Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] When some people hear that they are being accused of antisemitism, they object.
[00:00:05] I'm not an antisemite, they say.
[00:00:10] I am an anti Zionist.
[00:00:14] Well, who are anti Zionists?
[00:00:18] In order to understand what is anti Zionism, I guess we need first to find out what is this Zionism that anti Zionists are against.
[00:00:30] The term Zionism was coined by Nathan Birinbaum in the late 19th century.
[00:00:38] It came from the name of Mount Zion located in the Land of Israel.
[00:00:44] Theodore Herzl, the leader of the Zionist Congress, wrote that the goal of the movement is to allow Jews live freely in their own land and be able to die peacefully in their own homes.
[00:00:59] Accordingly, people who call themselves anti Zionists must oppose the right of Jews to live in this land.
[00:01:10] The very fact that someone thinks that a person can lose his right to live somewhere because of his ethnic background or religion is already scary.
[00:01:23] It is similar to pales of settlement in Russia or Nazis proclaiming areas Juden Rhein.
[00:01:33] When people say that they are not anti Semites but anti Zionists, it reminds me of the infamous joke of Jackie Mason who said, I'm not racist, I just hate blacks.
[00:01:46] Some people who call themselves anti Zionists point to the policies of the State of Israel, accusing it of all kind of grave sins.
[00:01:55] Even if all these claims are true, the person making them cannot be called anti Zionist.
[00:02:01] I, for example, disagree with many decisions of the Israeli government, but that does not make me an anti Zionist.
[00:02:09] There's a big difference between disagreeing with a country's policies and denying its people the right to live there.
[00:02:19] The territory in which the State of Israel is situated was given by God to Abraham.
[00:02:27] At that moment, most of this land was not inhabited and its parts were settled by other Semitic people.
[00:02:37] From them, Abraham purchased the city of Hebron.
[00:02:41] Abraham, his son Isaac, his grandson Jacob and his 13 great grandchildren lived there with their families until famine forced them to temporary move to Egypt.
[00:02:56] There their children were enslaved.
[00:03:00] When Jews returned to their land after two centuries, they saw that the territory was conquered from the Semitic tribes by African nations.
[00:03:10] They took it back from the African nations and established a state.
[00:03:16] And they lived there for the next 13 centuries with an interruption of 70 years of Babylon exile.
[00:03:27] After the destruction of the Temple in the first century of common era, most of the Jews became scattered all over the world. But Jewish presence always remained in the Holy Land.
[00:03:40] Last year my daughter was in Israel and she was at a family that had not left the land of Israel for more than 3,000 years.
[00:03:53] Jews living all over the world are praying every day to return to Israel. And they are doing it for the past 2000 years.
[00:04:02] During this time, many countries have been conquering the Holy Land from each other.
[00:04:08] But in the entire history of mankind, no independent state except for the Jewish one has ever been established in this territory.
[00:04:19] Today I have two points.
[00:04:22] First, if you believe in human rights, you must believe that a person cannot suddenly lose his right to live somewhere because of his religion or ethnicity.
[00:04:35] At least because of this, Jews should not be prohibited from living in the land of Israel.
[00:04:42] But if you are an anti Zionist, you are opposing the right of Jews to live in the land of Israel.
[00:04:51] Anti Zionists want to take away simple human rights from from Jews.
[00:04:58] My second point is that if there is one group of people which, according to history, has the right to live in the land of Israel, it is Jews.
