Hating Israel is the thing to do today on university campuses. It makes you seem “progressive.” It means you’re “woke” and socially aware. It means you’re fighting against a tyrannical regime. It is supporting the struggle of an oppressed people at the hands of White colonialist supremacy. Zionism is racism. Israel is evil, end of story.
Except that’s complete nonsense.
Zionism is the support for and affirmation of the Jewish right to self-determination in their indigenous homeland of Israel. It’s the Jewish Civil Rights Movement. It is the struggle of a native people who have been oppressed for thousands of years, expelled from their land, killed and persecuted wherever in the world they went. It is the celebration of victory, of the return home after millennia of diaspora, of surviving and flourishing against all odds.
That sounds like something the Left would wholeheartedly support, right? Not anymore. The dominant narrative on campuses is that Israel is Nazi Germany 2.0, that Israelis are White Europeans who colonized the land of Palestine after WWII. The screams of “apartheid” and “genocide” go unquestioned. Israel is evil, end of story.
Nobody talks about the 850,000+ Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands. Nobody mentions that the majority of Israelis are these refugees or descended from these refugees, not from Europe (not that European Jews are White). Nobody clarifies that Israeli Arabs have all the same rights as Jews in Israel, or that Arabs hold seats in Israeli Parliament, serve in the military, and are doctors and celebrities and shopkeepers and lawyers and teachers. Nobody mentions the thousands of Palestinians treated at Israeli hospitals and employed at Israeli businesses. Israel is evil, end of story.