The word Zionist, as well as of various derivations of the word, including the abbreviation Zio or compounded terms such as Zionist pig or Zionazi, are sometimes used as pejorative terms. They are used to disparage various groups of people, encompassing Jews, Israelis, and supporters of Israel. This is in contrast to the primary definitions of the word Zionist, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as originally "an advocate or supporter of a movement among Jewish people for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine" and later "an advocate or supporter of the development and protection of the state of Israel" after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
History In 2010, the British charity Community Security Trust (CST) said that "Zionist" was increasingly used as an antisemitic pejorative term in mainstream British discourse. The CST also alleged that the conflation of "Zionist" with "Jew" was becoming more common, and could obscure antisemitic intent. In 2016, the British Labour Party released the results of an inquiry into antisemitism in the party, which stated that "Epithets such as [...] 'Zio' and others should have no place in Labour party discourse going forward." Speaking at the inquiry's launch, party leader Jeremy Corbyn stated that "'Zio' is a vile epithet that follows in a long line of earlier such terms that have no place whatsoever in our party." The Philologos columnist in Jewish magazine Mosaic, writing in 2016, associated the term with white-supremacists and said that it was popularized by antisemite David Duke, whose Ku Klux Klan website WikiZio uses Zio as a hyphenated prefix in terms such as "Zio-Communism," "Zio-economics," "Zio-history," "Zio-supremacism," or "Zio-occupied America." In 2017, the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March faced accusations of antisemitism after their Twitter account used the term "Zio tears", later apologizing for the term's "violent history" while maintaining their anti-Zionist stance. In April of the same year, Terry Couchman, an election candidate of the British Labour Party, was suspended over his use of "ZioNazi" in a post criticising Israel. Tony Greenstein, then a Jewish member of the Labour Party, was accused of antisemitism and expelled from the party in 2018 for using the term "Zios" among other allegations. Ben Samuels of Haaretz said that the term was popularized first by David Duke and then later by leftists and members of the UK Labour Party. A quantitative content analysis of 99,062 tweets surrounding the 2018 U.S. elections found that just under 50% of the uses of the word Zionist were in an antisemitic context, and that #zionists was the hashtag with the third-highest rate of associated antisemitic content, behind #soros and #votered. Antisemitic uses of the word were common in QAnon-related tweets. In 2021, when a South African media outlet used the term "Zio-Nazi" for South African Jewish groups, Czech-Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer and author Matthias Küntzel called the term "hate speech".
Use during the Gaza war
Contested meanings of Zionism In April 2024, Jonathan Guyer wrote in The Guardian that the term Zionism means different things to different people, citing a 2022 survey of American Jews' views on Zionism conducted by Mira Sucharov of Carleton University. The survey showed that a majority of American Jews identified as Zionist when it was defined as supporting a "Jewish and democratic state", but would reject the label if it was defined as "privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel". According to American scholar Saree Makdisi, "when people think of Zionism now, they look at Gaza ... This is what it means: that you want to have an ethnically exclusive state," and, according to him, "it's ugly." According to IfNotNow co-founder Simone Zimmerman, "a lot more young people, including young Jews, are listening to their Palestinian friends and classmates who are saying: 'This is what Zionism means to us.'"
Meta
In July 2024, Meta imposed restrictions on the use of the term Zionist. There had been discussions at Facebook over the moderation of the term 'Zionist' in 2021 amid pressure from various organizations for the company to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. +972 Magazine reported that Jordana Cutler, Facebook's director of public policy for Israel and the Jewish diaspora and former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, was a key figure in these discussions at Facebook.
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