No. of Recommendations: 3
Zionism is not the belief that the Jewish people should be allowed to have their own country. It is a political project to establish a country in which only Jews have a majoritarian right to citizenship and statehood.
Which is what many (if not most) countries are - political divisions which have historically been formed around a discrete and cohesive people that share common culture, language, and history. Why do you think borders get drawn the way they are? Why do India and Pakistan have the borders they have?
You might not like that. You might not like the fact that humans tend to organize themselves around conceptions of a "people," rather than a multi-ethnic multi-cultural amalgamation that ignores nearly all aspects of personal identity and instead is based solely on physical proximity and geography. That individuals tend to draw meaning and importance from their participation and membership in a specific group, rather than undifferentiated "humanness." But that's the way most people are. That's how most countries are. They are almost all "political projects" intended to provide self-determination and independence and autonomy to a people in a way that being part of a much larger and more undifferentiated grouping would not.
Being anti-Zionist is to say, "but not the Jews." Every other people and every other country (save a small handful), is allowed to be organized this way - a country for the Thai, a country for the Pakistanis, a country for the Slovaks - but not the Jews. You're not decrying the dissolution of Czechoslovakia as a "racist state building project," even though the resulting Partition resulted in - and was a "political project" intended to result in - the creation of separate states that are majority inhabited by two separate and distinct people. Just the Jews. Only the Jews.
There's nothing wrong with finding the current government of Israel or its policies reprehensible. I share that view. But being anti-Zionist - believing that the Jewish people, alone among the peoples of the world, should not be allowed to engage in the project (political or no) of having their own country? That's anti-semitic.
