Have you seen this meme? It was posted in the Candace Owens News group on Facebook. A woman named Debra OM posted it. She’s a raging antisemite. Nearly every day, she goes on an anti-Jewish rant. Unfortunately, Debra isn’t the only antisemite who frequents the Candace Owens News group. The group is crawling with these despicable people, many of them Muslims. These claims are easily eviscerated. In this essay, I will go through the latest nonsense point by point and debunk it. Debra and her ilk have no rational response to my debunking exercises because the facts are incontrovertible. They never bother to falsify their own position because it does not emanate from a place of fact and reason.
True, Jewish religious and communal traditions developed over many centuries. However, Jewish national aspirations are ancient. In fact, by definition, Jews are intrinsically a nation. The Jewish nation has existed for millennia, since the Jews are a people, ie., an ethnic group. The planet is made up of a myriad of ethnic groups. Some have nations, e.g., the Arabs; others are nationless, e.g., the Kurds. Jews happen to be among those ethnic groups that also have a nation.
Zionism is merely the name of an organized modern political movement seeking national recognition for the Jewish people in international law. The meme falsely claims that Jewish nationalism is a new phenomenon. Jews have been nationalist for thousands of years. Read the Old Testament. The texts explicitly refer to the Jewish people as a nation.
Many early Zionists were secular, socialist, liberal, or otherwise motivated by national self-determination rather than religious observance. That is true. So what? The fact is that Jewish religious thinkers advocated a return to the land long before Zionism took shape. The Zionist movement is merely a later iteration of Jewish nationalism. Moreover, Zionists are not all atheists. Religious Zionists interpret national restoration in religious as well as political terms. So, the idea that the push for a Jewish state is atheist in character is a lie. Secular and religious Jews want a homeland.
Many Christians have supported Jewish restoration in the Holy Land for their own theological reasons. This is a distinct Christian tradition, not the origin of Jewish Zionism. There are many Christian Zionists, to be sure (as there ought to be), but they are not 93 percent of the Zionist movement. I don’t need to document percentages to know that’s an absurd assertion. As I have shown, Zionism originated as a movement among Jews seeking Jewish self-determination. It’s a Jewish movement. The antisemites make a category error. Judaism is not simply a faith in the same sense Christianity is. Jewish identity can be religious, ethnic, cultural, familial, or some combination of these. Jewish nationalism doesn’t depend on a particular strain of Christian eschatology. Indeed, it has nothing to do with Christian eschatology. It’s Jewish. Duh.
This is where antisemites really expose their ignorance. While faith is central to religious Judaism, it is not the sole basis of Jewish identity. Judaism encompasses religious beliefs, practices, law, history, culture, and collective identity. Zionism is Jewish nationalism. Of course it encompasses more than religiosity. Its central idea is that the Jewish people are a people entitled to national self-determination in their historic homeland. This is hardly extraordinary. Indeed, it’s common everywhere. The Japanese are nationalist. Etcetera.
Moreover, nationalism is not inherently virtuous or inherently evil. It depends on the ideology’s contents. The relevant question is not whether Zionism is nationalist. It is what kind of nationalism is being advocated. That the Jewish people have a right to live in their indigenous homeland is hardly an evil thing—unless one assumes Jews are an evil people. That is the trick, isn’t it? Antisemites smuggle in the assumption that Jews are evil people; therefore, their national aspirations are evil in intent. This is classic Jew-hatred. The double standard screams antisemitism.
There is nothing in the desire to reestablish the Jewish homeland that demands all Jews concentrate in one place. That’s silly. Israel is a haven for Jews, to be sure. But if Jews want—and are allowed—to live elsewhere, they certainly can and do. The United States is home to forty percent of all Jews in the world, and most of them have no intention of leaving the country (not yet, anyway). Fourteen percent of Jews live outside Israel and the US (mostly in Europe). Sure, some Zionists have emphasized aliyah and the idea of gathering Jews from the diaspora. But many others have supported Israel’s existence while expecting most Jews to continue living elsewhere. The problem is that, apart from Israel, Muslims have driven most Jews from the Middle East.
The wars and military actions by Israel are not a defining characteristic of Zionism. Zionism is an ideology, not a military force. Israel needs a military force, obviously—for the same reason other countries need to maintain militaries. Unfortunately, the world comes with bad actors. But Israel does not engage in aggressive war. It resorts to military force defensively. Arabs and Persians, on the other hand, engage in aggressive war against Israel. Again, Israel has the right to collective self-defense. This is a feature of national sovereignty. The antisemite doesn’t believe Jews have a right to defend themselves because the antisemite hates Jews. Anti-Jewish antipathy drives people to construct memes like the one I am debunking in this essay.
Finally, Zionism is not sustained through violence any more than Judaism has resorted to violence throughout its history. Again, read the Old Testament. Jews have never been a people to roll over and be dominated. Nor should they. They are the wellspring of Western Civilization. There would be no Christian ethics if there were no Jews. Jews should be admired and copied. The West defends Israel and the Jews not only because Israel is strategic to world affairs, but also because it has a moral obligation to do so. To turn away from the Jews is to turn away from Western Civilization.
I don’t expect to change Debra’s mind. As I noted, she’s a raging antisemite. My goal in this essay is to provide readers with ready points to counter Jew-hatred. These and many other claims made about Jews and Zionism are easily debunked, and I am confident many of you already know the counters, but here they are for your convenience. I shouldn’t assume everybody is prepared to confront the enemies of Western Civilization with facts. So if you find these points helpful in your tangles with Jew-haters, then use them. At the very least, they will save you time. In an ideal world, you should do the work, of course, but you can depend on me to do it regardless. Antisemites are the enemy of the people. We have to counter their lies.
