Why do zionists

To many religious Jews, Israel is 'the promised land'. But many non-religious Jews, too, value the fact that there is a country where Jews can live in freedom and safety. Nowadays, the word Zionist is often used as a swearword. As a negative label. Many Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause no longer distinguish between the words 'Jew', 'Israeli' and 'Zionist'. That is not correct. Most Jews do not live in Israel. Not every inhabitant of Israel is Jewish; there are also many non-Jews living in Israel.

And not all Jewish Israelis are 'settlers' who want to conquer more and more Palestinian land. The vast majority of Jews believe that the State of Israel should continue to exist. But many Jews, both living in Israel and elsewhere, are in favour of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a possible solution to the conflict.

To cut a long story short: although many Jews identify with Zionism, there are still many different points of view. That is reason enough not to mix up the words 'Jew', 'Israelis' and 'Zionists'. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. T he argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars.

The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. All the peoples on earth? Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot.

It is widely recognised that states based on ethnic nationalism — states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group — are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom.

Sometimes it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multiethnic states up. A rgument number two is a variation on this theme. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved.

Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it. But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges. In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then, in , those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa later the Republic of South Africa , which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.

The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders.

This changed in By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races.

But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens.

For them, Zionism represents a form of political dispossession. Because they live in a state that privileges Jews, they must endure an immigration policy that allows any Jew in the world to gain instant Israeli citizenship yet makes Palestinian immigration to Israel virtually impossible.

So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live. My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist though hopefully democratic country of their own.

But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.

These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues — who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state — antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups? T here is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Zionists believe Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion, and that Jews deserve their own state in their ancestral homeland, Israel, in the same way the French people deserve France or the Chinese people should have China. Jews often trace their nationhood back to the biblical kingdoms of David and Solomon, circa BC.

A secular Austrian-Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, was the first to turn rumblings of Jewish nationalism into an international movement around Herzl witnessed brutal European anti-Semitism firsthand, and became convinced the Jewish people could never survive outside of a country of their own. Before Herzl, about 20, Jews lived there; by the time Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, the number was about eight times that.

For instance, any Jew anywhere in the world can become an Israeli citizen , a right not extended to any other class of person.