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IOL News
04-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
'Zionacity': The Audacity of Pretend Intellectualism
Tim Flack critiques Gillian Schutte's term 'Zionacity', revealing how it distorts historical truths and manipulates ideological narratives, ultimately challenging the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. Image: IOL / Ron AI A reply to Gillian Schutte, by Tim Flack In the now all-too-familiar theatre of progressive thought, where victimhood is currency and language is weaponised to invert truth, we find ourselves confronted with a fresh absurdity. Gillian Schutte, self-styled decolonial thinker and social critic, has coined a term 'Zionacity'. A Frankensteinian mash-up of "Zionism" and "audacity," it is the sort of pseudo-intellectual graffiti one might find scribbled in the margins of a 1st years Marxist seminar notes, rather than in anything resembling serious journalism or moral philosophy. Yet here it is, published with no sense of shame or rigour, paraded as if it were a concept of gravitas, rather than a crude ideological club designed to bludgeon the world's only Jewish state. In just a few short paragraphs, Schutte manages to unravel any credibility she may have had by engaging in an extraordinary exercise in double standards, historical revisionism, and - dare we say it - a rather fashionable brand of antisemitism, cloaked, as always, in the language of virtue. Let us begin with her core assertion: that Zionism is not a political movement rooted in the self-determination of a historically persecuted people, but rather a "psychosis," a "global apparatus of control," a "death cult" feeding on the corpses of others. This is not criticism. This is incitement with adjectives. And it's precisely the sort of grotesque rhetorical overreach that reveals the intellectual poverty of her position. Zionism, for the uninitiated or the wilfully ignorant, is the belief that Jews - a people indigenous to the land of Israel, with a continuous presence there for over three millennia - have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is not imperialism. It is not colonialism. It is not conquest. It is return. That this simple truth must still be defended in 2025, and defended against supposed "anti-racists," is a mark of just how distorted our discourse has become. Schutte accuses Zionists of "elevating one group's trauma" above others. This, she says, is the moral disease of "Zionacity." But this is a malicious and cynical sleight of hand. Jewish trauma - pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, ghettos, blood libels, forced conversions, and of course, the Holocaust - is not elevated. It is remembered. And it is remembered not to cancel out other people's suffering, but because forgetting it has proven time and again to be a luxury Jews cannot afford. To remember Auschwitz is not to diminish Gaza. But to accuse Jews of weaponizing memory is, in effect, to accuse them of having survived too visibly. She then asserts that Zionism, again, Jewish national self-determination has become a template for "settler-colonialism" globally. Here we enter the realm of hallucinatory projection. Are we seriously to believe that Afrikaner farmers in the Karoo are inspired by Herzl and Ben-Gurion? That global injustice, from Yemen to Donbas, is downstream from Tel Aviv? This is the sort of ideological derangement that used to be confined to fringe pamphlets and badly moderated message boards, not respectable publications. But such is the reach of post-colonial chic that anything, however ludicrous, can be published, so long as Jews are the villains. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Her most odious claim and let's not be coy here, is that Jewish grief is uniquely manipulative. That it is not just remembered, but "weaponised." That it is not just sacred, but enforced through guilt. In this framing, Jews do not mourn, they plot. They do not suffer, they scheme. This is the old libel, reheated for the Instagram era. Replace the word "Zionist" with "Jew" in her piece and one quickly realises the ideological lineage of her accusations. They are not new. They are not clever. They are simply more dangerous in an age that has forgotten its history. She laments that radical anti-Zionist Jews are "silenced." Nonsense. Anti-Zionist Jews are given front row seats at every anti-Israel protest, paraded as token 'as a Jews' for ideological antisemitism. The fact that they represent a minuscule sliver of global Jewry is irrelevant to Schutte. What matters is their usefulness as fig leaves for her project of demonisation. They are not prophets they are props. The linguistic trickery continues. Israel doesn't defend itself, it "bombs Gaza." It doesn't resist annihilation, it imposes siege. The flattening of language is complete. Hamas is nowhere to be found. The thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli cities are absent. The tunnels, the hostage-taking, the massacre of October 7 are all unmentionable. Because they disrupt the victim-oppressor binary Schutte so desperately needs to maintain. And then, as if to remind us of her seriousness, she expands her lens to the entire world. Venezuela, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Donbas. All tragic. All relevant. But none of them have anything to do with Zionism. Yet she drops them in like seasoning, hoping the reader won't notice the false equivalencies, or worse, will see Zionism as the root of all geopolitical evil. The move is transparent and it is also contemptible. And here lies the irony. The ideology Schutte claims to oppose, one that allegedly monopolises grief and dehumanises others, is, in fact, the one she practises. She demands selective empathy. She criminalises Jewish memory. She pathologizes Jewish self-defence. And she frames Palestinian suffering not as tragedy but as a cudgel to delegitimise an entire people's existence. It is not Zionists who dehumanise others. It is Gillian Schutte who denies the humanity of Israelis, and by extension, the Jewish people. It is she who insists that Jewish survival is inherently supremacist, that Jewish agency is inherently colonial, that Jewish statehood is inherently illegitimate. Let us be very clear, her vision ends with the dismantling of Israel. That is not justice, that is annihilation by another name.
IOL News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Zionacity: The Audacity of Eternal Victimhood
Explore the concept of 'Zionacity'—an ideological condition that elevates one group's trauma while diminishing the suffering of others. Image: IOL Zionacity, a term forged from Zionism and audacity, names an ideological condition of extreme exceptionalism, where one group's trauma is treated as sacred and untouchable, and all others' suffering is deemed either fabricated, deserved or irrelevant. It is a disorder of moral reasoning that weaponises grief into entitlement and reframes domination as divine right. But Zionacity is not confined to the Israeli settler state. It is a global psychosis, an exported belief system that afflicts settler-colonial logic across the world. In South Africa, it takes form in the behaviour of white Afrikaans landowners who frame their historic land theft as cultural inheritance, and their continued dominance as the right of a 'Christian civilisation'. Zionacity is the theological twin of every settler project that sanctifies conquest while vilifying resistance. This ideology operates beyond the geopolitical. It is also theological and psychological. It refuses reciprocity. It replaces solidarity with siege. It renames justice as hatred and peace as submission. Zionacity insists that one people's pain entitles them to unaccountable power, and that any challenge to this logic constitutes an existential threat. It is this ideological framework that justifies the mass bombing of Gaza, the starvation of civilians, and the flattening of hospitals and schools. It is what renders the shattered bodies of Palestinian children invisible to international law and morally irrelevant to Western media. It is desensitisation, it is dehumanisation, it is doctrinal. Zionacity erases empathy. It demands silence, obedience and allegiance parceled in guilt. It teaches the world that to mourn Palestinian lives is to betray Jewish ones. That to name Israeli war crimes is to defile the memory of Jewish trauma. It thrives on the falsehood that grief is a zero-sum game. That the suffering of the colonised must defer to the sensibilities of the coloniser. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ It is also an erasure of prophetic Judaism, the Judaism of resistance, of liberation theology, of standing with the oppressed. Zionacity is not Judaism. It is the death of that moral and spiritual legacy. The radical Jewish voices who once marched against apartheid, who stood for Palestinian rights, who dared to speak the truth, are now vilified, silenced or exiled from the public square. Zionacity is symbiotic with liberalism. The two work together like seasoned partners. Zionacity drops the bombs, and liberalism edits the headlines. Zionacity razes schools, and liberalism appeals to 'complexity'. The liberal mind is incapable of asymmetry. It will not say: one side occupies, bombs and kills with impunity. It must frame everything as 'tragic', 'complicated', 'both sides'. It weeps selectively for Palestinian victims — and only when their suffering can be extracted from the wider political landscape of resistance. There are no liberal tears for the victims of NATO bombs in Libya, of Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, of Israeli proxy wars against Iran, of the economic strangulation of Venezuela, of Western-backed terror in Syria, or for the dead in Donbas under years of shelling. Russia, China, Iran, Libya, Yemen — all are filed away under 'authoritarian regimes', their populations rendered unworthy of empathy. To the liberal mind, these people are not victims, but collateral in the fight for 'democracy'. They do not grieve them. They judge them. We saw this logic in South Africa too. It is the same liberalism that asked Black South Africans to 'move on' after apartheid, without land, justice or redress. It is the same liberalism that now asks Palestinians to condemn their own resistance before they are allowed to grieve. Liberalism demands civility from the oppressed, never justice. Zionacity claims not only the moral high ground but the exclusive right to self-defence. In its worldview, only Israel may respond to violence, and even to imagined threats, with overwhelming force. Palestinians are never granted this right. Their resistance is immediately criminalised, their anguish reframed as aggression. A settler-colonial logic underwrites this asymmetry. The occupier claims the right to defend stolen land, while the dispossessed are punished for refusing to be erased. Zionacity is theological settler-colonialism. It claims that God, not law or justice, grants the right to erase a people. It reframes mass displacement as security. It makes siege into necessity. It casts those demanding dignity as terrorists and those dropping bombs as victims. Not only does it reject the notion of universal rights, it weaponises their language for exclusion. It is not coincidental that the same states funding Israel's war machine backed apartheid South Africa, invaded Iraq and support proxy wars in Africa. Zionacity is embedded in the infrastructure of global power, in diplomacy, finance, surveillance, journalism, philanthropy and cultural production. Its arrogance lies in its assumption that the narrative is fixed. That if you control language, you control memory. That if you control memory, you erase responsibility. But from under the rubble, truth rises. From exiled Jewish thinkers, resistance echoes. From global youth movements, the word Palestine is spoken with clarity and resolve. To name Zionacity is not antisemitism. It is moral courage. It is to refuse to let one trauma sanctify all future violence. It is to reject the demand that empathy be selective, conditional and censored. Zionacity is not just a doctrine. It is a global apparatus of control. But it is also brittle. Its strength lies in silence. Its weakness lies in exposure. To resist Zionacity is not simply political. It is human. It is the insistence that no people, anywhere, are chosen for impunity. And that no child's life, anywhere, is disposable. If Zionism and its audacity remain unable to recognise the full humanity of others — whether Palestinian, Iranian, Yemeni, Libyan, Russian or Chinese — then the world which it victimises with its cruel impunity will be forced to declare unfettered war against it, not just on its weapons, but on its worldview. For an ideology that refuses empathy becomes a death cult, and like all death cults, Zionism will eventually devour its own children. * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and social critic. She writes on decoloniality, media and political resistance across the Global South. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
