An Israeli's Perspective on Zionism and Anti-Zionism

I was born and raised in Israel to a Jewish Holocaust-surviving family, so my parents are offsprings of post-traumatic immigrants from Poland and Hungary.

And it was in that environment of post-trauma and victimhood that I grew up, along with a mantra that we Jews have no other safe place than Eretz Israel.

Zionism was not a word I pronounced, nor I understood it, but it was like an oxygen that I breathed, the ideology upon which I was indoctrinated.

Usually, when we talk about politics, we differentiate between right and left wing.

I find it very misleading when discussing Israel-Palestine.

It is more accurate to differentiate between Zionism and anti-Zionism.

Political Zionism is an ideology and de facto solution to the so-called Jewish problem, starting in the late 19th century.

It pursued the self-determination of Jews in the establishment of a Jewish nation in the state of Palestine.

With prominent Western support, they implemented a state by colonization, occupation, apartheid, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and finally genocide of the native population.

So therefore, Zionism is not the ideology of the Jews' right to self-determination in general, but the implementation of that right in the form of a nation state.

Therefore, anti-Zionism is merely the opposition to Zionism, namely to its crimes of colonization, occupation, apartheid, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

Anti-Zionists, and Jews are included, support Palestinian justice and liberation.

Woo-hoo!