The Times of Israel recently interviewed Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for a congressional district in New York City. Much of the coverage focused on her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally on October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas massacre in Israel.

What struck me, however, was not primarily her views on Israel. It was that she appeared to apply the same moral framework to Israel, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other questions of nationalism. She did not seem motivated by a unique hostility toward Jews. Rather, she seemed to be operating from a broader political ontology.

That distinction matters.

Too often, discussions of anti-Zionism collapse every motivation into one category. Sometimes anti-Zionism is inseparable from antisemitism. Sometimes it grows out of religious hostility toward Judaism. But sometimes it arises from an entirely different worldview—one that interprets history primarily through the relationship between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed.

Understanding that worldview is more illuminating than simply dismissing it.

My concern is not that this framework sees nothing true. Quite the opposite.

Third Worldism begins with a profound historical truth, recognizing the victims of empire and nation-building. But it has not fully answered the moral problem that begins after liberation: how a formerly oppressed people avoids becoming the next oppressor.

One of the most important historical lessons I learned as an adult came from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The modern nation-state was not born peacefully.

Europe was a patchwork of languages, religions, and peoples living within multinational empires. As those empires collapsed, new nation-states emerged claiming to represent particular nations. But their borders rarely matched the populations living inside them.

The result was not simply national self-determination.

It was also displacement, minority persecution, statelessness, forced assimilation, population transfers, and countless people who suddenly discovered that they belonged to the “wrong” nation.

The same story unfolded in different forms throughout the colonial world. European empires imposed borders, elevated some communities over others, and reorganized societies around imperial interests. Millions lived under systems they........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)