“I’m a Zionist” is a phrase that simply means one believes in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination; which has recently been turned by many to mean, “I’m a terrorist.” Since Hamas attacked the south of Israel on October 7th, 2023, the Free Palestine movement has been slowly radicalizing. What once was a call for equal treatment of the Arab population in Israel has become a call for the destruction of the only Jewish state.
A common modern misconception about the Jewish population is that they originated in Europe, and after the Holocaust, the United Nations gave the British Mandate, commonly known as Palestine, to the Jews to create their own Nation. This is far from the truth. Jewish history in Israel dates back over 3,000 years, as evidenced by archaeology. Between tels, temples, tunnels, and more, Jewish history not only existed but was preserved. The reason there is an ethnic and cultural divide within the Jewish population is persecution and exile. Many Jews had to flee Judea—modern day Israel and Jordan—due to Babylonian and Roman rule, where their choices were to convert, leave, or die; this led to many Jews living in regions like southern and eastern Europe or further East in Asia, giving us Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrachi Jews, all of which still have Middle Eastern origins. As for the term zionism, though it was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1885, it is an ideology held by the Jewish people for millennia.
The name “Palestine” itself did not originate as the name of an independent Arab nation, but was derived from the Roman name Syria Palestina, imposed on the region after the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE with the sole purpose of severing Jewish ties to their homeland of Judea. For many centuries thereafter, the term “Palestinian” referred to all inhabitants of the region—Jews, Christians, and Arabs alike. The Jerusalem Post, for example, was once known as The Palestine Post, and has always been a Jewish publication. Only in the mid-20th century did the term become primarily associated with the Arab population, particularly after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, known in Israel as the War of Independence. It was not a war of colonialism but an existential war for survival. In the aftermath of the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947—a proposal to which Jewish leadership had reluctantly agreed and Arab leaders had not—five neighboring Arab states attacked the newly established State of Israel with the intent to destroy it. Against daunting odds, the Jews not only survived the assault, but they achieved independence on the very land their ancestors had walked. In return, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries in retaliation and found refuge in the new state, which became both a sanctuary and a homecoming.
In 1967, the boundaries of the area were once again rearranged by the Six-Day War. With its forces massed and seas blockaded in front of them, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Within six days, it had occupied the West Bank, annexed by Jordan, and Gaza, which was under Egypt’s rule. These were not random conquests, but the inevitable outcome of wars called for by neighbors unwilling to see Israel exist. To disregard this past is to make the tale of Zionism a thin charge of colonial exploitation.
Zionism is not conquest by strangers—it is the return of an indigenous people to their own land, the rebirth of a language, culture, and independence after centuries of exile. Hebrew was reconstituted, deserts were tilled, and cities that were but a remembered dream spoken only in prayer became great centers of Jewish existence. Israel, any nation, needs to be criticized when it is in error, but equating Zionism with terror, erasing one thousand years of Jewish history, and memorializing massacres as resistance are not the works of justice—they are misrepresentations, frequently antisemitic. The current radicalization of the so-called “Free Palestine” movement bears troubling resemblance to older, darker ideologies. Its chants for liberation “from the river to the sea” are not calls for coexistence but for erasure. Its targets are not only soldiers or politicians, but synagogues, Jewish students, and civilians thousands of miles away from the conflict. It transforms an ancient people’s struggle for safety into a pretext for their demonization.
Critique of any government is a democratic necessity. Regional peace has not been frustrated by Jewish presence; it has been frustrated by the obstinate refusal of certain movements and regimes to accept that presence.
It is a declaration that Jews, like any other people, have a right to a homeland where their presence is not at the mercy of the powerful. It has not been a war over borders, from the Jews’ expulsion from the Arab world through the 1948 and 1967 invasion setbacks, but whether the Jewish nation can or cannot have a right to its homeland at all.
It is not provocation but declaration to say, “I am a Zionist,” a repudiation of exile as destiny, a response to two centuries of persecution and dispersion. It is a promise introduced in prayer and sustained in expectation—that the Jewish people will not be erased from history, nor will revisionism destroy their thousand-year-old connection to the Land of Israel.