Passover arrives each year with a familiar structure. Jewish people gather, retell the same story, and move through a ritual that has barely changed in centuries. Slavery, redemption, freedom. The sequence is fixed.

This year, the question is not whether Jews remember the past. It is whether they understand the present and are willing to describe it without euphemism.

Hostility toward Israel no longer hides behind coded language or careful phrasing. It is stated openly across campuses, in newsrooms, in NGOs, and throughout the institutions that shape public discourse. Israel is described as illegitimate. Zionism is labeled immoral. Jewish sovereignty is framed as a mistake that should be corrected.

These are not policy critiques. These are arguments against existence.

That distinction is often blurred, and not by accident. The language of “human rights” and “decolonization” has been used to recast a very old idea in modern terms, that Jews, uniquely, are not entitled to self-determination. In a world where about 27 countries proclaim Islam as their official state religion, some 14 countries officially recognize Christianity as their state religion or have a specific established church, and at least four carry Buddhism as theirs, no other people are asked to defend their right to exist in this way. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the point!

This shift did not happen overnight. It developed slowly, in part because key terms were left undefined long enough to be reshaped. “Zionism” has come to mean entirely different things depending on who is using it. For some, it is simply the expression of Jewish self-determination. For others, it has been transformed into a global symbol of oppression. Once a term is allowed to float without definition, it........

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