The Star of David as Zionism’s Swastika
Zionists have warped the Star of David into a fascist symbol akin to the swastika
Posted at a military occupation checkpoint
Tagged on the door of a destroyed home
Printed on death threats dropped from planes
Branded onto a beaten hostage’s face
Seared into bombed land with a tank
Etched on protest signs blocking food for starving families
Hung behind a torture interrogation
Affixed to a podium during a speech calling for mass slaughter
Pinned between tightly zip-tied wrists
Draped around the neck of a serial rapist
Plastered on a vehicle mowing down ancient tree groves
Sewn onto the sleeve of a hunting sniper
Drawn as the crosshairs-marker for targeted drone strikes
Painted on a pile of corpses
— Some of the places I’ve recently seen the Star of David
I abandoned associating with the Star of David years ago. The deeper I dived into anti-zionism and witnessed the seemingly bottomless depths of Israel’s depravity, the more I grew increasingly disgusted at the sight of the Star that flies on the Zionist entity’s flag. Always front of mind was that if the Star of David could evoke such feelings of rage and disgust in me - someone who grew up cherishing the symbol - I can’t begin to imagine what it elicits for Palestinians on the receiving end of relentless Zionist aggression.
The Star of David is a Zionist bludgeon to assert domination: Israelis brand it into Palestinian skin, shave it into Palestinian heads, and carve it into Palestinian homes. I’m certain my revulsion couldn’t measure an iota compared to Palestinians generationally tyrannized under the suffocating weight of Zionist settler-colonial occupation.
The Star of David has been fully absorbed into the Zionist project and is now emblematic of the ongoing holocaust of Palestine.
WWII Nazis appropriated the swastika symbol from Eastern spiritual traditions, turning it into a globally recognized symbol of fascism, supremacy, and genocide. After the Nazi holocaust, Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, who had previously associated with the symbol for spiritual purposes since time immemorial, decided to retire it because it was irrevocably stained by Nazi fascism.
The difference of course, is that in the case of Zionism, Jewish people ourselves transformed our own symbol into a genocidal marker: No one stole the Star of David from us. Rather, Zionism is the trajectory of assimilation into the “world of the above” that the vast majority of Jewish people chose and continue to choose everyday: We became monsters and supremacists building a proudly Jewish imperial project in occupied Palestine, and Zionists embedded our faith symbols within it.
Genocide indelibly shifts a symbol, and that ship has already sailed for the Star of David. Zionists have transformed the formerly sacred Star of David into a symbol and weapon of fascism, wonton cruelty, and settler-colonial genocide.
If that makes you feel defensive as a Jewish person, consider: Why should your attachment to the Star receive more weight than its material manifestation on Palestinian flesh, land, and homes? Why should coddled Jewish feelings outweigh the concrete Palestinian reality of a holocaust perpetrated by a colony flying the Star of David on its flag?
We as Jews built hell on earth, proclaimed it “the Jewish state” and used our Star of David as its primary symbol: This is a reality of our own making.
If this truth disconcerts you as a Jewish person, dedicate your life to ending Zionism and US/Israel. That is the only path forward.
I recently attended an art exhibit of children’s drawings from Gaza created after October 2023. The curator of the exhibit is from Gaza and managed to get the art out during one of the brief moments when the crossings were open before the Zionist entity closed the concentration camp gates shut again. As I write this, food is rotting in trucks outside the closed border of the Gaza concentration camp, as Palestinians searching desperately for impossibly expensive food drop dead from manufactured starvation by US/Israel.
The images at the art exhibit were - unsurprisingly - stark and deeply disturbing. Scenes of genocide scrawled in crayon and colored pencil by children who shouldn’t know how to capture with such precision the shape of a missile, the underbelly of a fighter jet, the contours of a tank, the way blood pools on the ground after a martyr is sniped. Saturated layers of trauma reverberating through the eyes of children who may or may not still have breath in their lungs.
I was grateful the exhibit even came to fruition: A similar art installation entitled “A Child’s View of Gaza” at a California museum was shut down in 2011 by Jewish Zionists claiming “antisemitism.” As if the tanks and bombs aren’t enough, Zionists seek to snuff out drawings of child witnesses to their crimes.
As I moved from tableau to tableau, I noticed that drawn on the planes, soldiers, and tanks were, of course, the Star of David. There’s nothing loaded about that depiction for a Palestinian child, nor should there be:
The Star of David is the symbol that the occupation chooses to represent itself when it rapes mothers and kidnaps fathers. It’s the symbol that flies on the Zionist flag, that is emblazoned on their death tanks.
Do you expect a 6-year-old child to learn European blood libel tropes before she draws her cousin getting shot in the head by the self-proclaimed Jewish state? Are you telling me that Palestinian children who have only known the choking death grip of occupation are motivated by centuries-old European anti-Jewish tropes? It’s so utterly ridiculous that it would be laughable if it weren't so material, so brutal, so lethal.
These children draw the world they know: Jewish soldiers proudly sporting Jewish imagery while destroying every facet of their precious young lives.
Palestinians have articulated this point extensively since the inception of Zionism, including Mohamed El Kurd in his seminal essay “Jewish Settlers Stole My House. It’s Not My Fault They’re Jewish.” Palestinians did not choose for the people who stole their land and killed their children to identify as Jewish and come waving the Star of David. Jewish Zionists are the ones who constantly assert and demand recognition for the “Jewish nature” of their murderous settler-colony.
Similar to how WWII Nazis donned the swastika on their apparel, flag, and propaganda while wielding it as a symbol of racial, religious, and nationalist domination, so too do Zionists globally, particularly in occupied Palestine. Soldiers and settlers in lynch mob formations spray paint the Star of David on Palestinian homes, cars, and buildings, asserting their supremacy by leaving their fascist mark on the neighborhood.
In this context, the Star of David is a violent threat from the settler to those native to the land. Settlers are explicit about the fact that they seek to “Judaize” Palestinian neighborhoods and steal more and more sacred Palestinian territory. When Israelis zealously tag the Star of David onto holy mosques and bedroom walls, they have the full backing of the Israeli government and therefore America: The most powerful terrorist organization in the world.
America is indeed leading this crusading civilizational war that dates back to 1492, as articulated and expertly illuminated by Dr. Mohamed Abdou and Dr. Linda Quiquivix. Palestine and Turtle Island’s freeing are inextricably bound and Jewish institutions provide not only moral cover for the existence of these intertwined settler-colonies, but transnational infrastructure, settler flow, material resources, and soldier-squatters to colonize Palestine on behalf of Euro-America.
It is ironic that Israel chooses the Star of David to represent itself, when Palestine is undeniably the spiritually robust underdog David to US/Israel’s (seemingly) all-powerful Goliath.
The Star of David appears everywhere across the landscape of conquering Zionist existence. Therefore it is unsurprising to see anti-zionist resistance art portraying breaking through the Star of David toward freedom: Depictions Zionists are quick to smear and charge as “antisemitic.”
But it’s not the 1940s in Europe when Jews were forced to wear the Star of David: In the context of Palestine, Jewish soldiers force the Star of David down the throats of their holocaust victims who they systemically rape to death in US-sponsored torture camps.
To crush the Star of David in the context of Palestine is to break through the chains of generational subjugation. To rip off the strangling noose of unrelenting Zionist settler-colonial oppression.
Earlier this year, Columbia University students disrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class and passed out flyers, one of which featured an archived resistance poster of a boot stomping on a Star of David with the words “Crush Zionism.” Columbia expelled the students and baselessly smeared them as “antisemitic.” This is just one instance of Zionists penalizing anti-zionists for depicting the Star of David as representative of the genocidal settler-colony of Israel.
Most Jewish people see the Star of David as a symbol we have ownership over, to embrace with pride: Just like the entire settler-colony of “Israel.” Many will be appalled at the very insinuation that the Star of David could be an oppressive symbol, let alone compared to something as violently weighted as the swastika. Unfortunately, those who feel that way are woefully out of touch with reality, with what we have become as a Jewish collective, with the sheer sadism of Zionism, and with how the Star of David has been irrevocably transformed into the frontward symbol of a globally-recognized fascist state.
It is Israel’s fault that it burns children alive while centering Judaism and using the Star of David as an emblem of its barbarism. That conflation is intentional by Zionists and relies on widespread Jewish consent to function.
Frankly, I don’t put moral weight into Jewish personal sentiments and feelings about Zionism, Israel, or the Star of David. We have nostalgia about our Judaica, Palestinians have plastic bags full of charred flesh, the weight approximating their precious martyred loved ones. It’s not morally relevant what Jewish people think and feel about Zionism because we are its expressed beneficiaries.
Jewish people do not experience the crushing weight of Zionism’s boot on our necks, so our emotional entitlement toward the colony bears no ethical relevance. Palestinians do not require Jewish people to co-sign their anti-colonial freedom struggle.
Last year at Jerusalem Coffee House, a beloved Palestinian cafe and community space in Oakland, California, a Zionist man came in to provoke and video record while wearing a blue and white hat embossed with a prominent Star of David. The Palestinian owner confronted him about his hat requesting that he leave and asking if he was a Zionist, noting that the man’s hat was violent. The Zionist provocateur then filed a lawsuit against the Palestinian cafe owner citing civil rights violation for denying service to a Jewish person.
It’s not enough for Zionists to steal Palestinian homes and massacre Palestinian communities: They feel entitled to also seek out Palestinian and anti-zionist spaces to instigate and claim victimhood.
But this problem extends far beyond mere symbolism: The Jewish community has a pervasive and widespread fascism problem that we are not willing to face or reckon with in any meaningful let alone purposeful way. The tyrannical Zionist branch of Judaism has successfully swallowed virtually every Jewish institution, organization, and synagogue whole. We act as willing tools for imperial conquest and support authoritarians from the US to Israel in using “Jewish safety” as pretense for abductions, incarcerations, deportations, and state violence.
We were taught to see ourselves as Jews as perpetual victims always teetering on the verge of another holocaust, but in reality: Jewish people have overwhelmingly come to embody Nazism via our institutional allegiance to Zionism. Palestinians including scholar Abdaljawad Omar have masterfully articulated the ways in which the German Nazi holocaust never really ended, it just evolved into Jewish people’s systemic genocide of Palestinians, or as Edward Said described: “The victims of the victims.”
This is not about Jewish feelings, Jewish crocodile tears, or Jewish navel-gazing claims of victimhood amidst a holocaust of our own making. We carry Hitler’s legacy forward with the systematic bloodbath Jewish people continue to wrought in Palestine and on Palestinians.
Our formerly sacred star - merely a symbol in a time of concrete death - is now an emblem of fascistic settler-colonial genocide. Zionists have indelibly mutated the Star of David into the Swastika of David.
How insane that a symbol of oppression of Jews by the Nazis became a symbol of oppression by the Jewish Zionists… I can’t ever look at it again the same way after what I’ve learned the past couple of years. Especially seeing it branded on flesh - that is despicable. The artwork you posted with the Israeli flag being cut in half with the resistance symbol is really powerful!! Great piece - I need to read it again to fully process the article! Hope to see you soon on Zoom 💜 We should talk!!
Spot on