Stockholm syndrome and the colonized Jew
Stockholm Syndrome describes the psychological bond that forms between hostage and captor that can manifest as empathy, loyalty, or even defense of the oppressor, often as a coping mechanism for survival.
A modern expression of this condition among the Jewish Diaspora is anti-Zionism. After centuries of exile, many Jews have absorbed the colonial ideologies of their host societies learning to see the world through imperial ideas of race, power and domination. This has created a deep psychological tension in Diaspora identity, one that swings between integration into the host nation and connection to the ancestral homeland. In that space of divided loyalty, anti-Zionism offers the illusion of moral clarity: a way to prove belonging to the host culture by condemning one’s own.
A growing number of Diaspora anti-Zionist Jews accuse Israel of being solely a colonial project. They describe Jewish sovereignty as settler colonialism, Zionism as European nationalism transplanted into the Middle East, and both Israel and the Jewish people as an illegitimate foreign presence. But in making these claims they reveal something deeper about themselves. They are shaped by the colonial worldview of the societies in which they live. They see Zionism as foreign precisely because they have been conditioned to view Jewish peoplehood through European eyes. Yet, this condition is not confined to the Diaspora. One could argue that it also manifests within the modern State of Israel itself, where decades of war and the feeling of being surrounded by hostile enemies have produced, in some quarters, a similar impulse – a psychological need to seek moral approval from those who despise it. In both cases, the instinct to survive has been misdirected into the instinct to appease.
Jewish exile and population distribution was a deliberate project of the ruling elite through the ages. Rome destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE, crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, and renamed Judea “Syria Palaestina” to erase the Jewish link to the land. Christendom and the Islamic Caliphates redefined Jews as tolerated religious minorities, servile religio or dhimmi, rather than as a people with sovereignty. Modern nation-states followed the same pattern: Jews could become Germans, French or British but only as hyphenated identities, rather than an indigenous nation in their own right.
Thus, the colonial project was always twofold: territorial dispossession and identity redefinition. Jews were cast as guests in other nations, permitted to survive only on condition that they accepted the host’s terms. Over generations, Jews have internalised these frameworks. The notion of being “German Jews”, “French Jews” or “American Jews” was and is an accommodation to colonial categories, albeit even if it was for the Jewish people to prove their allegiances to their host countries in earnest. As Zygmunt Bauman argued, the hyphen symbolised anxiety, a perpetual balancing act between proving loyalty to the host state and retaining a fragile distinctiveness.
This accommodation has morphed into a deeper psychological identification. Like captives sympathising with their captors, many Diaspora Jews have embraced the colonial categories as their own. They insist their Jewishness is purely religious or cultural, deny its national character, and distance themselves from Israel or being called Israeli in a historical, ancestral and ethnic sense. The separation is to absolve themselves of any guilt for the constant wars that plague the Jewish nation when faced with extremist anti-Zionist (anti-Israel) ideology so prevalent in the region. When they accuse Zionism of colonialism, they are projecting the very colonialist framework that has been imposed on them, and deflect it against their own people.
Zionism is the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral land after centuries of displacement and dispossession. Aaron Demsky documents how Hebraisation of names in pre-state Israel was a deliberate act of shedding exile and reclaiming ancestral identity. Moreover, Israel functions as what Ilan Baron calls a “civilisational archive”, the locus where memory, language and sovereignty converge. To reject Israel as a nation because of its government or because of imperialist narratives is to deny the Jewish people’s own process of self-determination and decolonisation.
Anti-Zionists take the categories of empire and turn them against their own people, perpetuating Jewish erasure from their ancestral land. For example, colonial ideology teaches Jews are a religion, not a people, that Israel is illegitimate because Jews are “only” a religion, and that Jews are “white Europeans” in the Middle East, thus are alien to their homeland. It is intellectual Stockholm Syndrome where Jews have internalized colonial narratives and have redeployed them as “progressive” critique. As Kim and Kim argue, Diaspora Jewish identities often oscillate between integration and homeland affiliation. For Jews, the only way out of this oscillation is to centre identity not on host nations but on the ancestral homeland. Anything less is continued captivity to colonial thought which in essence is anti-Zionism.
One way to combat this anti-Zionism is by recovering a Jewish way of seeing that is rooted in memory rather than ideology. Jews in the Diaspora can begin with self-understanding: the recognition that Jewish identity is older than colonial narratives and deeper than politics. Israel is not a foreign transplant but the reawakening of an ancient people after years of exile and dispossession.
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Sheree Trotter is a Maori (Te Arawa) researcher and writer, co-founder of the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation and a co-director of Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem. Her doctoral thesis was on Zionism.
Hava Mendelle is co-founder of Minority Impact: a minority and refugee led organisation working together to strengthen tolerance and prevent racial, cultural and faith-based harm.
This article first appeared in the Australian Jewish News.
