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Zionists are, by definition, people who believe in the legitimacy of the Jewish nation. Of course, not everybody is on board; some deny historical Jewish ties to the land, objecting to the decision to grant land from the former British Mandate of Palestine for the creation of a Jewish state.
Indigenous Arabs were unjustly pushed off their land.
Often neglected is the story of 760,000 Jews displaced from surrounding Middle Eastern countries, a number similar to that of Arabs displaced from the British partition. Jews whose families had lived in Middle Eastern countries for generations were ethnically cleansed, fleeing in fear from pogroms and violence, with their property and homes taken before they departed. But they did not stay refugees.
After five armies from surrounding nations invaded the nascent Israeli nation, 700,000 Arabs fled their homes due to the threat of violence. Some, though not most, were told by Arab soldiers that they should leave, with a promise of future return when the fighting was over. However, they could not return, and their land was later confiscated under Israeli forfeiture laws.
Today, anti-Zionists object to Israel’s existence as well as to Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre of 1,200. Their arguments drift from the past to the present, tossing off muddled objections to Israel defending itself. They prefer Jews to be victims.
Few anti-Zionists come out and say that they want all Jews (the two million Arabs perhaps might be allowed to stay) to leave Israel and find somewhere else to live. Nobody is out looking for a nice spot to accommodate seven million ex-Israelis.
If Israeli Jews aren’t staying or going, the remaining options are slim. The one-state solution, where the land is shared, is sometimes raised; however, considering demographic forecasts, it would lead to Israel no longer being a Jewish state, which defeats Zionism.
But even if one negates this and negates 3,000 years of Jewish ties to the land of Israel, as well as negating the fact that 65% of European Jewry had just been murdered in the Holocaust, it doesn’t make it a better case for the anti-Zionists.
Compounding this is the fact that the return to Israel has been a dream since the late 1800s, rather pre-Holocaust, and considering that Jews were historically dispersed from modern-day Israel and forcibly scattered and subjected to slavery, pogroms and expulsions, it looks even worse for the anti-Zionist argument that the Jews had no ties to their ancestral lands.
Regardless, any serious anti-Zionist, if they are to be consistent, must equally object and say that anyone in a country formed by an act of war or force is thus living within illegitimate borders, and they and their descendants have the right to correct the original borders.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
So, all historically displaced persons, or even those forced to live within borders created by force - and their descendants - have a claim to their ancestral homes?
But those persons seem to be unimportant to anti-Zionists.
But any historical examination shows many countries’ borders were set through wars, colonial conquest, and ethnic splits where might made right; why don’t the anti-Zionists have similar objections to the bloody borders of other countries born through violence and suffering?
The chart below notes the method of border formation of the top 50 nations in the world: almost 15% were formed from war or conquest, almost 20% by forced colonialism, which is the accusation made against Israel, and about 5% were formed along ethnic lines that were, of course, forcefully determined.
Why have anti-Zionists not raised similar objections to the legitimacy of other national borders, to the formation of other states, to the massive displacement and deaths during the Indian partition, or to the incredible displacement in the former Soviet Union following the Second World War?
Bloody and forced borders with internal and external refugees seem to be a historical element of the creation of our modern world.
Still, it seems the anti-Zionists—those who dispute the legitimacy of the state of Israel—have no concern for the circumstances of those other countries’ formation, even though a large percentage of this was brutal and savage.
If anti-Zionists came out and said, “It’s not about the displacement. It’s about the fact that Arabs were forced to live next to prosperous, successful Jews,” they wouldn’t win much public favour, but their honesty might be appreciated.
And it’s neither humanitarian concern that drives anti-Zionists; 17,000 Christians have been murdered by Muslim militias in Nigeria since 2023. Over 500,000 Muslims have died in Syria, including Rohingya Muslims, and 227,000 Muslims are dead in Yemen.
