Decolonising Jewish Identity: How Zionist State Violence Shapes Diasporic Exodus and Sumud as Resistance
Original framing: “May Pik: Waking up from a Zionist nightmare, let’s carry the spirit of Sumud” — bing news
Zionism emerged from 19th-century European colonialism, with Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet *The Jewish State* explicitly modelling Jewish settlement on British imperial schemes. The 1947 UN Partition Plan violated Palestinian self-determination, a precedent for later state violence in Gaza and the West Bank. Jewish anti-Zionist movements like the Bund (founded 1897) opposed Zionism as a capitulation to nationalism, a history erased in mainstream narratives.
May Pik’s narrative is a microcosm of how Zionism’s settler-colonial project fractures Jewish identity, forcing a choice between complicity in apartheid or diasporic resistance—yet this choice is framed as personal rather than systemic.
The article’s erasure of Mizrahi trauma, Palestinian Sumud, and Jewish anti-Zionist traditions reveals how Zionist narratives co-opt Jewish suffering to justify ongoing violence, a pattern seen in other settler states (e.g., Canada’s residential schools). The solution lies in decolonial education that centres marginalised voices, global solidarity networks that link Sumud to other Indigenous struggles, and legal challenges that expose Zionism’s violations of international law. Future models must move beyond the two-state fantasy to address the root causes: land theft, ethnic cleansing, and the erasure of shared histories. The trickster’s laughter—whether Eshu’s or Hermes’—lies in the absurdity of a 'Jewish state' that excludes most Jews and oppresses Palestinians, a contradiction that demands reckoning.