Religious or belief descriptions included Christian, Catholic, atheist, Muslim, Hindu and agnostic.
By Shula Rosen
A surge of posts from non-Jewish supporters of Zionism has emerged on X, with 88% of the messages identified in a Jerusalem Post review appearing from October 9 onward as hundreds of users adopted similar declarations of support.
The Post identified 613 posts from 549 accounts between October 4 and October 11 after developing code to examine public search results containing variations of “I’m not Jewish” and “Zionist.” Duplicate URLs were excluded from the final dataset.
Only 74 qualifying posts appeared during the first five days studied.
Daily totals stood at three on October 4, 13 on October 5, 10 on October 6, 22 on October 7 and 26 on October 8.
The number climbed to 131 on October 9 and more than doubled to 270 on October 10. Researchers recorded another 138 on October 11 before collection ended partway through the day.
While non-Jewish users had expressed support for Zionism before, the wording became increasingly consistent during the period examined.
Early examples included the simpler declaration, “I’m not Jewish, but I am a Zionist.”
Posters subsequently began adding details about their backgrounds. An October 5 message read, “I’m not Jewish. I am Irish, and I am a Zionist,” while an October 6 user wrote, “I’m English, I’m not Jewish, but I am a Zionist.”
Variations identifying users as American, Canadian and Iranian appeared more frequently by October 7.
Dutch writer Bart Schut joined in on October 11, writing, “I’m not Jewish. I’m a Dutch atheist. And I am a Zionist.”
Other posts referred to Iranian, German, Finnish, Italian, New Zealander, Polish, Australian, British, Czech, Japanese, Portuguese and Nigerian identities.
Religious or belief descriptions included Christian, Catholic, atheist, Muslim, Hindu and agnostic.
Participation was spread broadly across the accounts captured, with most appearing only once.
The findings do not demonstrate centralized organization or coordination behind the posts.
Users themselves had begun commenting on the phenomenon by October 9. Oren Barsky called it “the ‘I’m not Jewish, but I’m a Zionist’ trend” and described it as “one of the most moving things I’ve seen on this platform.”
By October 11, Barsky said it was “basically [his] whole feed.”
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