Thanksgiving has always struck me as America’s most sacred civic ritual—a national moment in which we acknowledge that a people, fleeing persecution, crossed an ocean to claim their right to live freely on the land where they believed God had led them. It is, in essence, a holiday of sovereignty. A holiday of survival. A holiday born of a people who refused to remain powerless.

And so I cannot help but marvel at the contradiction of the student protesters who denounce Israel as a “colonial settler state” while happily celebrating a holiday rooted in the very history they claim to despise. They luxuriate in their American citizenship—born of territorial conquest and nation-building—yet demand that the Jewish state alone be dismantled. That is not moral conviction. It is intellectual fraud wrapped in slogans.

The American Promise and the Jewish Promise

To be American is to inherit a story shaped by displacement, struggle, and the forging of a nation from the ruins of persecution. It is imperfect, complicated, and real. And it is exactly this same pattern that defines Zionism.

Zionism is not colonialism; it is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)