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.

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. 

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