I know I shouldn’t be, really, because it’ll probably lead to some really ugly rants from people with dreadful politics, but I am perversely delighted at how much piss this will boil.
In all seriousness though, I think this is a profoundly unhelpful question to ask. I don’t see why non-Jews (or, for that matter, Jews) should have to self-identify with Jewish nationalism to affirm support for the right of Israel to self determination.
Saying “if believing in Israel’s right to exist and self determine makes me a Zionist, then I’m a Zionist”, as RLB kinda has here, is a reasonable enough formulation on its own terms, but without qualification it’s a severely limited and potentially reactionary statement.
The necessary qualifications are: supporting the right of a national people to self determination doesn’t mean you have to adopt the label of their nationalism. And we need to recognise that “Zionism” has meant radically different things to different people at different times...
...and for Palestinians it has often meant, and continues to mean, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and national oppression.
In the truly egotistical and solipsistic fashion that Twitter encourages, I’m now going to use this as a jumping off point to talk about the history of my own personal relationship with the word “Zionist”...
I called myself a “Zionist” between the ages of 12 -14. I never saw Israel as “my homeland”, but as a Jew with a profound sense of my history and heritage, I saw the existence of a Jewish state, a life raft for Holocaust refugees and survivors, as a symbol of defiance.
For me at 13, calling myself a “Zionist” was more about affirming that defiance, amplifying pride in my heritage, and asserting Jewish peoplehood than any indication of what I thought about the policy of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians.
(That’s the case for many Jews who self identify as “Zionist”, or “supporters of Israel”, which is why the insistence of some on the left that “Zionism” is akin to racism, or even fascism, or that Zionism should be “no platformed”, has potentially antisemitic implications.)
There was some overlap between calling myself a “Zionist” and becoming a socialist, but once I’d arrived at properly worked-out revolutionary socialist politics, I’d come to understand Zionism as a form of nationalism, which I no longer felt comfortable identifying with.
I believed that the Israeli-Jewish national community had the right to self determination, but I didn’t believe in a global Jewish nation that could somehow collectively self-determine via a tiny state in the Middle East.
I also developed an understanding of Israel as the colonial oppressor of the Palestinians, and decided the easiest way of summarising my opposition to that oppression was to call myself an “anti-Zionist”.
But I’ve moved away from that term too. For Palestinians suffering under military occupation, I understand how “anti-Zionism” must feel like a material necessity. But given the reality of Zionism’s emergence as a response to oppression, and the fact that immigration to >
< Palestine really was a “life raft” for many Jewish refugees, a flat, unqualified statement of opposition to it seemed to lack historical nuance. For some years I preferred “non-Zionist” as a personal descriptor.
Most recently, and in the crucible of renewed debates around antisemitism on the left, I’m increasingly sympathetic to the provocation Steve Cohen made when he described himself as an “anti-Zionist Zionist” in an eccentric but rather brilliant poem: …u-dont-look-anti-semitic.blogspot.com/2005/08/i-am-a… 
Like I say... “Zionism” has been many different things to many different people at many different times. It’s been a politics of Jewish-supremacist bigotry towards Arabs, but it’s also been a radical politics of national liberation.
There were Zionist detachments in the Bolsheviks’ Red Army in the post-revolution Civil War, organised by Marxist-Zionists from the left wing of Poale Zion (an organisation which shares some genealogy with @JewishLabour).
The best thing would be to move past “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism” altogether and articulate a non-nationalist politics of equal rights, including the equal right of all national communities to self determination.
But as both Israeli chauvinists, including vicarious ones, and antisemites both left and right are insistent on keeping the terms front and centre, maybe we should all be “anti-Zionist Zionists” of the Steve Cohen type. Read his book. @dontlookanti
