The question arose within hours of a death that should have remained a matter of grief. On 16 February, Dana Eden, co-creator and producer of the Israeli espionage series Tehran, was found dead in her hotel room at the Gatsby Athens. She was 52. Greek police are investigating and are treating the death as a possible suicide. Eden had been in Greece filming the programme’s fourth series.
Tehran, first released in 2020, follows a Mossad hacker-agent sent to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility, only to become trapped inside the country. Filmed partly in Greece and other locations standing in for Tehran, the series became an international success after its acquisition by Apple TV+, winning the International Emmy Award for Best Drama Series in 2021. Laurie joined in Season three as a South African nuclear inspector.
The controversy did not centre on his reference to suicide. It centred on something more charged
Eden’s body was discovered by her brother after she failed to respond to his messages. Reports indicate bruising on her limbs and neck and large quantities of pills at the scene. Police are examining whether, before ingesting the pills, she attempted to harm herself in another way. Online speculation quickly attributed her death to Iranian agents. The production company dismissed those claims.
Laurie posted a tribute on X. ‘Dana Eden, who co-created and produced ‘Tehran’, died on Sunday, seemingly by her own hand. It’s a terrible thing. She was brilliant, and funny, and an exceptional leader. Love and condolences to all who knew her.’
The controversy did not centre on his reference to suicide. It centred on something more charged. Some critics accused Laurie of using the tribute to signal support for Zionism by publicly honouring an Israeli producer associated with a series portraying Mossad operations. Laurie responded sharply: ‘Nothing I have ever said or done could lead a sane person to believe that I am a Zionist. However. If someone exults in the death of a friend of mine, yes I will block them. If you wouldn’t do the same in my position, you can fuck off too.’
That denial prompted a wave of allegations that Laurie was going out of his way to suggest he was somehow anti-Zionist, a view summed up by one tweet from a Rabbi S. Litvin: ‘What greater affront could Hugh Laurie make to Dana Eden than using her death to disassociate from Dana, her people, and her homeland. How utterly pathetic.’ Laurie answered: ‘Rabbi. I did no such thing, nor would I ever. Please re-read in the morning.’
Those who identify as anti-Zionist often insist that their position targets a political ideology rather than a people
The sequence is brief. A death. A tribute. An accusation of Zionist signalling. A denial of Zionist identity. An accusation of disassociation. A rebuttal.
Laurie’s clarification is precise in one respect. He states that nothing he has said or done marks him as a Zionist. He does not declare himself an anti-Zionist. He does not denounce Israel. He rejects an attribution.
The question then arises: why clarify at all? Public figures understand the currency of inference. In the current climate, even the act of praising an Israeli colleague can be interpreted as endorsement of something not even mentioned. Perhaps he felt that silence in the face of that claim would have been read as consent, so Laurie chose to rebut.
But what does ‘anti-Zionism’ even mean? And what does it mean to be accused of Zionism? ‘Zionism’ is often deployed as a sanitised proxy for something older and uglier: the notion of a global Jewish cabal manipulating media, finance and governments. That conspiracy has stalked European and Middle Eastern history for centuries. It animated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it fuelled expulsions and pogroms, and it continues to circulate in digital form today. To dress that fantasy in contemporary political language does not dignify it. It remains a paranoid fiction, a slander against Jews, and it deserves to be rejected without qualification. For the moronic conspiracist, to oppose such a phenomenon is virtuous and brave. But such people cannot easily be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
In fact, Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination in their historic homeland of Israel. No more and no less. It does not assert global control. It does not demand supremacy. It asserts statehood. It does not imply a right wing or left wing government would rule Israel, nor a specific set of war policies. To deny that right in the present geopolitical reality, where Jewish sovereignty functions as the primary guarantee against renewed statelessness and persecution, carries consequences that critics rarely examine. Once the protection of statehood is stripped away in theory, the vulnerability of those who depend upon it becomes an abstraction. In practice, it would not be abstract at all.
If Zionism is defined minimally as support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then opposition to Zionism entails opposition to that principle. Israel is home to roughly eight million Jewish citizens. To advocate dismantling the state as a Jewish polity is to propose a fundamental restructuring of sovereignty in a region where minority protection has always ended badly for us Jews.
Judea Pearl, the Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher and father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has argued that one should ‘shock the anti-Zionist out of his pompous self-righteousness’. He is right.
His challenge is uncomfortable. If anti-Zionism involves dissolving Jewish self-determination in the only state where it currently exists, what becomes of its population? Are they to entrust their security to political arrangements that have yet to demonstrate durability? Are they to accept permanent exposure as the price of ideological consistency?
Those who identify as anti-Zionist often insist that their position targets a political ideology rather than a people. They frame it as opposition to nationalism, or to specific Israeli policies. Criticism of a government is ordinary political speech. Advocacy for the eradication of a state’s defining national character carries different consequences.
Laurie has not articulated a doctrine. He mourned a colleague and resisted being labelled. Others supplied the ideological frame around his words. But he took the bait and seemed at least to imply his rejection of Zionism by pointedly responding to critics that he had never said he supports it.
When celebrities feel compelled to signal distance from Zionism, even defensively, clarity becomes essential. If the objection concerns government policy, say so. If it concerns the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood in Israel, confront the implications directly and own the full genocidal implications of your beliefs.
Dana Eden’s tragic death remains under investigation. The argument that followed reveals how quickly grief is conscripted into ideological struggle. A tribute became a test of political identity. Before adopting or repudiating a word as freighted as Zionism, one ought to ask what world that choice implies. And whether one is prepared to defend it.
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