I once heckled a Zionist speaker.

Every Israeli Independence Day, the Argentine Jewish community organized a massive celebration at Luna Park, Buenos Aires’ main indoor arena. The Zionist youth movements, then very strong, would descend on the stadium — less to celebrate Israel than to attack the elder leaders of the O.S.A., the Organización Sionista Argentina. At the time, there was a bitter debate about what Zionism actually meant. For us, Zionism meant only aliyah, immigration to Israel; anyone over 18 who wasn’t living there could not legitimately call themselves a Zionist.

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A 60-something-year-old leader of the Zionist movement delivering a speech 10,000 miles away from Israel was, to us, an insufferable contradiction. And we — overstimulated teenagers with something to prove — made sure they knew it. Every time they spoke, we shouted “Sionismo es Aliá” (“Zionism is aliyah”) or “¡Aliá, Aliá! ¡La juventud responde con la única verdad!” (“Aliyah, aliyah! The youth answer you with the only truth!”).

I wasn’t alone. For most Jews back then, Zionism mostly meant moving to Israel. Parents would tell day school teachers things like: “I want you to teach my kid Hebrew and love of Israel, but don’t make him a Zionist” — meaning don’t make him move to Israel. 

Teenage me would not have been shocked by the recent Jewish Federations of North America study showing that only 37% of American Jews define themselves as Zionists. It might even have struck me as good news — that nearly three million American Jews were planning to move to Israel.

Naturally, my understanding of Zionism has evolved since my puberty’s hormonal effervescence. In fact, I’ve devoted much of my adult life to educating people toward a broader, more comprehensive view of Zionism. And yet, today as then, the obvious moral of the story remains: terms mean different things to different people. 

Case in point: that same JFNA study shows that 88% of Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, which is one of the most widely accepted definitions of Zionism. Support for Israel remains as high as ever — and by some measures, even higher. Not only do 9-in-10 Jews support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but more than 7-in-10 report an emotional attachment to Israel. 

And yet somehow, the term Zionism has been rendered problematic, even toxic. It has been emptied of its original meaning and refilled with a jumble of ideas that have little to do with Zionism. For example, about 80% of self-identified anti-Zionist Jews say that “supporting whatever actions Israel takes” is a core tenet of Zionism, while only about 15% of self-identified Zionists agree, according to the survey. Thirty-six percent of Jews surveyed said Zionism only meant “the right of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state,” and 35% said Zionism meant “believing Israel has a right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” The confusion here is not abstract: it shows up clearly in how Jews themselves now define the term. 

The blame for this semanticide is widely shared. To begin with, since the mid-20th century, Soviet and Arab propaganda waged a deliberate campaign to turn Zionism into a proxy for everything allegedly wrong with the world: racism, colonialism, imperialism, whatever -ism happened to be in vogue. The discourse against Zionism became omnipresent in academia, where “progressive” professors elevated it to dogma. Neo-colonial theory, intersectional ideology and Qatari petrodollars later joined the party, which has now hired Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as DJs. For anti-Zionists, “Zionism” is not a real historical movement but a fantasy construct. Much like the “Jew” of classical antisemitism, it is an imaginary symbol of evil.

But many Jews have helped drain Zionism of meaning as well. Many members in today’s Israeli cabinet identify themselves as Zionistic despite eschewing central tenets of Zionism like liberal democracy or respect for minorities. When they practice “Zionism” in a way that would have horrified Herzl and Jabotinsky, they hollow out and distort the concept. 

Meanwhile in America, ignorance has become a major contributor to the problem. I routinely find myself lectured about Zionism by people who don’t speak a word of Hebrew and think Altneuland is a variation of Sachertorte served in a Viennese café. Their “Zionism” tends to be a hodgepodge of right-wing politics, social-media bravado and WhatsApp heroics. Ignorance is widespread and, more troublingly, it reaches communal leadership. (Try a simple test: Name three major works of Zionist literature without Googling.) If most anti-Zionists cannot accurately define Zionism, neither can many so-called Zionists. 

This knowledge vacuum leaves many Jews outsourcing the definition of Zionism to the loudest group in the room — antisemites — representing a catastrophic failure of Jewish education at every level.

In sum, three forces converged to make Zionism toxic for Jews: the best-funded and best-organized demonization campaign in modern history; the misuse of the term by our own extremists; and the ignorance that made it all possible.

Ultimately, the debate over Zionism has little impact on on the reality of Israel’s existence (even as it impacts reality in other ways). For most people inside and outside Israel, what Herzl dreamed of in 1897 is just an intellectual curiosity. The country evolves according to its own social and political dynamics, oblivious to the debates of tenured academics in American ivory towers. In that sense, there is an unintended wisdom in American Jewry’s response. They simply express love for Zionism’s creation: Israel. It’s not that they are anti-Zionist (only 7% identify as such); they are disengaged from a theoretical argument that strikes them as nonsensical.

So what are we to do with these findings?

One option would be to abandon the term altogether. I don’t favor that approach, but it deserves a fair hearing.

In politics, religion and other social settings, terms are routinely abandoned due to what linguists call semantic fatigue. Semantic fatigue occurs when the explanatory cost of a term exceeds its communicative value; when words become so burdened by controversy, misinterpretation and constant justification that speakers stop using them, not because they’re false or meaningless, but because uttering them reliably derails the conversation. Zionism could fall into that category. Abandoning the term might pull the rug out from under its detractors, at virtually no cost.

Tempting as that may be, it would be wrong on several levels. First, Zionism was among the most inspiring socio-political movements in human history. It generated an extraordinarily rich intellectual tradition, and its product — the modern Jewish state of Israel — is a model of success in many ways. Zionism is worth knowing and understanding.

Additionally, abandoning the term would be futile. Calls to drop “Zionism” recall earlier moments in history when Jews attempted to abandon the word “Jewish” itself (hence the proliferation of organizations labeled “Hebrew,” “Israelite” or “Mosaic”). The term “Jewish,” it was thought, was too burdened. Yet replacing it did nothing to curb antisemitism; the new terms quickly absorbed the same stigma. As a defiant rebuke to that impulse, Martin Buber launched a journal in the 1920s and named it Der Jude — a deliberate challenge to both antisemites and timid Jews.

If Jews relinquish the term Zionist, antisemites will simply move on to another euphemism. We know this because that is precisely what happened in the Soviet Union, where antisemitic discourse migrated effortlessly from “Zionist” to “Talmudist,” a term that served the same purpose while shielding bigots from the charge of racism. When challenged, Soviet propagandists would insist: We are not talking about Jews, but about a mentality of decadent scholasticism and intellectual indulgence. If every term can be weaponized, retreating only ensures the need for further retreats. Better to stand and fight for this one — to reclaim Zionism and to reframe anti-Zionism as a hate ideology deserving the same moral contempt as anti-Black racism.

Zionism also still matters within the Zionist project — Israel — itself. How we define Zionism shapes who we consider legitimate actors in Israeli politics. Just as we cannot allow antisemites to hijack the term, we cannot allow our own extremists to monopolize it. Zionism still carries moral and political currency in Israel — that is precisely why extremists seek to own it. Properly reclaimed, Zionism can be a tool for defending Israeli democracy and cultivating a more enlightened society. Herzl himself anticipated figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and showed us how to defeat them. Not for nothing is Herzl called “the Prophet of the State.”

The JFNA survey should therefore serve as a wake-up call to radically expand Jewish and Zionist education. Zionism is a Jewish movement, and Jews cannot allow others to define it. We must be clear about what Zionism is, and what it is not. It is not blind support for every Israeli policy, nor is it a colonial enterprise. Zionism is as diverse as the people who created it, but across its many streams — socialist, revisionist, religious — it shares four core commitments:

1. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, forged in the crucible of anti-imperialist struggle and decolonization.
2. Zionism affirms the Jewish right to national self-determination, a human right no less than a national one.
3. Zionism, in all its forms, embraces liberal democracy and Enlightenment values to the point that it can’t be conceived without them. 
4. All Zionism streams uphold full equality for non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish national home.

As such, Zionism is an antidote both to Jewish powerlessness and Jewish extremism.

True Zionism — not the antisemitic caricature — can be a source of pride and joy for Jews. For that to happen, Jews must know its history and intellectual depth. When “Talmudist” became a slur, Jews didn’t abandon the Talmud; they doubled down on it. The same must be true of Zionism. The task is easier than it appears: 9-out-of-10 Jews already accept its core principles. They just call them by another name.

Through learning and engagement, we can turn Zionism’s semantic fatigue into semantic energy.

Andrés Spokoiny is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.