The Limits of Symbolic Refusal- a personal note

Over the past two years, travel has shaped my political thinking mostly through what unsettled me as a Palestinian. I moved through places the way many people do, between cities, conversations, and movements, but what stayed with me was ideology; how it travels, how it embeds itself in everyday life, and how easily it becomes normalized far from where it originated.

South Korea was where this first became impossible for me to ignore.

Living there meant living inside the afterlife of the Korean War and the aftermath of anti-communism in the South.  Anti-communism is a social and political inheritance produced by war, division, and decades of authoritarian rule justified in the name of ‘collective security’. The war never officially ended, and that unresolved reality continues to shape politics, education, and public memory there. 

This history also explains South Korea’s deep entanglement with the United States. Militarily, South Korea cannot act without U.S. approval. Joint training exercises, mandatory conscription shaped through US coordination, and the presence of US military bases reinforce a political culture in which alignment with American power feels existential.

Back in 2018, I encountered a conservative political protest calling for the release of Park Geun-hye, the impeached and imprisoned former president accused of corruption. I was not surprised by its existence, nor by the rhetoric or the imagery of Park presented as a wronged figure. I was not even surprised by the presence of American flags at the protest. Given the history of South Korean conservatism and its alignment with the US Empire, those symbols felt familiar. 

What struck me were the Israeli flags.

They appeared alongside portraits of Park and American flags, waved casually— as if their presence required no explanation. The presence of ‘Israel’ felt normalized, almost natural, and that was precisely what disturbed me.

At the time, I could not understand why Israel appeared in this political space. I wondered whether there was a broader public sentiment in South Korea supporting Israel, or whether this phenomenon was confined to a specific group. Over time, it became clear that this support did not circulate evenly across society. It appeared in particular spaces, among certain communities, and through specific institutions.

One of those institutions was the church.

I visited Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest church in the republic, out of curiosity. I tend to visit religious spaces when I travel because the architecture and symbolism often reveal how societies ‘imagine’ themselves or aspire to be. 

Inside the church, I saw Israeli flags displayed prominently.

I was genuinely shocked because this was a religious space. I asked why national flags, especially those of a foreign state, were displayed inside a church. I approached someone working at the church and questioned whether this inclusion constituted a political endorsement that contradicted the idea of a church as a ‘spiritual’ institution.

I was not given an explanation, and I was asked to leave.

That moment stayed with me, not because of the initial discomfort, but because of the clarity it produced. What I encountered was an ideological endorsement of zionism, and it was actively defended.

In its evangelical and dispensationalist forms, Christian zionism frames the modern zionist entity as a theological necessity. Support for zionism is grounded in theological prophecy rather than historical analysis or political debate. The triumph of zionism becomes central to a narrative about the Second Coming of Christ, transforming a colonial political project into a divine imperative.

What struck me most was how little this belief required engagement with Palestinian history or material reality. In South Korea, zionism continues to find fertile ground in a Christian society shaped by anti-communism, closely aligned with U.S. evangelical networks, and accustomed to interpreting global conflict through moral binaries.

This realization followed me beyond Korea. Later, while traveling in South Africa as part of a speaking tour with the Good Shepherd Collective, one of our hosts spoke about the local prevalence of Christian zionism. A prominent example was the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) and the Nazareth Baptist Church. Once again, support for zionism emerged primarily through Christian messaging, teachings, and religious networks that framed Israel as sacred and inevitable.

I was reminded again that this was not a phenomenon confined to the United States. Evangelical Christian zionism had been exported globally. Once again, I was confronted with the reality that churches across the world have become vehicles for a political theology that aligned easily with Western imperial power. 

Movements such as Kairos Palestine have long challenged this logic, naming Christian Zionism explicitly as a theological distortion and rejecting the use of faith to sanctify dispossession. Liberation theology, which emphasizes solidarity with the oppressed against injustice as a core Christian belief, has offered powerful critiques of zionism as heretical to Christianity. Still, the emphasis on religious rhetoric as a way to discern zionism makes me feel uneasy. Framing zionism primarily as a religious error obscures its true nature. Zionism did not emerge as a theological project. It emerged as a colonial movement backed materially and militarily by Western imperial powers and sustained by weapons, shifting borders, capital, and geopolitical protection.

Much of our everyday opposition to Zionism focuses on delegitimization within immediate spaces. This includes boycotts, disruptions, efforts to sever academic partnerships, and challenges to cultural normalization. These actions matter as they interrupt complicity and fracture consensus. Yet they are not the full struggle.

At times, they resemble an attempt to purify our surroundings rather than confront the system itself. Removing Zionism from cultural or intellectual spaces in the West does not prevent it from continuing to operate with devastating force on the ground. The task is to organize for the conditions of undoing zionism in Palestine. This requires a different strategy from that of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa or ‘anti war’ movements. If all global, ideological and financial support for zionism were to disappear tomorrow, but settlements, borders and military control in Palestine remained intact, zionism would still exist materially. The issue here is when tactics to isolate or confront zionism abroad become mistaken for a strategy to defeat zionism. 

Then the question is: How do we move beyond the tasks of purifying our surroundings; efforts that have material value in disrupting the longevity of zionism and the structures that maintain it? How do we ensure that our efforts advance the defeat of zionism in Palestine? 

More importantly, where is the Global South in this struggle?

South Africa’s decision to bring Israel before the International Court of Justice was principled and historically significant. It carried moral weight but also devastatingly relied on the illusions of a functioning international legal order. International law has rarely constrained Western power or meaningfully protected those harmed by its allies. Accountability is applied selectively, and impunity remains structural and unchanging. Treating legal mechanisms as sufficient responses can sometimes feel like a delusional refusal to address the material impacts of these violent systems and the threat of Western imperialism on all of us. 

Has South Africa materially supported those struggling to undo zionism in Palestine? What is its position on the axis of resistance? Why does the official government line support the two-state solution? These questions require further deliberation from the South African solidarity movement. 

It is important to reconsider the limits of symbolic actions, or those which are not likely to result in material changes. Exposure and condemnation matter, but they do not dismantle systems of power, nor does moral clarity automatically translate into political effectiveness. The act of undoing zionism in our spaces can become a way of addressing zionism where it is least decisive, rather than where it is most entrenched. This is not because such acts (boycotts, disruptions and protests) are misguided, but because they often take place where intervention is most accessible rather than where power is most concentrated. Symbolic acts proliferate precisely because material sites of power are inaccessible, protected, or monopolized. Symbolic refusal migrates into culture, discourse, and morality when zionism’s “sovereignty”, “borders”, and armed force are structurally foreclosed from challenge. The issue is not in the strategy of confronting zionism where we are, but in mistaking its visibility for its decisiveness. That is why we hear well-meaning activists saying things like “well, it’s not like I can go and fight zionists in Palestine”. The question is why such a necessary confrontation is dressed in a cynical tone? This is not only a denial of the importance of armed resistance in the struggle against zionism but a conscious decision to sideline the continuing armed struggle in Palestine and the region. 

Travel has taught me that zionism does not endure because it persuades everyone. It endures because it is embedded militarily, economically, and geopolitically within a global system designed to protect it. That system cannot be undone through isolated ‘sweeping under the rug’ actions. When we confront zionism where we are, we need to be honest about zionism as settler colonialism that requires land and active settler frontiers. The task is to undo zionism’s settler colonial element instead of  ‘coercing’ zionism to ‘slow down, stop the genocide or respect international law’. When we commit to undoing zionism in Palestine, then we proclaim that Palestinian indigenous rights on this land are non-negotiable. So, yes, we can oppose zionism’s entanglement in our own spaces and institutions, churches…etc, etc. Such opposition, however,  must directly aim to advance the liberation of Palestine as its goal. 

Looking back on the past years of movement across Korea, South Africa, and beyond, brought my attention to the fact that sometimes, being a visitor allows you to see what has become invisible to those who live inside an ideology. And sometimes, that seeing demands that we ask not only what we oppose, but what it would truly take to bring it to an end. Anti zionism is not about rehearsing symbolic refusal, it's about a praxis where we see its defeat.