Zohran or Zion: The future of world order

They say history swings on a hinge—on moments that demand a reckoning, not a retweet. Today, we stand at such a crossroads. One path leads to ‘Zohran’: a world built on egalitarian liberation, where justice is not a marketing slogan but a lived reality, and where the commons are rescued from corporate siege. The other path barrels toward Zion—not the ancient hill, nor the faith of a people, but an ideology of supremacist violence, perfected in the smoking ruins of Gaza.

Two futures, one choice. And neutrality is a myth.

The rise of a world worth fighting For

“Zohranism” is not a campaign slogan. It is not another rebranding of left-liberal identity politics. It is not about a singular politician—though New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani has come to symbolize its ethos. Rather, Zohranism is a slow, stubborn insurgency of principles against propaganda. It’s the recognition that justice cannot be carved into electoral soundbites or sacrificed on the altar of bipartisan respectability.

This political ethic isn’t crafted in think tanks or donor retreats—it’s forged in food lines, on picket lines, and in frontlines like Gaza. It does not sanitize its outrage to fit into Sunday talk shows. It names genocide when genocide is unfolding. It calls out apartheid even when that means losing endorsements. It links domestic struggle to international solidarity without flinching.

Zohranism, at its core, is a politics of coherence. It sees no contradiction between organizing for tenant rights in Brooklyn and condemning Israeli airstrikes in Rafah. It’s not driven by public relations, but by public conscience. It is growing—not because it flatters power, but because it refuses to bow to it.

Gaza: The graveyard of illusions

No place on Earth lays bare the moral fraudulence of our global order more brutally than Gaza. And no people expose the hollowness of militarized supremacy more defiantly than Palestinians.

Since October 2023, over 56,000 lives—mostly women and children—have been erased by Israel’s war machine. Hospitals have been converted into morgues. UN shelters pulverized. Entire families incinerated in drone strikes deemed “surgical.” In March 2025, Operation Might and Sword murdered over 855 civilians in a single night—no credible military objective, just a spectacle of vengeance.

But Gaza does more than grieve. It resists.

Even amid siege and starvation, Gazans cook communally, organize aid, write poetry, and dig the dead from rubble with bare hands. They live—and that is their revolt. Gaza has become a crucible of courage, a frontline of the possible. And it is this fierce will to live, not just survive, that animates Zohranism. A refusal to let brutality dictate the boundaries of imagination.

Zion: The empire with no clothes

Let’s be precise. Zion(ism), as referred to here, is not Judaism. Nor is it simply the existence of the Israeli state. It is a settler-colonial doctrine—an ethno-supremacist framework that privileges Jewish identity above all others, sanctions dispossession, and lauds apartheid as self-defense. It is the blueprint behind razed villages, stolen land, and a state machinery that murders with impunity.

Once, Zionism relied on liberal fig leaves: “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “a vibrant multicultural society,” “a beacon of progress.” Gaza tore those fig leaves into confetti. You cannot bomb children in U.N. schools and then deliver TED Talks about tolerance. The contradictions are now too glaring to cover.

Even in the propaganda heartland of the United States, the mask is slipping. AIPAC can still buy Congress, but it can’t buy the conscience of the streets. Jewish peace activists now chain themselves to weapons factories. Students occupy campuses with chants of “Divest from genocide.” CIA analysts murmur that Israel has become a “strategic liability.” When Langley begins to fidget, it’s no longer just a moral indictment—it’s a geopolitical alarm.

Inside Israel, the rot is also visible. The far-right coalition fights over whether to ethnically cleanse Palestinians slowly or in one fell swoop. Netanyahu, trapped between trial and tyranny, rides the backs of messianists and militarists alike. The project of Zion(ism) is no longer expanding. It is entrenching, collapsing inward, scorched by the fires it set.

The genocide that’s losing the narrative

Here’s the bitter truth: For all its billions in U.S. weapons, satellite precision, and air superiority, Zionism is failing to achieve its core goals. Gaza has not been pacified. Hamas has not been crushed. Palestinian resistance has not been broken—it has evolved, militarily and morally.

Despite the flattening of neighborhoods, over 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed. Despite overwhelming firepower, Israeli occupation troops face a landscape riddled with IEDs, tunnel ambushes, and unyielding defiance. Despite international pleas, Israel has ignited a diplomatic inferno. Even U.S. allies now whisper about “exit strategies” and “regional containment.”

Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes—targeted and bold—have signaled a regional red line. Hezbollah’s posture in the north, the mobilization of militias in Iraq and Syria, the global South’s fury—all point to a growing consensus: Israel’s impunity is no longer sustainable.

Meanwhile, Washington’s contradictions are impossible to conceal. It pledges humanitarian aid with one hand and airlifts bunker busters with the other. The Pentagon drops leaflets warning of famine, while Raytheon profits from missile contracts. The theater is obscene—and the audience is done clapping.

You can bulldoze buildings. You cannot bulldoze memory. Or truth.

Zohranism as a foreign policy

Zohranism is not just a domestic vision. It is a redefinition of global politics itself. It stands against endless wars, not out of pacifism, but out of a principled belief in sovereignty, dignity, and collective liberation.

It declares housing a right. Water a human necessity. Health a public good. Zohranism fights the climate crisis not with carbon markets, but with a Green New Deal that doesn’t exclude Gaza, Sudan, or the Global South. It disarms empire by divesting from its factories of death. It speaks of Palestine not as a “complex issue,” but as an open wound—inflicted daily, funded hourly.

This is the threat it poses to empire: not simply moral dissent, but material disruption. The Zohranistas demanding rent control in Queens are also organizing to defund war. The students occupying campuses are not just calling for a ceasefire—they are building an ethic of solidarity that spans continents and breaks lobbies.

They understand something the old world order refuses to admit: that injustice is not local. It is systemic. And so must be the resistance.

A world reaching for its tipping point

From strikes in California to encampments at Columbia, from women’s rights marches in Argentina to anti-imperialist movements in Kenya, the signs are clear: the people of the world are fed up with crumbs and carnage. The old order—of endless growth, war without cost, and profit over people—is trembling. Its mask is cracking. Its guns are no longer enough.

And this terrifies our global plutocrats.

Because the truth is, their entire edifice—of oil deals, surveillance states, and apartheid walls—depends not on strength, but on obedience. They rule not because we are weak, but because we have forgotten our strength.

Zohranism reminds us. It is a memory returning. A politics grounded in the radical idea that people matter more than profits, that borders should not eclipse justice, and that Gaza’s suffering is not exceptional, but emblematic.

The choice is clear—and urgent

So here we are.

Not just at a fork in the road, but at the cliff’s edge of history.

Zion or Zohran.

One future leads to biometric checkpoints, billion-dollar bombs, and sanitized genocide livestreamed in high resolution. It ends in surveillance, in scarcity, in silence dressed as stability.

The other dares to dream. It dismantles walls, not just with protest, but with policy. It builds not empires, but coalitions. It doesn’t just resist genocide—it organizes to uproot its causes.

The empires have picked their side. The question is—have we?

Let’s not pretend the middle ground is a moral ground. Let’s not hide behind the fig leaf of complexity. The blood on Gaza’s pavement is not complicated. It is evidence. Evidence of a system that must be not only condemned—but dismantled.

Zohranism is not perfect. It is flawed, contested, still forming. But it is real. And it is rising.

The bombs falling on Gaza are not the future—they are the shrieking death rattle of an order that cannot survive the light. Our task is not just to mourn, but to mobilize.

History is not written by those who stayed neutral. It is written by those who refused.

So stop asking what is possible.

Ask what is intolerable.

And then act accordingly.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.