Responding to Randa: a polite, earnest takedown.
I read it so you don't have to: "Paraglides, Cultural Safety and Decolonization" in Mondoweiss.
Let’s politely neutralise bigotry. Together!
Just like we did with an Asajew, here.
*note to readers: free subscriptions to anyone who finds spelling or grammar errors.
The “Zionist” Phantom: Libel, Substitution, and the Moral Architecture of Eliminationism.
This is a response to Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Mondoweiss essay “Paraglides, Cultural Safety and Decolonization,” published today.
Abdel-Fattah’s “Zionism” does not correspond to any historically or sociologically existing movement, nor does it pretend to engage with any really existing person, people, or experience. Understanding this is crucial to grappling with how antizionists create permission for broader society’s vilification of, and violence toward Jewish people.
“Zionism” here functions as a phantom object: an invented construct endowed with totalising moral pathologies—violence, death-worship, colonial malevolence—whose purpose is to justify the disqualification of “Zionists” from speech, safety, and political legitimacy, and to render the elimination of the Jewish state morally necessary.
“The n***er is not a real person or cohort: it is a construction of the African American by those who hate them… The bigot will fight, tooth and nail, for their right to free speech despite the harm it causes. The bigot does not see the harm caused as harm, but as justice.”
Using Abdel-Fattah’s own words, I will demonstrate that she neither describes nor engages with actually existing “Zionism”. Instead, it is replaced by a libellous abstraction, structurally analogous to the imaginary “Jew” produced by classical antisemitism.
1. Introduction
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s “Paraglides, Cultural Safety and Decolonization”—published this morning—presents itself as a defence against misrepresentation and censorship following her removal from Adelaide Writers’ Week. The essay claims to clarify her intentions and to expose what she frames as bad-faith attacks on Palestinian advocacy.
I will not adjudicate claims about Israeli policy or regional conflict. Instead, this piece examines how Abdel-Fattah’s argument functions internally: what conceptual work it performs, what assumptions it relies upon, and what political outcomes those assumptions render morally intelligible.
The central claim advanced here is that the essay depends on the construction of a fictive object called “Zionism”—an abstraction severed from historical and lived reality, endowed with essential moral corruption, and mobilised to justify exclusion and elimination. This object is not described, analysed, or evidenced; it is asserted and then acted upon rhetorically.
If you’d like a fuller historical framing of this process, this might be helpful.
2. A note on terminology: Zionism as a reactive identifier
In contemporary discourse, the term “Zionism” is often treated as though it denotes a robust, affirmative political ideology comparable to other modern movements. In practice, however, its continued salience is largely reactive.
Most national communities are not required to repeatedly affirm the legitimacy of their state’s existence; the term “Zionism” persists primarily because the Jewish state remains uniquely subject to organised efforts to delegitimise or eliminate it. Absent this persistent antizionist fixation, “Zionism” would today hold limited relevance beyond its reference in the past-tense. “Zionism was the movement that culminated in exiled Jews’ repatriation to their ancestral homeland after centuries of persecution and being told to go back to Palestine.”
For most Jews, it functions not as an expansive ideological program but as a minimal assertion: that Jewish collective self-determination is uniquely threatened; that “Zionism” ends when Jewish self-determination is no longer subject to Soviet, Pan-Arab, Islamist, Western, or algorithmic assault.
This distinction matters. The “Zionism” condemned in antizionist discourse is not an engagement with historically or sociologically existing positions, but an abstraction constructed to justify exclusion. A bogeyman. A phantom. A foil.
The analysis that follows concerns this abstraction—not the complex, plural realities it replaces.
3. The bait and switch: Abdel-Fattah’s “Zionism”.
Abdel-Fattah repeatedly insists that Zionism is merely a political ideology:
“Zionism is not a religious, racial, ethnic or cultural identity.”
At first glance, this appears to be a definitional clarification. Analytically, however, it performs a different function: it empties Zionism of historical, sociological, and plural content, rendering it available for the antizionist’s moral inscription.
Notably absent from the essay is any engagement with:
Zionism as a heterogeneous historical movement;
Zionism as Jewish self-determination in multiple, contested forms;
Zionism as a response to Jewish vulnerability;
Zionism as lived identity forced upon millions of Jews today in response to eliminationism;
Zionism as a consolidation of Jewish peoplehood in an age that sought to enshrine a people’s protection through a state apparatus;
Zionism as a defensive manoeuvre after centuries of persecution;
Zionism as a pluralistic enterprise in an almost entirely Arab and Muslim colonised region.
There are no references to Zionist thinkers, texts, debates, or evolutions. Zionism is not described. It is asserted. This absence enables substitution.
4. The construction of a libellous abstraction
The “Zionism” that appears in the essay is endowed with essential moral characteristics that are neither argued nor demonstrated, but declared. The n-word performs a similar function in North America. It is not used to describe the African American, but to reduce them to a sub-human corruption. The n***er is not a real person or cohort: it is a construction of the African American by those who hate them.
