A Letter to my Anti-Zionist Friends

By Paul M

In keeping with the modern custom recognized as an essential act of justice by all right-thinking people, I’d like to start this piece by acknowledging that this and every discussion of Zionism or anti-Zionism has at its heart the unceded ancestral lands of the indigenous Yehudim, who were forced from their homes in Yehuda and Shomron by acts that we now understand as the crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure. Despite this, the Jewish people have maintained their unbroken connection to the land for millennia and have never surrendered their claim to it.

Dear friends,

I call you “friends” as I know that you bear me no personal animosity as a Jew, but are driven solely by motives of justice and peace just as Jews are, when we agree with you. I know this because of your insistence that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Not that it isn’t necessarily or isn’t always antisemitism, but that it isn’t, full stop. Knowing this, I am reassured that I am talking to what feels like the only community on Earth that is completely untouched by Jew-hate. What a relief that is.

Because you are not antisemites it follows, as surely as justice follows suicide bomb, that you believe genuinely and sincerely the accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, collective punishment, baby-killing, colonialism, neocolonialism and settler-colonialism that you have been making. (If I’ve forgotten anything, please do let me know.) Also, that you believe just as genuinely that Hamas did not commit murder and other atrocities on October 7th despite the purported videos they are alleged to have made, for which there’s no evidence apart from what’s all over the internet. I accept your sincerity, but I am puzzled by a few questions that I wish you would help me with.

There are, first of all, a couple of aspects of Zionist genocide I don’t understand. I’m having trouble thinking of any other case in which the perpetrators said “Give us back our captives & lay down your arms, and we’ll stop” and the victims replied “No thanks, you go ahead.” Perhaps you will say that the Palestinians daren’t agree because then the Zionists will commit even more and worse genocide. I have thought about that but, beside the fact that even now the martyrs of the resistance don’t seem to be slowing the Zionists down—quite the opposite in fact—it brings us to the next oddity.

Since 1948, the Zionist Entity has had a large part of the Palestinian population within its borders, defenseless and entirely at its mercy. Currently they amount to somewhere between 10 and 15% of all Palestinians. I need you to help me understand: Why did the Zionists wait 75 years to launch this genocide, when they could have been sating their bloodlust all this time on the Palestinians already in their clutches?

I have more questions about the genocide but I’ll pass over them for now. Likewise the ethnic cleansing, since those are mostly the same questions. The peculiarities of Zionist-style apartheid, with Palestinians forced to take up roles in every part of the Entity’s society, are already well-known and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I do want to ask about something a bit more abstract: We Zionists have been quite consistent for at least a century and a half now in stating what Zionism is as far as we’re concerned, a movement for Jewish liberation and national self-rescue in response to two thousand years of increasingly lethal persecution. As anti-Zionists with deep principles of justice, humanity and humility, do you ever experience a bit of a sense of discordance to be in the position of trying to redefine Zionism for us? Doesn’t it feel, I don’t know, sort of imperialistic, not to say bigoted, for you to be telling us that our movement has nothing to do with our own definition of it?

I’m drawing to the end now, I promise, but I’ve been saving my biggest question for last. It’s this:

What the hell happened to your moral compass? You know that Zionism is colonialist and genocidal and all the rest, and you know that the overwhelming majority of Jews—a solid 85% on every poll—support the colonialist, genocidal (etc.) Zionist Entity. Have you no shame? Why aren’t you antisemites? Why won’t you, good anti-racists and all-round humanitarians all, hate the genocide- and colonialism-loving Jews? Those who trod this path before you might not have reached your level of moral refinement but they at least had the courage of their convictions. They knew that the Jews killed Christ, invented both communism and capitalism and corrupted everything decent in wholesome Aryan society. They drew the appropriate conclusion. You tiptoe right up to the door that these others flung open but are scared to walk through it.

How will you explain yourselves to your children?