Why zionists want palestine

Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire.

The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation. Though the two-state plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to make it work in practice. Most observers think this would cause more problems than it would solve, but this outcome is becoming more likely over time for political and demographic reasons.

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We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority. These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues — who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state — antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups?

T here is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other. But that claim is empirically false. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it. In the s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack.

Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go. You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US.

I f antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism. Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone. Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.

Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come. But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism. And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.

Zionists actively encouraged the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. Despite their efforts, and the sharp rise in anti-Semitism in Europe culminating in the Nazi persecution, Arabs still outnumbered Jews in Palestine. Thus, as the likes of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe have argued, Zionist leaders were well aware that implementing their project would necessitate the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population.