The Zionism Explainer That Rewrites History

Matt Baker wants to settle the argument over Zionism with two definitions. Historical records, Palestinian diplomacy, and Jewish political history expose the weakness of his approach.

In his UsefulCharts video Zionism and Anti-Zionism Compared, Matt Baker offers viewers an appealing proposition: beneath the bitterness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies a relatively simple disagreement about how two peoples should govern themselves.

Zionists, he explains, want Israel to continue existing as a Jewish state. Anti-Zionists reject that arrangement. Moderates on both sides supposedly want essentially the same things, differing mainly over whether peace requires two countries or one.

It is a reassuring explanation. It is also much too convenient.

Baker's problem is not that every distinction he draws is wrong. Criticism of an Israeli government does not automatically make someone anti-Zionist. Opposition to Zionism does not automatically establish hatred of Jews. Both points deserve to be understood.

The trouble begins when Baker takes these reasonable distinctions and turns them into universal rules about political identity, history, and motivation.

His account produces extraordinary conclusions: Palestinians who support two states become Zionists by definition; advocates of a shared state become anti-Zionists regardless of the movement's history; and most Jews supposedly rejected Zionism until World War II ended.

These are not minor shortcuts. They reshape the history of a conflict while presenting the results as elementary definitions.

The documents tell a more complicated—and more revealing—story.

1. The Palestinian Leadership That Recognized Israel Without Accepting Zionism

Baker's most consequential claim is also his easiest to test.

He argues that because a two-state settlement preserves Israel as a Jewish state, anyone favoring that settlement must qualify as a Zionist.

He explicitly includes Palestinians.

Consider what actually happened on September 9, 1993.

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, sent Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a letter formally recognizing Israel's right to exist in peace and security.

The PLO also accepted United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, committed itself to negotiations, and renounced terrorism and other violence.

Rabin responded by recognizing the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

These were foundational diplomatic steps toward the Oslo peace process. They did not require Arafat to declare himself a Zionist or endorse the underlying ideology of Jewish nationalism.

The distinction became even more explicit in April 2014.

Addressing the PLO Central Council, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rejected demands that Palestinians formally recognize Israel's Jewish national character.

He argued that Palestinians had already recognized Israel as a state and questioned why recognition of its Jewish identity should be an additional requirement.

Abbas was distinguishing between accepting a country's existence and endorsing the national principle upon which that country defines itself.

That distinction directly challenges Baker's classification.

Accepting a political arrangement is not necessarily the same as believing in the ideology that produced it.

A Palestinian negotiator might accept Israel's continued existence because the alternatives appear worse, because international diplomacy requires compromise, or because two independent states seem the most realistic arrangement.

None of those motives automatically establishes ideological allegiance to Zionism.

Baker's definition effectively removes that distinction.

A Palestinian could recognize Israel, negotiate its borders, and support Palestinian independence while expressly rejecting the label Baker assigns them.

That should be a warning against the definition, not an invitation to overrule the Palestinian.

2. Some Zionists Wanted a Binational State

Baker creates a second rule: anyone supporting his version of a shared Jewish-Arab state is, by definition, an anti-Zionist.

History presents an inconvenient objection.

Some prominent Zionist intellectuals supported binational political arrangements rather than the establishment of a conventional Jewish nation-state exercising exclusive national sovereignty.

Among them were philosopher Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

They were associated with Ihud, a movement advocating political accommodation between Jews and Arabs through binational arrangements.

Historian Sasson Sofer examines this movement in Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy, published by Cambridge University Press.

Ihud attracted other notable intellectuals, including Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergman, Ernst Simon, and Henrietta Szold.

Its proposals were politically marginal. They nevertheless represented a genuine current within the historical Zionist world.

This matters because Baker presents the distinction between Jewish sovereignty and shared sovereignty as though it cleanly separates two ideological traditions.

It does not.

Historical Zionism encompassed competing ideas about Jewish national revival, cultural identity, political sovereignty, and relations with Palestine's Arab population.

Not every historical Zionist believed the movement's objectives required the particular state structure that eventually emerged.

The existence of binational Zionists does not settle whether a modern one-state proposal should be called Zionist. The projects differed in important ways, including their proposed institutional structures.

But it defeats Baker's suggestion that the classification follows automatically from the number of states.

The real questions involve competing national claims, collective rights, democratic representation, and the constitutional structure of government.

A movement with more than a century of ideological disagreements cannot be accurately reduced to a political sorting exercise.

3. Jewish Support for Zionism Did Not Suddenly Arrive in 1945

Baker next turns to history.

He correctly observes that Zionism did not originally command universal Jewish support.

Then he makes a considerably stronger claim: until the end of World War II, most Jews did not support Zionism.

The first proposition is historically well established. The second requires evidence Baker does not provide.

Consider the development of American Reform Judaism.

In 1885, Reform rabbis adopted the Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected the idea that Jews should expect a national return to Palestine.

This was a major expression of Jewish religious opposition to political nationalism.

But the movement's position changed.

In 1937, eight years before World War II ended, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted the Columbus Platform.

Its position recognized Jewish peoplehood and endorsed the development of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, cultural center, and refuge.

The conference's own 1997 historical statement explicitly acknowledged that its earlier position had been reversed by 1937.

That reversal did not mean every Reform Jew supported an independent Jewish state. Support for a homeland and support for statehood were not identical positions.

But it establishes something Baker's account neglects: Jewish attitudes were changing substantially before 1945.

The political record provides another example.

In August and September 1943, approximately 500 delegates gathered at the American Jewish Conference in New York.

The gathering adopted a resolution supporting the eventual establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.

There was disagreement. The American Jewish Committee opposed the resolution, while the Jewish Labor Committee abstained because its membership was divided.

Nevertheless, a major gathering representing organized American Jewish opinion endorsed the objective before the war ended.

The Holocaust profoundly accelerated support for Zionism. The destruction of European Jewish communities and the desperate need for refuge changed the political environment.

But identifying a dramatic historical turning point is not equivalent to proving that a majority of Jews worldwide held one position until a particular date.

Establishing that claim would require comparable evidence about Jewish populations across Europe, the Americas, Palestine, and elsewhere over time.

Baker offers no such evidence.

His account takes a real historical transformation and converts it into an unsupported worldwide majority claim.

4. Baker Counts Millions of Christian Zionists Without Showing the Count

Another remarkable assertion arrives near the end of the video.

Baker says the vast majority of Zionists today are not Jewish but Christian, predominantly American Christian.

Christian Zionism is real, influential, and historically important.

American evangelical religious beliefs have demonstrably shaped attitudes toward Israel.

But Baker makes a demographic claim without supplying a demographic measurement.

Pew Research Center's 2022 survey found that 70% of White evangelical Protestants in the United States believed God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.

That is substantial evidence of religious attachment to the Jewish claim to Israel.

It is not a census of self-identified Zionists.

Believing that land has biblical significance is not necessarily equivalent to supporting every political proposition associated with Zionism.

Nor does it establish that the respondent identifies with the Zionist movement.

The difficulties multiply when Baker explains Christian motivations.

He describes an evangelical belief that Jewish return to the ancestral homeland is necessary before Jesus can return.

Such beliefs genuinely exist.

Yet Christian interpretations are not uniform.

In a 2011 Pew survey of evangelical leaders from around the world, 48% regarded Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy concerning the Second Coming, while 42% did not.

Among the American evangelical leaders surveyed, 44% accepted that interpretation and 48% rejected it.

The survey was of evangelical leaders attending an international gathering, not a representative census of all Christians. Its findings nevertheless demonstrate substantial theological disagreement within the very religious world Baker discusses.

Baker's assertion that most Zionists are Christians might ultimately be defensible under a particular definition and with sufficient demographic evidence.

But the available figures do not establish it.

To make the claim responsibly, he would need to define who qualifies as a Zionist, estimate the relevant Christian and Jewish populations, and measure actual support using comparable questions.

He does none of those things.

Instead, a potentially important demographic question becomes a confident numerical conclusion without a visible denominator.

5. The Christian Prophecy Argument Confuses Belief With Motivation

The problem grows more serious when Baker moves from religious belief to political motivation.

After describing evangelical expectations concerning Jewish return and the Second Coming, he suggests that Christian support for Zionism is therefore less about Jewish interests than Christian interests.

This is an interpretation, not an established consequence of the beliefs he describes.

A Christian might support Israel because of biblical prophecy, perceived moral responsibility toward Jews, historical identification with Jewish suffering, strategic commitments, or several motivations simultaneously.

Some of those motivations could conflict.

Others could coexist.

Establishing that a particular religious belief exists does not reveal the complete motivation of every person holding it.

Baker also briefly invokes the profits earned by American weapons manufacturers from military support for Israel.

Commercial interests in arms sales are legitimate subjects for investigation.

But a serious investigation would identify manufacturers, contracts, payments, lobbying organizations, and the policies those interests attempted to influence.

Baker supplies none of that evidence in this episode, referring viewers instead to another creator's video.

The distinction matters.

A weapons manufacturer profiting from a government contract does not, by itself, establish the company's ideological commitment to Zionism.

Nor does an evangelical Christian's belief in prophecy establish indifference toward Jewish welfare.

Both propositions require additional evidence.

Baker introduces potentially consequential interests without investigating the relationships necessary to support the implications.

6. The Palestinian Displacement Argument Deserves More Than Historical Inevitability

Baker's discussion of anti-Zionism includes a claim that establishing a Jewish state required Palestinian expulsion and that maintaining it continues to require occupation and the denial of rights.

Palestinian displacement is neither speculative nor something that can responsibly be ignored.

United Nations historical accounts estimate that approximately 750,000 Palestinians became refugees during the conflict surrounding Israel's establishment in 1948.

Palestinian communities suffered forced displacement, dispossession, and enduring loss of homes and property.

But a historical outcome and an unavoidable prerequisite are not the same proposition.

The United Nations partition proposal of November 1947 envisioned separate Jewish and Arab states.

It also required constitutional protections, including equal legal protection and prohibitions on discrimination based on race, religion, language, or sex.

Those proposed protections did not prevent the subsequent war and refugee catastrophe.

Nor do they prove that partition could have succeeded peacefully under the circumstances of 1947 and 1948.

They do, however, demonstrate why the claim of historical necessity requires a serious argument rather than a passing assertion.

One must examine political decisions, military operations, population movements, competing national objectives, and the alternatives available to the people making those decisions.

Baker does not undertake that examination.

There is also a distinction between Israel's existence within its internationally recognized statehood framework and its policies in territories occupied in 1967.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded in an advisory opinion that Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was unlawful and that its settlement activities must cease.

The Court also found that Israeli policies were obstructing Palestinian self-determination.

The advisory opinion is not a binding judgment in a dispute between states, but its conclusions carry substantial legal authority.

These findings make the occupation an urgent legal and political issue.

They do not establish that every possible form of Jewish national self-determination necessarily requires permanent occupation.

Baker blurs that distinction by compressing a complicated history into a supposedly inevitable relationship.

An argument about historical necessity demands more than pointing to historical injustice, however real that injustice is.

7. The One-State and Two-State Models Are Not Just Different Maps

Baker repeatedly returns to the idea that moderate Zionists and moderate anti-Zionists share a fundamental commitment to peace, freedom, and security.

Their principal disagreement, he suggests, is whether one state or two would better achieve those objectives.

There is merit in recognizing shared humanitarian goals across ideological divisions.

But the difference between one state and two states is not merely geographic.

It concerns who exercises sovereignty, how constitutional rights are protected, how national identities are recognized, and what happens when the interests of the two populations conflict.

Consider Israel's 2018 Nation-State Basic Law.

The law explicitly identifies Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and reserves national self-determination within the state to the Jewish people.

That provision is central to understanding the dispute Baker attempts to summarize.

A proposed shared state would need to address that constitutional principle.

Would Jewish and Palestinian national identities receive equal recognition?

Would the government be organized around individual citizenship, collective national representation, or a combination of both?

What would happen to the existing Israeli state institutions, security forces, and legal framework?

How would Palestinian refugees' claims be addressed?

How would the rights and security of both communities be guaranteed?

These are not peripheral implementation details.

They determine what the political proposal actually means.

The two-state alternative presents its own considerable difficulties, including territorial continuity, settlement expansion, borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugee claims.

Neither arrangement becomes realistic merely because its advocates sincerely want peace.

Baker acknowledges that critics regard both models as potentially naive. He does little to examine why.

That omission leaves viewers with an attractive moral comparison but insufficient understanding of the political choices.

8. Antisemitism Is Too Serious to Become Another Shortcut

Baker concludes by arguing that Zionism itself can be antisemitic.

His historical example concerns Europeans who supported Jewish migration to Palestine because they did not want Jews living in their own countries.

The distinction is important.

Someone who wants Jewish people removed from their country because they are Jewish holds an antisemitic position.

That person might simultaneously favor the establishment of a Jewish homeland elsewhere.

The coexistence of those beliefs is possible and historically meaningful.

But it does not follow that the political movement they support is necessarily motivated by the same hostility.

Baker also suggests that negative attitudes toward Jewish diaspora history among some Zionists can represent internalized antisemitism.

That criticism may be justified when specific examples demonstrate contempt for Jewish identity or Jewish communities.

The video, however, identifies no individuals, writings, or historical evidence sufficient to establish how widespread those attitudes are.

Baker's own central message is that political labels should not automatically determine how we judge individuals.

Yet he ends by making broad judgments about ideological communities without supplying the evidence those judgments require.

A more rigorous approach would distinguish antisemitic motivations among particular supporters from the aims and beliefs of Zionism's different political traditions.

The same standard should apply to anti-Zionists.

Criticism of a state is not automatically hatred of a people. Nor does the claim to be criticizing a state automatically rule out prejudice.

Both propositions can be true.

Neither justifies abandoning careful examination of what a particular person actually says or advocates.

The Verdict: Definitions Cannot Replace History

Baker begins with a legitimate correction.

He recognizes that opposing a government's conduct is different from opposing the existence or national character of the state it governs.

He also correctly rejects the notion that everyone using the same political label necessarily holds identical moral views.

Those are useful distinctions.

But the video becomes less reliable precisely when Baker attempts to make them universal.

The Palestinian leadership's diplomatic record undermines his automatic classification of two-state supporters as Zionists.

The history of binational Zionist movements undermines his automatic classification of shared-state advocates as anti-Zionists.

The documented evolution of Jewish political opinion before 1945 undermines his simplified historical timeline.

And his demographic claim about Christian Zionists remains unproven without comparable population data.

The central failure is methodological.

Baker begins with definitions designed to make a difficult subject understandable. He then treats the definitions as sufficient evidence for conclusions about real people, historical movements, and political motivations.

The result is a tidy account that becomes increasingly unreliable when tested against the historical record.

Zionism and anti-Zionism are not merely competing answers to a question about how many states should exist.

They contain disagreements about nationality, historical rights, political sovereignty, equality, religious identity, and the obligations of governments toward the people living under their authority.

Some of those disagreements are fundamental. Others cross the ideological boundaries Baker constructs.

The conflict deserves an explanation capable of accommodating those realities.

Baker offers a useful starting vocabulary, then asks it to perform work that only historical evidence and serious political analysis can accomplish.

A definition can clarify an argument. It cannot settle an argument by declaring inconvenient people members of movements they do not belong to.

References

1. Zionism and Anti-Zionism Compared — UsefulCharts, Matt Baker.
Original video.
Watch the original video

The primary source for Baker's definitions, historical assertions, and interpretation of Christian Zionism.

2. Israel-PLO Recognition: Exchange of Letters Between PM Rabin and Chairman Arafat — United States Department of State, September 9, 1993.
Original diplomatic correspondence

Documents the PLO's formal recognition of Israel's right to exist and the commitments that established mutual recognition.

3. Address of President Mahmoud Abbas to the PLO Central Council — Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, April 30, 2014.
Official speech transcript

Establishes Abbas's explicit distinction between recognizing Israel and recognizing its Jewish national character.

4. Magnes, Buber and Ihud (Unity) — Sasson Sofer, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Historical research chapter

Documents binational political movements within the historical Zionist world, including proposals associated with Martin Buber and Judah Magnes.

5. Reform Judaism & Zionism: A Centenary Platform — Central Conference of American Rabbis, June 24, 1997.
Official historical statement

Records the movement's change from its 1885 opposition to Jewish nationalism toward support for a Jewish homeland by 1937.

6. American Zionism: The American Jewish Conference — Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio.
Historical exhibition

Documents the 1943 American Jewish Conference, its approximately 500 delegates, and its endorsement of plans for a Jewish state.

7. American Jewish Conference Endorses Creation of Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine — Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 2, 1943.
Contemporary report

Records the conference's resolution and the objections and abstentions of Jewish organizations that remained divided over Jewish statehood.

8. Modest Warming in U.S. Views on Israel and Palestinians — Pew Research Center, May 26, 2022.
Survey findings

Finds substantial evangelical belief in the biblical significance of Israel but does not establish how many respondents identify as Zionists.

9. Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders — Pew Research Center, June 22, 2011.
International survey

Documents significant differences among evangelical leaders regarding Israel and biblical prophecy; the sample was not representative of all Christians.

10. Palestine Plan of Partition With Economic Union — United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), November 29, 1947.
Original partition proposal

Establishes that the proposed Jewish and Arab states were required to protect minority rights and provide equality before the law.

11. The United Nations and the Question of Palestine — United Nations, 1994.
Historical account

Documents the refugee crisis accompanying Israel's establishment and the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians.

12. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People — Knesset, July 19, 2018.
Official legislative text

Defines Israel's national identity and the exclusive status of Jewish national self-determination under the Basic Law.

13. Legal Consequences Arising From the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem — International Court of Justice, July 19, 2024.
Court findings and explanatory release

Establishes the Court's conclusions concerning the unlawfulness of Israel's continued presence in occupied Palestinian territory, settlements, and Palestinian self-determination.