The

The Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Jake Rom.

Zionism and the project of ethnic cleansing and

colonial settlement in historic Palestine is often rightly compared to other projects of European

colonialism. But in a recent essay for Parapraxis, my guest Jake Rom argues that Zionism not only

has been influenced by the European Imperial Project, but that it has also been

massively shaped by anti-Semitism, and that in its recapitulation of anti-Semitic stereotypes

and even anti-Semitic practice, it makes sense to view Zionism as a species of anti-Semitism

itself.

We talked about how Jake came to this view via Max Hawkeheimer's and Theodore

Adorno's The dialectic of Enlightenment, why he thinks Zionism has always been bent on the

destruction of the Palestinian people and could never be content with merely exploiting

Palestinian labour. And we also talked about the extreme machismo of Israeli society

and how October 7th was experienced

as an emasculating event.

Finally, we talked about Israel's likely turned to a permanent occupation of Gaza and the possibility

of the creation of new Israeli settlements in the territory.

Jake Rom is a writer and human rights lawyer and an associate editor at Protein magazine.

His writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Brooklyn Rail and Hyperalergic, amongst other venues.

His article, Elements of Antisemitism, The Limits of Zionism, which was the subject of our conversation, appeared in the latest issue of Parapraxis.

You begin the article by writing that Zionism is an anti-Semitism.

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