'Zionacity': The Audacity of Pretend Intellectualism

IOL News

04-07-2025

Tim Flack critiques Gillian Schutte's term 'Zionacity', revealing how it distorts historical truths and manipulates ideological narratives, ultimately challenging the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination.
Image: IOL / Ron AI
A reply to Gillian Schutte, by Tim Flack
In the now all-too-familiar theatre of progressive thought, where victimhood is currency and language is weaponised to invert truth, we find ourselves confronted with a fresh absurdity. Gillian Schutte, self-styled decolonial thinker and social critic, has coined a term 'Zionacity'.
A Frankensteinian mash-up of "Zionism" and "audacity," it is the sort of pseudo-intellectual graffiti one might find scribbled in the margins of a 1st years Marxist seminar notes, rather than in anything resembling serious journalism or moral philosophy.
Yet here it is, published with no sense of shame or rigour, paraded as if it were a concept of gravitas, rather than a crude ideological club designed to bludgeon the world's only Jewish state. In just a few short paragraphs, Schutte manages to unravel any credibility she may have had by engaging in an extraordinary exercise in double standards, historical revisionism, and - dare we say it - a rather fashionable brand of antisemitism, cloaked, as always, in the language of virtue.
Let us begin with her core assertion: that Zionism is not a political movement rooted in the self-determination of a historically persecuted people, but rather a "psychosis," a "global apparatus of control," a "death cult" feeding on the corpses of others. This is not criticism. This is incitement with adjectives. And it's precisely the sort of grotesque rhetorical overreach that reveals the intellectual poverty of her position.
Zionism, for the uninitiated or the wilfully ignorant, is the belief that Jews - a people indigenous to the land of Israel, with a continuous presence there for over three millennia - have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is not imperialism. It is not colonialism. It is not conquest. It is return. That this simple truth must still be defended in 2025, and defended against supposed "anti-racists," is a mark of just how distorted our discourse has become.
Schutte accuses Zionists of "elevating one group's trauma" above others. This, she says, is the moral disease of "Zionacity." But this is a malicious and cynical sleight of hand. Jewish trauma - pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, ghettos, blood libels, forced conversions, and of course, the Holocaust - is not elevated. It is remembered. And it is remembered not to cancel out other people's suffering, but because forgetting it has proven time and again to be a luxury Jews cannot afford. To remember Auschwitz is not to diminish Gaza. But to accuse Jews of weaponizing memory is, in effect, to accuse them of having survived too visibly.
She then asserts that Zionism, again, Jewish national self-determination has become a template for "settler-colonialism" globally. Here we enter the realm of hallucinatory projection. Are we seriously to believe that Afrikaner farmers in the Karoo are inspired by Herzl and Ben-Gurion? That global injustice, from Yemen to Donbas, is downstream from Tel Aviv? This is the sort of ideological derangement that used to be confined to fringe pamphlets and badly moderated message boards, not respectable publications. But such is the reach of post-colonial chic that anything, however ludicrous, can be published, so long as Jews are the villains.
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Her most odious claim and let's not be coy here, is that Jewish grief is uniquely manipulative. That it is not just remembered, but "weaponised." That it is not just sacred, but enforced through guilt. In this framing, Jews do not mourn, they plot. They do not suffer, they scheme. This is the old libel, reheated for the Instagram era. Replace the word "Zionist" with "Jew" in her piece and one quickly realises the ideological lineage of her accusations. They are not new. They are not clever. They are simply more dangerous in an age that has forgotten its history.
She laments that radical anti-Zionist Jews are "silenced." Nonsense. Anti-Zionist Jews are given front row seats at every anti-Israel protest, paraded as token 'as a Jews' for ideological antisemitism. The fact that they represent a minuscule sliver of global Jewry is irrelevant to Schutte. What matters is their usefulness as fig leaves for her project of demonisation. They are not prophets they are props.
The linguistic trickery continues. Israel doesn't defend itself, it "bombs Gaza." It doesn't resist annihilation, it imposes siege. The flattening of language is complete. Hamas is nowhere to be found. The thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli cities are absent. The tunnels, the hostage-taking, the massacre of October 7 are all unmentionable. Because they disrupt the victim-oppressor binary Schutte so desperately needs to maintain.
And then, as if to remind us of her seriousness, she expands her lens to the entire world. Venezuela, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Donbas. All tragic. All relevant. But none of them have anything to do with Zionism. Yet she drops them in like seasoning, hoping the reader won't notice the false equivalencies, or worse, will see Zionism as the root of all geopolitical evil. The move is transparent and it is also contemptible.
And here lies the irony. The ideology Schutte claims to oppose, one that allegedly monopolises grief and dehumanises others, is, in fact, the one she practises. She demands selective empathy. She criminalises Jewish memory. She pathologizes Jewish self-defence. And she frames Palestinian suffering not as tragedy but as a cudgel to delegitimise an entire people's existence.
It is not Zionists who dehumanise others. It is Gillian Schutte who denies the humanity of Israelis, and by extension, the Jewish people. It is she who insists that Jewish survival is inherently supremacist, that Jewish agency is inherently colonial, that Jewish statehood is inherently illegitimate.
Let us be very clear, her vision ends with the dismantling of Israel. That is not justice, that is annihilation by another name.