Why Julian Casablancas Gets Zionism Wrong

When musicians enter political debates, they have every right to do so. Like any citizen, they are free to express their views and use their public platform to advocate for causes they believe in. But influence also carries responsibility – especially when invoking history.

Recent comments by Julian Casablancas about Israel, Zionism, and white privilege demonstrate how complex historical realities can be reduced to familiar political slogans, often at the expense of historical nuance and accuracy.

In the infamous Subway Takes viral clip, Julian Casablancas frames Zionism as a form of white privilege. This claim is difficult to sustain.

Zionism is the national movement for Jewish self-determination. The Jewish people originate in the Land of Israel, and their history has unfolded across diverse diaspora communities in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Today, a majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or of mixed heritage.

Even if one focuses on Ashkenazi Jews – the group most commonly associated with “whiteness” in contemporary American discourse – the historical picture is far more complicated. For centuries, Jews were explicitly excluded from Europe’s dominant racial categories. Antisemitism portrayed them as an alien and inferior race, culminating in the Holocaust. While many Ashkenazi Jews today may be socially perceived as white in some Western societies, projecting contemporary American racial categories backward onto Jewish history does a profound injustice to the complexity of their experience.

Describing Zionism as a project of white privilege also requires overlooking the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Jews who were expelled or forced to flee Arab countries after 1948. Many arrived in Israel as refugees after losing their homes, property, and citizenship. Their history fits poorly within an American racial framework built around colonial binaries of white oppressor and non-white oppressed.

Casablancas also delivered a speech at the Oxford Union, where he claimed that the Arab world accepted Israel’s existence and borders, while Israel alone has continuously violated them through expansion. History tells a different story.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership but rejected by the surrounding Arab states and Palestinian Arab leadership. Rather than recognizing the proposed borders, several Arab armies invaded the newly declared State of Israel in 1948. The 1948 war was not fought because Israel rejected internationally proposed borders; it was fought because many of its neighbors rejected the very existence of a Jewish state.

Nor did broad Arab recognition arrive soon afterward. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, where neigbouring arab states declared war on Israel, the Arab League’s Khartoum Resolution became famous for its “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. Egypt did not recognize Israel until 1979. Jordan followed in 1994. Several Gulf states established relations only through the Abraham Accords in 2020, while others still refuse recognition today.

This history does not mean Israel has never pursued controversial policies. The expansion of Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 lines following the Six-Day War remains a deeply contested political and legal issue, even within Israeli politics. Israeli policies can be criticized without rewriting the historical record into a narrative in which only one side ever rejected borders or refused compromise.

Casablancas, like many on the American left, approaches the conflict through a framework shaped by American debates over colonialism, race, and white supremacy. That framework often emphasizes a binary between colonizer and colonized. If the Israel-Palestine conflict is examined through an anticolonial lens, however, the historical context must be considered in full.

Jews are an indigenous people of the Land of Israel whose history also includes centuries of exile, dispersion, persecution, and survival across multiple continents. Within this historical context, Zionism represented a movement for national revival and self-determination by a dispersed indigenous people. At the same time, the region’s broader history – including the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the subsequent processes of Arabization that shaped much of the Middle East and North Africa – cannot be excluded from the discussion.
The complexity of this history cannot be captured by simply importing American racial frameworks into the Middle East.

People can debate international conflicts and disagree with Israeli policies and strategies – but those debates should begin with historical accuracy rather than ideological frameworks.

The Middle East deserves better than slogans.

So does the conversation surrounding it.

There is irony in Casablancas’ rhetoric. He frequently frames Zionism through the language of privilege while rarely acknowledging his own. Born into wealth and cultural capital as the son of prominent businessman John Casablancas, Casablancas grew up with access to opportunities, networks, and influence unavailable to most people. None of this invalidates his political views – but it does make his selective use of the language of privilege striking.

It is difficult to apply the label of “white privilege” to Jewish communities whose histories include displacement, persecution, and refugee experiences – from Jews who fled Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Ethiopia, and the Caucasus to survivors of the Holocaust – while making that argument from a position of inherited social and economic advantage.