TSQuint

Let’s stop using the term “Zionism.” Egypt is for Egyptians. Iran for Iranians. Turkey for Turks. China for the Chinese. The Netherlands for the Dutch. Russia for Russians. Nobody calls these “Egyptism,” “Iranism,” “Turkism,” or “Dutchism.” They’re just peoples with homelands. But when it comes to the Jewish people having a homeland in Judea, suddenly it gets a special name — Zionism — and then people spend decades loading that word up with all sorts of baggage having little to do with the basic idea itself. So drop the term. There is no Zionism, just as there is no Egyptism or Turkism. There is simply the Jewish homeland. Israel — Judea — is the homeland of the Jewish people. It has been continuously their homeland for over 3,000 years. That’s where Jews originated. That’s where Jewish civilization emerged. That’s where the Hebrew language, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, and Jewish identity took shape. Empires came and went. Conquerors came and went. Jews were dispersed, persecuted, expelled, and murdered. But the connection never broke, and neither did the continuous Jewish presence in the land. And like virtually every nation on Earth, Israel is not inhabited by only one people. Roughly 20% of its citizens are Arab Muslims, along with Christians, Druze, Bedouins, and others. The strange thing isn’t that the Jewish people have a homeland. The strange thing is that people insist on giving that one fact a special name, and then acting as if the name itself proves there’s something sinister about it.

To claim that dismantling a state, a governing structure, means murdering the people who live there is beyond absurd. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled. The white people there were not mass-murdered. The state simply became a state for all its citizens, with equal rights.