There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people who share your history work hard to be the exception. To be invited to the right gatherings. To be photographed at the right protests. To signal, with their presence and their Jewish name, that they are the ones who get it. The ones who have moved beyond tribe. I understand the psychology. I have spent years studying how people behave under threat, social and physical. When belonging is conditional, people negotiate the terms of their belonging. That is not weakness. It is survival logic. The problem is when survival logic gets mistaken for moral clarity.

Anti-Zionism is not a critique of Israeli military strategy, settlement expansion, or the conduct of any particular government. Those are legitimate subjects of analysis and disagreement, including among Israelis, including among people who love Israel deeply. Anti-Zionism is something more specific. It is the rejection of the premise that Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It argues not that Israel should behave differently, but that Israel should not exist. Understanding that distinction matters before accepting any invitation to stand inside a movement built on it.

Jewish history already answered the question of what Jewish life looks like without sovereignty. Expulsions from England, France, and Spain. Pogroms across Eastern Europe. The systematic murder of six million people in the middle of a continent that had spent centuries building the most sophisticated legal and cultural institutions in the world. Jewish powerlessness was not a temporary condition that goodwill could reliably correct. It was a structural vulnerability that produced predictable outcomes across centuries and cultures. Zionism emerged from........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)