The CIA , Israel’s Intel Services & Zionism: A History
The CIA, Israel’s Intel Services & Zionism: A History
Why the spy agency’s infamous James Angleton midwifed modern Israel—and its bomb—into existence
SUDDENLY, “ZIONISM” IS A FIGHTING WORD. The term for the nationalist movement to build a Jewish state in Palestine has not often figured in American political debate over the half century since the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, denounced a 1975 United Nations resolution asserting that “Zionism is a form of racism.” Now Zionism has returned as epithet and issue in the 2024 election.
Anti-Zionism is “incontestably” anti-Semitic, argues Bari Weiss of the Free Press, an online news site devoted to “the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.” Anyone who doesn’t support the existence of a Jewish state, she asserts, is a hater of Jewish people. “We need an exodus from Zionism,” counters Naomi Klein in the Guardian. She calls political Zionism “a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.” And so, like “genocide” and “anti-Semitism,” “Zionism” is now a flash point in Jewish conversation and American politics.
This is the lexicon of a seismic political conflict. The generationally solid consensus behind Israel in the Democratic Party has fractured over Gaza. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism distills a potent pro-Israel Republican talking point. The issue has defenestrated two female Ivy League university presidents and prompted a third to order the massive arrest of student protesters. The result: campus demonstrations proliferating across the country—and ever more widespread debate about the meaning of Zionism.
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