Doomed by bad branding: Why ‘pro-Israel’ is actually a con argument

My name is Zoe and I am not pro-Israel.

Now I expect that sentence to set off quite a few alarm bells, as well it should, but not for the reasons you might assume.

For too long, the “pro-Israel” label has materially damaged the very cause it represents. And it’s no wonder that Zionists are losing the PR war if even the most action-oriented of us are muddying the waters with bad branding.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. The terminology trap is an easy one to fall into. Once upon a time someone coined a quick catchall term to give Zionist activism a less biblical and more approachable label and it caught on. The only problem – the term is inaccurate, misleading, and provocative.

Of course, it seems like simply being a living breathing Jew these days is somehow inaccurate, misleading, and provocative, so I can see how any initial objections to the term might have taken a backseat to more immediate existential concerns like whether Israeli mall-goers were safe from suicide bombers or whether you could walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world without worrying about an active shooter situation.

On the surface, arguing about terminology when there are actual lives on the line seems like the last thing we should be devoting resources to. But the reality is that we live in a world where a catchy soundbite holds more sway than any first-person testimony, pile of video evidence, or mountain of dead bodies ever could. In this world, the terms we use must be as deliberate and well-coded as possible.

We need to pay careful attention to our language choices, especially when we take up the mantle of trying to educate people who come from different backgrounds than us. We need to be mindful of the perspectives of those who know nothing about us, who may have incorrect preconceptions about us, and who have no dog in the fight. We need to allow for lazy thinkers, three second attention spans, and, dare I say it, even Star Wars fans.

So let’s take a look at one of the most predominant terms we use, “pro-Israel,” and examine how it hold us back so we can make better choices moving forward.

First, a considerable amount of advocacy under the “pro-Israel” label unintentionally equates “pro” with “fair,” which actually reinforces bias against Israel.

Pro-x implies that you are either advocating for policies that benefit the country in question or that you approve of their decisions. For any other country we can take that at face value. However, the larger problem when it comes to discussions about Israel is that we must first negotiate such deeply ingrained bias that advocates often find themselves first defending Israel’s right to exist closely followed by explaining why some political speech is dripping with either hateful and bigoted subtext or overt antisemitism.

We cannot allow for the continued tacit assumption that advocating for fair and equal treatment for Israel is invariably a scale tip in Israel’s favor, when what we are really asking for is for an already unfairly weighted scale to be zeroed or for a teeter totter to lay with a flat fulcrum before we jump on.

We must use a different term to advocate for Israel’s fair and equal treatment, and we must only use the “pro-Israel” label in the exact same way that we would for any other country. We also have a critical obligation to call out others who continue to misuse the term.

If we continue to allow an existential defense of Israel’s right to exist to be equated with preferential treatment, we lose sight of a deeply problematic truth: no one has to do this for any other country on earth and needing to do so over and over again is not “pro-Israel,” it is simply a rejection of bigotry and a defense of reality.

Second, using the term “pro” subliminally legitimizes a “con.”

A fatal flaw of the “pro-Israel” label is that a pro argument necessarily validates a con argument (or, in the world of lazy binaries, a pro-Palestine argument), which is especially problematic in this context. Legitimizing a con-Israel/pro-Palestine argument when “pro-Israel” so often means justifying Israel’s existence and “pro-Palestine” means advocating for a Palestine that replaces Israel legitimizes calls for Israel’s destruction – which is a terrifying mistake.

Israel exists. Period. Israel has a right to exist. Period. Its modern incarnation has existed for over 75 years. Period. Its people will fight for its continued existence. Also period. These things are not open to discussion, no matter how much people who hate Israel might wish.

By aligning yourself with the “pro-Israel” label you are unwittingly validating a discourse in which arguments for the country’s illegitimacy and destruction are perfectly acceptable. This stands in direct opposition to what Zionist advocacy stands for. This ignores the facts on the ground. And this perpetuates an insidious double standard in which Israel’s existence and Israel’s existence alone can be debated.

Lazy thinkers love binaries. Oppressor/oppressed, good/evil, Star Trek/Star Wars, so once again the “pro” puts us directly in the crosshairs of a binary bullet. The world is not black and white. It isn’t even just shades of grey. We have all the thousands of shades of the color spectrum at our fingertips to try to capture the complicated world around us and we still come up short. Israel is a diverse state with a colorful history going back thousands of years. It means too many things to too many people to be boiled down to a yes/no or a live/die, but that is exactly what people are doing to it.

We who are personally invested in Israel are fully aware that “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” are not necessarily mutually exclusive philosophies when they are defined appropriately. But we are not the crowd we need to appeal to.

We need to reach the people who believe that “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” are fundamentally opposite. We need to meet them where they are and use words they can understand to teach them, rather than waste energy trying to redefine terms that confuse them and obscure the issue.

Many Zionist advocates are at least subliminally aware of how much time and energy using the “pro-Israel” label costs us. They have spent too much time repeatedly explaining that their advocacy is centered around the safety of Jews and not the ethnic cleansing of Arabs to not have at least some consciousness of the labelling problem.

Simply put, the “pro-Israel” label has created an unfortunate disconnect between what we want to say and what others are hearing. Advocates use the term to warn people that legitimate negative criticism is welcome, but hiding behind “Israel” to say hateful and xenophobic things is not; others hear they are biased in favor of Israel and therefore assume that Jews are silencing any criticism of Israel for various (and probably nefarious) reasons.

The average non-Jew simply doesn’t have enough skin in the game or cultural/ historical memory to identify or parse the difference between legitimate criticism and bigotry. We might want them to, we might beg them to, but the reality is that we need to meet them where they are – and they simply aren’t where we need them to be.

This is particularly disappointing when we look at social justice movements that seem to be able to advocate for every single identity group except for Jews. So if Jews are going to continue to be the exception, we need to pay exceptional care to our words.

We must look at our terms from the perspective of disinterested outsiders. We must reserve the “pro-Israel” label for its intended use and not allow it to stand for defending Israel’s existence.

My name is Zoe and I am not pro-Israel.

I respect sovereignty. I respect the sovereignty of all nations.

If you can respect the sovereignty of the almost 200 nations on this planet, you must respect the sovereignty of the one and only Jewish state that followed the same path to achieve the same result as so many of the others – self determination. If you cannot respect the sovereignty of one and only one nation out of the almost 200 others, you are either woefully misinformed or a bigot, or, as we are seeing more and more these days, both.

My name is Zoe and I respect sovereignty.