In History Matters, and On Matters of History, Israel Wins the Debate, The Dark Heart of Antisemitism, and several other essays on this platform, I have written at length about the right of Jews to a homeland and the incessant resistance to this right. Today, I want to dispel this notion that one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.
One of the more remarkable things about the Old Testament and Judaism is that it’s not so much focused on heaven as it is on the Jewish people and how they should conduct their affairs. It’s a practical religion. It’s not a religion based on salvation and transportation to an afterlife. It doesn’t promise the poor a good life in some other form. It promises the good life to everybody who is disciplined and watches out for his neighbor.
But it’s more than that. The Old Testament is the story of the establishment, conduct, and defense of the Jewish nation. The Old Testament is full of talk about nations. It isn’t an argument for converting everybody to Judaism and transforming the world. It’s about allowing people of different ethnicities to form a sovereign political state for themselves. Zionism is a political and national movement advocating for the self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland. It’s rooted in Judaism. Jews are indigenous to the territory that the Romans renamed “Palestine” to punish the people for their struggle for national self-determination.
People like to tell you that their criticism is of Zionism, not the Jewish people. But Zionism is a modern-day representation of the goals that the Jews have sought going back thousands of years—and that they have a natural right to pursue. There is no substantive difference between them. Antisemites don’t get to dress up their anti-Jewish sentiment in the language of anti-Zionism and then claim they’re not anti-Jewish.
freedom and reason 