“UNDERSTANDING ZIONISM”

Class 5 – Israel’s Divided Society: Contemporary Zionism and its Contradictions

This session will investigate Zionist society through close examination of internal dynamics of Israel’s various religious, geographic, and ethnic settler communities and how such dynamics are exposed by Arab/Palestinian resistance projects. Through investigating the dialectical relationship between Zionism’s settler-colonial nature and the counter-forces of Arab resistance, we will uncover the corollary that Zionist ideology inherently leads to genocide, whether postulated as “leftwing” (Labor Zionism) or rightwing (Revisionist Zionism/Religious Zionism). Participants will come away with an understanding of how Israeli society’s divisions are a byproduct of its settler-colonial nature and its inability to solve the Palestine question (i.e. completely eliminate the Palestinian people and remove them from their land). Finally, this session also investigates contradictions between Zionism and different factions of the US ruling class.