Stockholm Syndrome and the colonised Jew

Stockholm Syndrome describes the psychological bond that forms between hostage and captor that can manifest as empathy, loyalty, or even defence of the oppressor, often as a coping mechanism for survival.

A modern expression of this condition among the Jewish Diaspora is anti-Zionism. After centuries of exile, many Jews have absorbed the colonial ideologies of their host societies learning to see the world through imperial ideas of race, power and domination. This has created a deep psychological tension in Diaspora identity, one that swings between integration into the host nation and connection to the ancestral homeland. In that space of divided loyalty, anti-Zionism offers the illusion of moral clarity: a way to prove belonging to the host culture by condemning one’s own.

A growing number of Diaspora anti-Zionist Jews accuse Israel of being a colonial project. They describe Jewish sovereignty as settler colonialism, Zionism as European nationalism transplanted into the Middle East, and both Israel and the Jewish people as an illegitimate foreign presence. But in making these claims they reveal something deeper about themselves. They are shaped by the colonial worldview of the societies in which they live. They see Zionism as foreign precisely because they have been conditioned to view Jewish peoplehood through European eyes. Yet, this condition is not confined to the Diaspora. One could argue that it also manifests within the modern State of Israel itself, where decades of war and the feeling of being surrounded by hostile enemies have produced, in some quarters, a similar impulse – a psychological need to seek moral approval from those who despise it. In both cases, the instinct to survive has been misdirected into the instinct to appease.

Jewish exile and population distribution was a deliberate project of the ruling elite through the ages. Rome destroyed the second Jewish Temple in 70 CE, crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, and renamed Judea “Syria Palaestina” to erase the Jewish link to the land (Safran, 2005). Christendom and the Islamic Caliphates redefined Jews as tolerated religious minorities (servile religio or dhimmi) rather than as a people with sovereignty. Modern nation-states followed the same pattern: Jews could become Germans, French or British but only as hyphenated identities, rather than an indigenous nation in their own right (Bauman, 1988).

Thus, the colonial project was always twofold: territorial dispossession and identity redefinition. Jews were cast as guests in other nations, permitted to survive only on condition that they accepted the host’s terms. Over generations, Jews have internalised these frameworks. The notion of being “German Jews”, “French Jews” or “American Jews” was and is an accommodation to colonial categories, albeit even if it was for the Jewish people to prove their allegiances to their host countries in earnest. As Zygmunt Bauman argued, the hyphen symbolised anxiety, a perpetual balancing act between proving loyalty to the host state and retaining a fragile distinctiveness.