zisser also said regarding the Wikipedia article’s use of the term “ethno-cultural nationalist” that “it’s the national movement of the Jews” and that “Polish nationalism or Italian nationalism” would not be discussed “in the same manner.”
“It’s not a matter of colonization, it’s a matter of feeling if any nation has its own right for self-determination and a state, Jews should also have this right and they should fulfill it in their historical homeland.”- Eyal Zisser
A Wikipedia editor told me that while it’s true that “Zionism ended up with colonization…as written now [the article] implies colonialism. It should probably mention the Ottoman [Empire] and British for context.” An editor who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia after making thousands of edits believes the “colonization” term should be removed altogether “because it’s being used anachronistically. When the early Zionists were talking about ‘colonization,’ a new city anywhere could be called a ‘colony.’ Now they’re trying to shoehorn that into the modern interpretation of colonialism where a power sends its people to gain control over a territory that at least to begin with remains loyal to that power.”
Shortly after the “colonization” sentence, the Wikipedia article says that “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” Romirowsky called this sentence “false.” “There are [an] abundance of diplomatic correspondents of looking to find ways for coexistence and the fact of the matter is that all those Arabs who stayed in the land and became the Arab Israelis … they became naturalized citizens because of that earlier desire for coexistence between the population of the land,” he said, adding that there were Jews who “bought the areas of the land fair and square from lease owners and land owners who were not even on the land itself. The politicization of the land itself only became politicized post-1948, and the reason for that was, this is all part of the Arab propaganda of the day, and theologically speaking I would argue that … there is a Sharia law perception that any land that was once Muslim is Muslim in perpetuity.” Romirowsky also pointed to the fact that “the Jewish community was willing to accept whatever proposal was offered to them, even the desolate land itself, just the idea of having a homeland.”
The Wikipedia Flood blog noted that the citations behind the “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible” line includes “anti-Israel extremists such as Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi.” In addition to Khalidi, anti-Israel historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and Nur Masalha are among the academics also cited.
“Shlaim, Pappe are all New Historians, they’re basically anti-Zionist Jews. Masalha and Khalidi are, of course, Palestinian … why not read Ken Stein’s book about what the Jewish community did in the 1930s, how about reading Anita Shapira’s book on Israel and Israel’s formation,” Romirowsky said. “There is a plethora of Zionist historiography looking at these facts, and they have selectively chosen basically all Arab Palestinian ones.” Shapira is cited elsewhere in the Wikipedia article.
Israeli historian Benny Morris’s 2004 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” is also among the citations for the “as few Palestinians Arabs as possible” line, based on a passage that stated in part that “the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology.” Romirowsky claimed that Wikipedia editors are “selectively choosing quotes” from Morris here. Interestingly, an editor raised concerns on the talk page that the line in question is “a bit too vague to be considered a broadly-supported mainstream view” and that the citation from Morris’ book is “taken out of context,” pointing to how Morris wrote in the following paragraph of the book that “there was no pre-war Zionist plan to expel ‘the Arabs’ from Palestine or the areas of the emergent Jewish State; and the Yishuv did not enter the war with a plan or policy of expulsion.” The editor’s concerns were roundly rejected, as others argued that the sourcing still supported the line in question.
An editor told me that the line “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible” line is not precise. “‘As much land as possible’ is obviously false. They only cared about the land of Israel, and while some certainly wanted as few Arabs (or non-Jews more precisely) others didn’t, so putting all this in the encyclopedia’s neutral voice is an obvious NPOV [Neutral Point of View policy] violation.” Another editor told me that the line is “POV” and poorly written, explaining that the “lead is supposed to be concise, a summary of the article, including all minority POVs. It’s ridiculous that there’s an article about Zionism that scarcely says what Zionist historians actually say.”
The end of the lead of the Wikipedia article concludes with the sentence: “Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.” Romirowsky said that this too was “incorrect,” calling the Zionism is settler-colonial narrative “propaganda. That is the Arab Palestinian viewpoint in order to argue and amplify that there is no connection between the people and the land itself.” Zisser said that “the United States is also a settler-state, and the Americans have no problem with that … maybe this is what they mean, I don’t understand it… maybe technically it’s right, [but] what you understand from such a sentence is wrong.”
An editor told me that the sentence “is awkward, clumsy, and it’s arguing in the lead,” reiterating that the “lead is supposed to be a simple summary.” Another editor told me, “How is this lead material unless you’re trying to push a POV? Most proponents of Zionism reject the characterization obviously. The ‘do not necessarily’ is so weasel-worded it’s ridiculous. Some don’t, most do.”
As I have previously written, Wikipedia operates by a process known as consensus, which is a combination of the number of editors who weigh in on a discussion and the strength of their arguments as it pertains to site policy. There have been rounds and rounds of debates dating back to the beginning of the summer on whether or not the notion that Zionism is based on “colonization” is the mainstream academic view.
“It is not the mainstream academic view,” Romirowsky argued, though he acknowledged that “it is the one that has become dominant as a result of how the conflict has been sold as a white colonial settler movement.”
At the heart of the arguments on the talk page is the aspect of Wikipedia’s NPOV policy known as WP:BESTSOURCES, which states: “When writing about a topic, basing content on the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources helps to prevent bias, undue weight, and other NPOV disagreements. Try the library for reputable books and journal articles, and look online for the most reliable resources.” Those in favor of the “colonization” descriptor contended that academic books specifically about Zionism, rather than about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Judaism more generally, are the best sources to decide this debate, especially when such books have “Zionism” in their titles. Those books describe Zionism as “colonialism” or “colonization,” editors in favor of the use of “colonization” argued. Those opposed to the use of “colonization” in a neutral voice (wikivoice) in the article argued that there are enough academics who dispute that Zionism is colonialism and that “colonization” should be put in its proper context. And so the two sides have gone back-and-forth on what the corpus of academic literature says on the matters and what exactly constitutes as the BESTSOURCES. Talk page discussions on the matter remain ongoing for a possible rewrite.
“I disagree that sources explicitly about Zionism are necessarily best sources … that seems to be likely to skew the results,” an editor told me. Another editor similarly told me that “that many more critical works on Zionism use Zionism in the title” and that the Wikipedia article needs to reflect that “most sources describe Zionism first and foremost as the Jewish movement for self-determination and a national homeland but not necessarily or always ethnocentric, or demanding anything in particular about the Arabs. To paint all of Zionism with said brush in my opinion is POV.” A new ongoing list of books on the matter on the talk page that was started on Sept. 17 seems to include a handful of books that don’t explicitly mention Zionism in the title.
Some editors on the Zionism talk page contended that the early Zionist founders saw their efforts as a colonial venture; one of the citations to the “colonization” sentence in the lead of the Wikipedia article is to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 “The Iron Wall” essay stating that “colonization can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed … Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” But Romirowsky told me that the early Zionist thinkers “all saw themselves as reclaiming and reinvigorating the ancestral promise of a Jewish homeland, not as colonizers.” Romirowsky explained that Zionist founding fathers specifically used a Hebrew phrase “that talks about resettling those lands” and “the opposition has taken that verbiage to connote that Jews are colonizers and they are stealing land that was not theirs. That’s the game that plays out here where they weaponize the meaning of what words actually mean.” Zisser agreed that the Zionist founders were talking about the resettlement of the Jews. “At that time, colony had a different meaning, and if you translate some of the statements made in the 20s or 30s or in the 19th century, when they speak about cultivating the land, and use it to show something that has a different meaning nowadays, it’s not serious,” he said.
Another aspect of the Wikipedia Zionism article that has garnered controversy is the “Ethnic unity and common ancestry of Jews” subsection discussing how “early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race.” The opening sentence of the second paragraph in the subsection states that “it was particularly important in early nation building in Israel, because Jews in Israel are ethnically diverse and the origins of Ashkenazi Jews were not known.” Romirowsky called this line “idiotic,” noting that the term “Ashkenazi” is traced to “areas of modern-day Germany. We know exactly where they came from.”
One of the citations to the Ashkenazi Jews line is to a 2012 book by Columbia University and Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj; the citation highlights a passage from the book that says: “There is a ‘problem’ regarding the origins of the Ashkenazim, which needs resolution: Ashkenazi Jews, who seem European — phenotypically, that is — are the normative center of world Jewry. No less, they are the political and cultural elite of the newly founded Jewish state. Given their central symbolic and political capital in the Jewish state and given simultaneously the scientific and social persistence of racial logics as ways of categorizing and understanding human groups, it was essential to find other evidence that Israel’s European Jews were not in truth Europeans. The normative Jew had to have his/her origins in ancient Palestine or else the fundamental tenet of Zionism, the entire edifice of Jewish history and nationalist ideology, would come tumbling down. In short, the Ashkenazi Jew is the Jew — the Jew in relation to whose values and cultural practices the oriental Jew in Israel must assimilate. Simultaneously, however, the Ashkenazi Jew is the most dubious Jew, the Jew whose historical and genealogical roots in ancient Palestine are most difficult to see and perhaps thus to believe—in practice, although clearly not by definition.”
Romirowsky noted that Abu El-Haj had previously written a book in 2001 in which she attempted to “say that there is no connection whatsoever archaeologically between the land and the people of Israel.” Zisser said that the El-Haj citation in the Wikipedia article is “polemic not scientific.”
An editor told me that “an anthropologist should not be considered an authoritative source on such a matter but in Wikipedia ‘academic press’ and ‘some kind of professor’ means ‘we can use’ and the complete politicization combined with admins getting rid of dissenting views means this sort of s— can and does find its way into high visibility articles.”
There appears to other issues with the “Ethnic unity” subsection. The beginning of the subsection states that “early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it ‘offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.’[67] Zionist nationalism drew from a German ethnic-nationalist theory that people of common descent should seek separation and pursue the formation of their own state… According to Raphael Falk, as early as the 1870s, contrary to largely cultural perspectives among integrated and assimilated Jewish communities in the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Romanticism, ‘the Zionists-to-be stressed that Jews were not merely members of a cultural or a religious entity, but were an integral biological entity.’”
“The whole narrative here is to dilute as much as possible the connection between the land and the people of Israel, to argue ultimately that Judaism is purely a religion,” Romirowsky said, “and has no nationalistic aspirations which are rooted in the Zionist narrative, which is Jewish nationalism…That ignores thousands of years of Jewish history of connecting to the land and the people and everything else.” Zisser agreed that the entire subsection reads like it’s trying to downplay the Jewish connection to Israel and is thus “not serious.”
In the end, Wikipedia talk page discussions are a “kabuki dance,” the longtime editor behind The Wikipedia Flood blog told me. “The sources and other substantive issues are actually weapons, sort of like sabers and rifles, deployed by one warrior or set of warriors against the other,” The Wikipedia Flood editor told me, adding that ultimately the numbers are what prevails as consensus on Wikipedia. “Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying.” One Wikipedia Flood blog post noted that a recent discussion on the Zionism talk page consisted of at least 4700 words in the course of a single day. “That is typical of discussions when the Wikipedia Flood of pro-Hamas editors are involved,” the blog post stated. “They just go on and on and won’t let up … Wikipedia talk pages under the control of anti-Israel editors use such methods to wear down their opponents, using the sheer numbers that they can bring to bear.” The blog post further noted that under the “extended confirmed” protection rule, someone has to have been an editor for at least 30 days and made more than 500 edits to even participate in talk page discussions on matters related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rule, thus keeping the anti-Israel editors in control.
Which then begs the question posed by the news aggregator Visegrad 24 on X, “Why did they feel the need to drastically rewrite the Wikipedia page for ‘Zionism’ in the past few months?” An editor told me that “there was a run on the article in the past 6-9 months” after “a bunch of editors were banned, and others were exhausted and stopped fighting as hard.” Consequently, the anti-Israel editors “realized that a lot of the opposition was weakened so they swooped in.” Another editor acknowledged that this explanation is “quite possible,” noting that at least a couple editors were banned “and other people just stopped editing or editing less, or got topic banned… I’ve seen other editors say they are just holding their powder and are gun-shy, editing in other topic areas…The area has been considered a war and toxic, and a failure of ArbCom, for years.” ArbCom is a reference to the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s 15-member body that acts as a Supreme Court of sorts on the site.
It may be easy to simply dismiss Wikipedia as being an unreliable site that nobody takes seriously, but consider that, as I have previously written, studies show that students begin their research process by looking at Wikipedia. Imagine the kind of effect Wikipedia’s Zionism article would have on a student working on a research paper about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
