On June 23rd an Israeli company set up a real estate bazaar in an ultra-Orthodox kollel and synagogue in Los Angeles. The company sells real estate both in “Israel ’48′” and in the West Bank. Protesters protested, counter protesters hurled eggs, LAPD showed up in riot gear, there were fistfights, and it just got even uglier.

CNN commentator Van Jones called the protest a “pogrom” against Jews, likening the keffiyah that Palestinian protesters wore to a “Confederate flag” — though he had no problem with an actual, foreign flag Jewish counter-protesters draped themselves in. Newsweek called the protest a “synagogue attack” — as if protesting an illegal real estate sale was tantamount to Kristallnacht.

While the protest was organized by a Palestinian student group, many of the protesters were Jewish — who saw the sale of illegal property as a violation of both the 1965 Civil Rights and 1968 Fair Housing acts. From both a Palestinian and a progressive Jewish perspective, the illegal land sales were outrageous and criminal. For the Jews among the protesters it was also unforgivable that these violations of US law and Jewish ethics were taking place in a synagogue.

But casting the Gaza-related protests as “antisemitism” has become a highly successful strategy pro-Israel groups use to distract from central issues like land theft and genocide. So much so that American media have become largely incapable of distinguishing Judaism from Zionism. Likewise, the Israel lobby’s push to create repressive laws based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews and Judaism with Israel, further threatens any distinction.

* * *

But Judaism is a religion that existed for centuries after the ancient Hebrew state (also called Israel) collapsed after only 125 years, in part due to civil war. Long after this collapse, Jewish culture still thrived in multiple cultural forms and languages. Rabbinic Judaism developed. The crown jewel of Jewish scholarship, the Talmud, was written over centuries in present-day Iraq. While early Zionists like Ahad Ha’am hoped that Zionism might enrich and strengthen Jewish culture, contemporary Zionists have managed to reduce Judaism down to Zionist land grabs and conquest — its ethical values further dishonored by the state of Israel’s repression, war crimes, and genocide and the insistence of Zionists that this is all that Judaism is.

But right from the beginning, Zionism has shamelessly placed Judaism at the service of its political agenda. In Der Judenstaat (the “Jewish State“) Theodor Herzl described (see original German in the graphic) the rather heavy-handed approach by which the Jewish Company would issue instructions to Jews:

Our Clergy

Every group will have its Rabbi, traveling with his congregation. Local groups will afterwards form voluntarily about their Rabbi, and each locality will have its spiritual leader. Our Rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire their congregations by preaching it from the pulpit. They will not need to address special meetings for the purpose; an appeal such as this may be uttered in the synagogue. And thus it must be done. For we feel our historic sanity only through the faith of our fathers as we have long ago absorbed the languages of different nations to an ineradicable degree.

The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations. Israel will pray for us and for itself.

It is worth reading Herzl’s foundational work describing the Zionist project. Among other things he made clear how little he thought of Palestine’s indigenous people, that he recognized that in a “pure” Jewish state it would be necessary to ethnically cleanse the inhabitants by “spiriting them away” across the border. Anticipating the cognitive dissonance of today’s liberal Zionist when trying to see Israel’s Apartheid state as both “democratic and Jewish,” Herzl’s Jewish state was to be structured as either a “democratic monarchy” or an “aristocratic republic,” neither of which would tolerate popular unrest.

Herzl’s state was to be a bulwark against the Asian hordes, which would then endear it to the Western powers. The Zionist project, Herzl wrote, would depend on colonial support and patronage. And not only was Zionism to be — explicitly — a settler colonial enterprise, it was to be a settler colonial enterprise that both served and profited from European colonial nations. Today’s Zionists become apoplectic when DEI scholars and scholars of colonialism point this out, but these very words were all in the draft of the Jewish state that Herzl described in Der Judenstaat.

Herzl, who eventually helped organize the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund, also helped create the Jewish Colonial Bank. In 1898 Herzl described the purpose of the bank in Die Welt: “The task of the Colonial Bank is to eliminate philanthropy. The settler on the land who increases its value by his labor merits more than a gift. He is entitled to credit. The prospective bank could therefore begin by extending the needed credits to the colonists; later it would expand into the instrument for the bringing in of Jews and would supply credits for transportation, agriculture, commerce and construction.”

Of the Jewish Company, which was central to the Zionist project in Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote: “The Jewish Company is partly modelled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has other than purely colonial tasks.”

Acknowledging the similarity of Jewish colonial settlement to that of the American West, Herzl wrote: “In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews. The lots in provinces and towns will be sold by auction…”

Which brings us to Los Angeles of 2024. The auction of stolen property at Adas Torah has been a principal feature of Zionism for over a century.

Despite attempts by early Zionist organizations like Brit Shalom and the Ihud to advocate for a binational state that would avoid ethnic cleansing, land theft and the inevitable resentment of the dispossessed, Herzl’s 19th Century dream of an undemocratic, racist Jewish state was ultimately realized.

From the moment of its founding, Israel has been an ugly, illiberal, nationalist anachronism in a world that has since adopted more democratic aspirations. As Herzl wrote, “if you will it, it’s not a dream.” And, strangely enough, Herzl was right: the ethno-nationalist state he dreamed of has become an absolute nightmare.