Saw a youtuber that I follow make a post comparing "Jewish supremacy" to hotep ideology as a way to dismiss the term and I genuinely cannot let this one go.
What makes this particularly maddening is watching western leftists overcorrect so hard in the name of protecting Jewish feelings that Palestinians get pushed entirely out of the conversation. This is so typically American; so obsessed with centring the feelings of the ingroup that the people actively being murdered get quietly moved into the second victim category. Palestinians coined the term "Jewish supremacy" to describe their lived experience of this ideology. Especially with the fact that Palestinians already get dismissed and branded as antisemitic when they try to express their suffering and are constantly expected to clarify that they don't mean all Jews, that Judaism is not Zionism, that they wish no harm on anyone, all before they are even allowed to describe their own oppression. That burden should not be on the victims. It is the work of Jewish people themselves to spearhead the effort of separating Zionism from Judaism and to lift that disclaimer off Palestinians every time they try to analyse their own oppression. That labour belongs to them, not to the people being killed.
Rejecting the term wholesale because antisemites have also used it is letting Zionists control the language of their own critique. The exact same move that turns any criticism of Israel into antisemitism and labels Palestinians as bigots for describing their oppression. We cannot claim to support Palestinians while refusing to acknowledge how deeply Zionism has colonised Jewish institutions. You cannot separate the two by pretending the entanglement does not exist. That is not nuance. That is silence dressed up as sensitivity, and Palestinians pay for it with their lives.
We understand how absurd it would be to expect Black South Africans to constantly stress that they wish no harm on all Afrikaners every time they want to talk about apartheid. Thee Boers were ethnically cleansed by the British, should Black South Africans have been expected to centre that history in every conversation about their own dispossession just because their oppressors also have a history of suffering? Of course not. So why is that the standard we tolerate here?
The American imperialism point is correct. The US does not bankroll Israel out of love for Jewish people; it does it to secure its Middle East interests, maintain a buffer against Islamic powers, whatever framework you prefer. Fine. But American imperialism and the internal ideological structures of Zionism are not competing explanations. They are co-constitutive. The US needs a willing settler population to occupy and maintain that vassal state, and that population has to be ideologically conditioned to do it. That conditioning happens inside Jewish institutions. Birthright programs. Synagogues financially tied to Israel. Palestinian land being auctioned in Jewish communal spaces. Young Jewish people raised to see Israel as their homeland and every threat to it as existential antisemitism. That is not fringe. That is infrastructure. The hotep comparison collapses here because hotep ideology has no institutional backing and produces no material harm to an occupied population. These are not equivalent things.
Jewish Americans benefit from Zionism and uphold its structures and should not be given a pass on the oppression of Palestinians. Most Jews in the west subscribe to Zionism because Jewish supremacy, a core tenet of the ideology, has been deliberately embedded in most Jewish institutions. If you tell a group with a real and brutal history of persecution that they need their own state because the world will exterminate them otherwise, and that they must secure it by any means necessary, it is very easy for them to buy in. Especially when the entire western media environment reinforces it; constantly framing Palestinian resistance as unprovoked, weaponising antisemitism and pushing the idea that all Arabs want to kill Jews. Add religion to the mix and the grooming is nearly complete.
Zionism, like any ideology designed to extract capital, needs a class of people willing to fund and legitimise its agenda. A significant portion of that class is Jewish, and the ideology has been made so entrenched in their daily lives that rejecting it carries real consequences; job loss, family estrangement, being expelled from your synagogue. That is not incidental. That is how ideological compliance is enforced.
I believe people should condemn harm done in their name and I say all of this as a Muslim myself. And I know it sounds uncomfortable. But we cannot keep handling Jewish feelings with kid gloves while people are actively being murdered. Yes, having your worldview shattered is a difficult and destabilising experience. But people's lives are on the line. Denying the extent to which Zionism has embedded itself in Jewish institutions does not protect Jewish people, it upholds the ideology. That is not harassment. That is basic accountability.
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