5h ago
Many young people, including Jews, think that by virtue of being exposed to more information (mostly online) than anyone has ever been before they are more informed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What they fail to understand is that there is such a thing as bad information, i.e. misinformation, and that there are nefarious agents that propagate such misinformation intentionally (otherwise known as propaganda) in order to create discord, i.e. disinformation.
In other words, they lack the critical thinking skills that are needed in order to sift the wheat from the chaff — and considering that the average reading comprehension skills in the US has been falling in the last few decades, it’s entirely unsurprising.
Zionism is not and never has been “ racially exclusionary and discriminatory”. In fact, Zionism is fundamentally an egalitarian movement — insofar that it purports that Jews, as a national group, have the same rights as any other national group, such as the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, from which they were exiled centuries ago.
Make no mistake: the anti-Zionist movement was never about anything Israel has ever done; It is, and always has been, fundamentally based on the antisemitic notion that the Jews, by virtue of being Jewish, are excluded from enjoying the same rights as any other nation.
It’s not about the occupation, the settlements, the human rights violations, the war crimes, or anything of this sort. It was always about Jewish sovereignty in this land. I don’t mean to excuse any of the above: all of them are incredibly problematic, caused immense suffering and are definitely blocks on the road to peace. But the conflict, at its core, is about Jews having a state of our own. As Ernest Bevin, the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs at the time the Mandate ended, who was no friend to the Jews or Zionism (and that’s an understatement)
