The Hollowed Vocabulary: Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institutional Capture of Anti-Zionism
This is part 1 of a series unpacking my Master's thesis — a two-year, 28,500-document study of how Jewish Voice for Peace defines and operationalizes anti-Zionism.
By Cody O’Rourke
In the aftermath of October 7th, activism in the United States ballooned. The images coming out of Gaza — burnt children, dismembered mothers, grieving fathers, and Israelis celebrating over all of it — moved and galvanized people, as they should have. The horrifying images that unmasked the nature of zionism cut through decades of propaganda, right-wing media framing, and Israeli hasbara, and surfaced a moral clarity for millions of people who had never before said the word Palestine out loud.
In the subsequent eight months after October 2023, existing organizing spaces mobilized, new ones formed, and the country began a political transformation that manifested itself most visibly in the streets. Researchers tracking the demonstrations counted nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests across the United States in that window, against just over 2,000 pro-Israel protests. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities. Campuses became sites of sustained, principled encampments. Organizations that had spent years at the far edge of liberal respectability politics suddenly found themselves at the center of a national argument about Palestine, trying to contend with the concepts of apartheid, zionism, and the United States’ role in underwriting the colonial violence of the Israeli project. Whatever else you want to say about that period, it was a genuine expansion — more people, in more places, willing to say more than they had ever said before. And through it, people were developing new vocabularies: they were calling out for decolonization, holding panels on settler-colonialism, and writing about solidarity.
The word that was under the most pressure, doing the most work — and at the same time, the least amount of work — was anti-zionism.