An antizionist is an antisemite hiding in the closet

The conflict between Hamas and Israel, unleashed after the unexcusable attack on October 7 th, generated several collateral effects.

One of them is the resurgence of a visceral and latent Antisemitism, waiting for the catalyst that will make it come out of the cocoon.

Many of these recently flourishing Antisemites do not consider themselves as such and, masked under the label of ANTIZIONISTS, they loudly maintain that they are not the same thing.

Dear reader, I will try in the following lines to show you the falsehood of such a statement.

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of Antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

To make it even simpler, let’s understand that Antisemitism is the hatred of the Jew,  their assets or institutions.

The term Antisemitism is not entirely happy, since ‘Semitic’ refers to the family of languages that emerged in Mesopotamia and the Near East before the first millennium BC, that is, there are several languages of that origin.   When Mr. Willhelm Mahr coined it in Germany at the end of the 19th century,  he only had in mind the Jews whom he hated with all his soul.  For him the term ‘Antijudaism’ had a religious connotation only.  He considered Jews to be foreigners and refused to consider them as German as himself.  He did not mind that they dedicated themselves to praying or eating Kosher, but he did mind that they claimed equal rights.

To this widespread hatred in different Western European countries, which reached a climax during the Dreyfus affair in France, must be added the insecurity of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia. Since 1881, Jews lived confined in a so-called exclusion zone, from which they could not leave.   Over there, they were constantly exposed to Pogroms, attacks coming from the Cossacks with freedom to damage people and things, kill indiscriminately and rape women, leaving their victims without the possibility of any possible compensation.

These phenomena generated the conviction that we Jews could never live in peace as long as we did not have a national home to shelter us.

In a world that little by little begun to recognize the right to self-determination of peoples, the Hebrew people understood that it was time to revindicate its own within their ancestral land.

There never ceased to be a Jewish population in the Middle East.   At some points in History there were difficulties in settling in Jerusalem, but for instance, not in Safed.

At the end of  XIX century, there was a stable Jewish population in the territory that since Roman Empire was known as Palestine.

A tough and difficult land whose owners were, in general, big landowners who did not live in the area and to whom slowly the diaspora Jews were legally buying each of the parcels where they later settled.

This movement of national self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancestral land is what is called Zionism.   It is not a bad word or an insult.   It is not a political position nor does it reflect a demonic or destructive ideology.

By the end of the British Mandate in 1947, a United Nations commission prepared a Partition Plan based on the existing Jewish and Arab populations in the territory, a plan that had the approval of two-thirds of the states that comprised it.

The Jews accepted.  The Arabs did not.

The day the British left in 1948, the Jews declared the creation of the State of Israel within the boundaries allotted to it.

Zionism is today the movement that defends the existence of a Jewish national home and the preservation of that state.

It is in that State where the largest Jewish community in the world lives.

Deny the legitimacy and existence of that State is to be Antizionist.

If a person claims to defend the right to self-determination of all the peoples of the world except one, this means he has problems with that solely one.  And if that only one is the Jewish people, we have no choice but to accept that this person is an Antisemite.

Obviously, these Antisemites do not recognize themselves as such and claim to be solely Antizionists as if it were possible to split both concepts.   But it is known that the abuser will never admit its abuses, the rapist will never recognize that he acted without consent and the scammer will never confess that he is a criminal.

If an Antisemite is someone who hates the Jew, his assets, and his institutions,  given that the  Hebrew country is the Jewish institution par excellence, if you hate it,  just come out of the closet and recognize yourself as one.