For the past 20 months of genocide, the Israeli military has regularly carved the Star of David into Palestinian soil, spray painted them onto walls and buildings like on Jenin’s Freedom Theater and the Qatari Consulate, drawn them onto children’s books and Islamic texts, shaved them onto the heads of Palestinian political prisoners, and emblazoned them across military equipment. Several recently released Palestinian political prisoners were forced to wear shirts with the Star of David on their chests. In a November 2024 Mondoweiss essay, Anna Lipman wrote that she stopped wearing her Star of David necklace because “it has become a symbol of supremacy and fascism.”
These spectacles of Jewish supremacy are not new. Even before this latest and accelerating chapter of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians began in October 2023, the Star of David was regularly weaponized by Israeli soldiers and settlers as a form of intimidation, land theft, and overt physical violence. When I was in East Jerusalem in the summer of 2018, I saw many Palestinian homes that had been stolen and occupied by Israeli settlers. The doors were spray-painted with the blue six-pointed star. In August 2023, a Palestinian man in East Jerusalem was beaten and branded with the Star of David. To avoid calling this Jewish Supremacy denies the motivations behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the reality that Israel fails to be the inclusive democracy it claims to be. It is instead an occupying colonial force that operates as a theocratic Jewish ethnostate.
In order to understand Israel as a Jewish supremacist state, we have to go back in time, more than 50 years before its founding. While Zionism as a cultural and ideological project is much older (and Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature is an excellent cultural history), the creation of political Zionism can be traced back to the thinking of several late 19th-century Jewish thinkers, most notably Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist. There has been much scholarship on Herzl’s life, writings, and ideology, and this essay tackles none of those things in depth. Instead, I focus on several excerpts of Herzl’s writings on Zionism and the Jewish State because they are both foundational Zionist texts and the blueprints of Jewish supremacy.
Herzl began imagining a Jewish supremacist state around the time of the first Zionist Congress of 1897. Despite its mythology, Israel was not created because of the Holocaust. Even so, early European Zionists like Herzl were developing plans for a Jewish state against the backdrop of Europe’s “Jewish Question.” It’s important to note that, in the late 19th century, things were very bad for Jews in Europe. But this “Jewish Question” was not Palestine’s problem until Zionists made it so.
Hellbound and Down 