I used to hold space for anti-Zionism. Not any longer. The reaction since Oct 7 has clarified for me where anti-Zionists actually stand. I don’t begrudge Jewish anti-Zionists their right to an interpretation or a conscience but miss me with all that misguided rhetoric and propaganda.
We can thoroughly criticize our own state without directly enabling and supporting (latent, unwitting) anti-Semites.
(Of course, our great-grandparents never even had the opportunity to criticize their own state, because they were still forced to live under the hegemony of foreign imperialism and settler-colonialism.)
Also, this is everyone’s reminder that – beyond the Israelite and Jewish communities that had never left the land despite Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic occupation – organized Jewish resettlement of the land of Israel began not in 1948 but in 1558 with the resettlement of Tiberias under the leadership of Doña Gracia, in the wake of Europe’s latest demonstration of how welcome Jewish people really were among their various nations.