By Zachary Foster, a response on Twitter to someone equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism

Hi, I’m Jewish. Many of my closest friends are Jewish. I love them all. My whole family is Jewish, I love them all too. My community is Jewish. Love them all. I love Judaism. I host shabbat dinners, celebrate Jewish holidays, sing Jewish prayers, study Torah & Talmud, and love Jewish culture, history and expression.

But I’m not a Zionist. Zionism was an ideology that said, let’s create a Jewish state in a country that’s 97%+ non-Jewish.

That’s why, when Zionists bought land in Palestine from the 1900s-1948, they uprooted the people living on the land because they weren’t jewish.

That’s why, when Zionists created cooperatives in Palestine in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, they insisted on “Hebrew Labor”, i.e., “Jews only” — no Arabs allowed. That’s why, in the 1930s, Zionists expelled Palestinian Arabs from working at Jewish companies and business. Jews only! https://jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2007.36.2.25

That’s why, in 1948, Zionists militias ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. That’s why, from 1949-1956, Israeli forces shot & killed b/w 2,700-5,000 overwhelmingly unarmed Palestinians trying to return to their homes after the war. Because they were the wrong religion/ethnicity (source: Benny Morris, Border Wars, p.416). That’s why Israel expelled another ~30-40,000 Palestinians from Israel from 1949-1959. https://palestinenexus.com/articles/israel-ethnic-cleansing-1949-1965

That’s why Israel expelled another ~250,000 Palestinians from Gaza & the West Bank when it occupied those territories in 1967. That’s why Israel continued to expel Palestinians from the occupied territories from 1968-1993, many hundreds of thousands of them. They had the wrong DNA. https://palestinenexus.com/articles/israels-ethnic-cleansing-of-the-palestinians-1968-1993

The Zionists wanted to create a Jewish State with a Jewish majority in a land of overwhelmingly Palestinians. That’s why Israel has become such a pariah state over the years, because it’s insistence on jewish rule in a country with so many Palestinians.

That’s why Zionism has led Israel to become an apartheid state, according to every relevant human rights organization (@ICAHD in 2010, @UNESCWA in 2017, @YeshDin in 2020, @AdalahCenter in 2020, @btselem in 2021, @hrw in 2021, @fidh_en in 2021, @alhaq_org in 2022, @Addameer in 2022, @AlMezanCenter in 2022, @cacalqudsuni in 2022, @AdvocacyJlac in 2022, @miftahpal in 2022, @ICJ_org in 2022, @DAWNmenaorg in 2022, @amnesty in 2022), since it cannot grant the ~5-6 million occupied Palestinians Israeli citizenship. Israel chose apartheid and Jewish supremacy over democracy. It had to.

Zionism also explains why Israel is now committing genocide (according to @hrw @amnesty @MSF @AlHaq @UNHumanRights @UN_HRC @pchrgaza @AlMezanCenter @WarOnWant @PHRIsrael @BtSIsrael & 86% of the members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars), because, what a Zionist dream it would have been had Palestine been a land without any people on it! The ideology incentivized genocide.

So, please don’t conflate Judaism — that has existed for 3,300+ years — with your 150-yr-old anti-Jewish ideology founded on the principles of forcible displacement & genocide.

Judaism will last as long as their are humans on the planet. Zionism is imploding in real time.