Why antizionism is spreading – and why it endangers Jews everywhere

This is an excellent commentary. The conflation of so many thousands of years of Jewish History in the region which is now modern Israel – to include specific European pogroms with dates starting in the 12th and 13th centuries moving into Soviet Russia and the Nazi Holocaust to massacres of Jews in ‘Palestine’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in what has become modern Israel – by the modern leftist notion of Jews as ‘white colonialists’ and ‘oppressors’ is not only dearly offensive but also deeply ahistorical.

In fact, I’d argue that we Jews and our return to Israel, literally, makes us the original anti-colonialists.

But I also question the continued use of ‘Zionism’ as a way to describe modern Israel and current Israeli geopolitics. The general definition of Zionism, coined by Nathan Birnbaum (1890/1891) then formalized by Theodor Herzl around 1897 was ‘a nationalist movement for the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, to establish a sovereign, self-determined Jewish state, primarily as a response to rising antisemitism and the need for a safe haven.’

Since the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Zionism has come to include the development and strengthening of Eretz Yisrael and the protection of our Jewish nation by support for a strong military, the modern IDF.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)