There is something deeply arrogant about people who have never lived a day of Jewish history, never buried a friend after a terror attack, never run to a shelter with their children, never stood on this land and felt what it means, and yet still believe they have the right to redefine the word Zionism for the Jews who carried it, built it, and defended it.

Zionism is not a fashionable insult. It is not a code word invented on social media. It is not a slur for Jews you dislike. Historically, Zionism is the Jewish national movement: the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Britannica defines it as the Jewish nationalist movement aimed at the creation and support of a Jewish national state in the ancient homeland of the Jews, and the World Zionist Organization’s official Jerusalem Program defines Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

That is the real meaning. Not the fantasy version screamed on campuses, not the distorted version posted online by people who could not tell Herzl from Hamas, and not the lazy propaganda that tries to separate Jew from Zionist as though the second word describes some alien species. The Knesset’s own publication of Israel’s Declaration of Independence begins with the simple truth that the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people, where its spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Zionism did not invent Jewish attachment to this land. It gave political form to an attachment that long predated the modern era.

That is why so much of the modern rhetoric around Zionists is intellectually dishonest. Of course not every individual Jew describes himself the same way politically, and of course debate exists inside the Jewish world. But when crowds across the West spit out the word Zionist with hatred, what they are usually targeting is not some abstract policy school. They........

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