“And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend."
For 3,500 years, the Land of Israel or Zion has been central to Judaism. Every Jew prays facing Jerusalem. Many holidays are based upon the harvest times in Israel. Jews maintained a constant presence in the land and its four holy cities (Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron and Tiberias) for thousands of years, long before Christianity and Islam were founded.
Other homelands were recommended. The British recommended Uganda, while the Soviet Union created Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous region in Siberia. Neither worked because they were not part of the Jewish historical and religious experience.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. It is the idea that the Jewish people have a fundamental right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. This does not negate Palestinians as also having a right to their ancestral homeland. Tragically, both people share the same land. Both need to figure out a solution to the consequences of British rule.
Demonizing one side does not bring peace, particularly when new versions of ancient hatreds are employed. Antisemitism’s pernicious strength is that it changes according to the fears of the age.
For centuries, Jews were persecuted as a religion, forced to convert. Later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews were considered a race. Conversion was no longer an option, only death. One-third of our 18 million co-religionists perished in the gas chambers during World War II. Even today, the global Jewish population has not fully recovered.
Now, we are entrenched in the third wave of antisemitism: anti-Zionism. Adherents explain that Jews themselves aren’t hated; it is their nationality that is despised.
In this new wave of hate, Judaism is not the ostensible issue, rather it is the Jewish homeland. This narrative was developed in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, even before Palestinian nationalism bloomed. At this time, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were part of the Kingdom of Jordan, and Gaza was part of Egypt. Anti-Zionism took its roots from the virulently antisemitic propaganda in the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” written by the Czarist secret police, and from “Mein Kampf” and other Nazi publications.
Anti-Zionism is just as pernicious and just as dangerous as antisemitism. Equating Zionism with everything the modern world finds reprehensible is a new form of a very old hatred. No other group on earth is targeted in such a way.
Neither Palestinians nor Jews are going anywhere. Both people need to find a way to live together. Demonizing one side while idealizing the other will not bring peace; it will just bring more hatred and bloodshed.
Sara Koplik, Director Aaron David Bram Hillel House
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