Anti-Zionism’s Threat To Western Democracy

I am a natural-born American who identifies as an American who is culturally Jewish. I have been an active advocate for legislation that respects all people in our great country, which has the world’s most diverse citizenry.  The United States has been far from perfect in respecting all people.  But as civil rights legislation was taking hold, I, as a tail-end Baby Boomer, have reaped the benefits of living in a society where freedom, liberty, and justice for all citizens reached a level not seen anywhere else in the world. However, as a Baby Boomer, I have also seen the dynamics unfold that have led to the anti-Zionism and growing worldwide antisemitism we see eighty-plus years after the end of World War II.  I have grave concern about US and Western democracy in general, but especially for the safety of Jews not only in Israel, but in the Diaspora, including the United States.  Furthermore, history has shown that when the Jews are harshly persecuted, it is a sign that wider sweeping persecutions are to come along with despotism.

In 1948, the United States became the location for the United Nations. War-torn nations after WWII felt that the United States, as the most democratic and pluralistic society in the world, would be an appropriate location for this new global organization that was to cultivate diplomatic relations between nations. Today, it has been almost eighty years since the UN began its operations, and despite the vital work it has accomplished over decades, the UN has increasingly become an international battleground for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and beyond that the democratized West bloc versus a totalitarian East bloc.

Upon the passage of UN Resolution 181 (aka the Palestine Partition Plan), Israel was declared a nation-state. But an alliance of Arab nations led by Egypt, and including Trans-Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, rejected the UN Plan on behalf of the Palestinian people. (This Arab nation alliance was driven by similar ideologies embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood.) The nations declared war on Israel in May 1948 with a mission to conquer it and declare the region as only the state of Palestine. The plight of the Palestinian people has been used for this greater mission: to have the entire Middle East be ruled by Islamists. Ironically, those Palestinians who were living within the  Israeli borders established by the UN Plan became Israeli Palestinian citizens living within a democracy, while those who resided in the area that was to be the Palestinian state were relegated to refugee status since the statehood was rejected. This refugee status for stateless Palestinans gaslit the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.  Today, decades of Islamic terror and disingenuous buy-in to many diplomatic two-state solution efforts for the region over decades, the strategy to destroy Israel now included an infiltration of higher academia; the movements of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel (BDS), Free Palestine, and the like were designed to target young American and European minds and indoctrinate them with freedom-fighting spirit that is steeped in anti-Zionist and antisemitic biases. Also, the free speech afforded by Western democracies allowed the Islamists to propagate their ideologies to the general population through social media and the internet.  The funds for the antisemitic propaganda have been provided by an anti-Western/antiZionism bloc largely made up of Islamists.

Sadly, the plight of the Palestinians has served the imperialist ambitions of Islamists leaders. The region that is the size of the state of New Jersey had been Judea and Samaria in ancient times when it was under Jewish monarchies. This kingdom existed from about 1200 BCE until about 720 BCE. The Assyrians conquered it, and then it was conquered again many times thereafter. It was around 4 BCE when the Roman Empire gained control over the region and gave the area the name of Palestine – then a territory under Roman rule. In 476 CE, the Roman Empire fell, becoming a Christian empire about a hundred years prior to its fall.  This next period began almost a thousand years of rule by the Byzantines – also a Christian empire. In 1453 C.E., the Ottomans (or the Turks) conquered Palestine, and it became part of the Ottoman Empire under a Muslim caliphate. The region remained under the Ottomans for almost six hundred years, until the British and French, along with their Allied Powers, defeated the Ottomans in World War I.  In 1918, Palestine began to be under British control, which had an international mandate under the then League of Nations to administer the area. This terminated in 1948. So this tiny territory, having been ruled by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leadership, and was now in limbo in a post-World War I world. The region’s population was made up mostly of Muslim Arabs and Jews. However, many Jews left it over the millennia, fleeing persecution to parts of Western and Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and parts of Asia, seeking a life they thought would be safer and offer better quality of life.  But they were viewed as immigrants, or outsiders and refugees, and they faced horrible persecution and death driven by xenophobia from non-Jews. Thus, the dangers of leading a Jewish life in the Diaspora spawned the Zionist movement and that Jews should be able to return to their ancestral homeland and live in safety and peace.

After WWII ended, the people who were known to be “Palestinians” – Muslims, Jews and Christians, found themselves caught in the crosshairs of the post-world war era. This was in the wake of virulent antisemitism that led to WWII’s Holocaust – a genocide which killed six million Jews, and the death of millions of others in combat and as collateral damage of wartime.  The United Nations’ support for the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland was a hot topic, grounded in upholding Jews’ human rights and evolving international law; the genocide of six million Jews weighed on the moral conscience of all nations.  But the ideals that the United Nations wished to implement were challenged by the growth of a pan-Islamic nationalism that came from the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.  That movement had, like Zionism, its own ethnic and religious interests, and its fundamentalist ideologies have been hostile towards Jews, so they were not in step with the UN’s two-state solution for the region in the Middle East.  So, the Islamic world has a long-standing resentment towards the Western bloc.

Since May 1948, when Israel declared its statehood, the Islamic endgame for it has been in play.  In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created, with Yasser Arafat as its original leader. He held the top position until his death in 2004. It was in 1974 when the PLO became a non-member participant in United Nations General Assembly sessions, and over fifty years later, in 2025, the State of Palestine encompassing East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza was officially recognized as a sovereign state by 157 of the 193 UN member states (over 80% of UN members).  The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created to administer and manage the Palestinians within these UN borders, while the PLO remained the formal national ambassador entity of the Palestinian People. But the fundamentalist ideology continued to ferment, and militant actions against Israelis in the form of terrorism led to the 1967 War and more conflicts that caused Israel to annex territory as national security buffer zones.  The two Intifadas (Palestinian uprisings), one in 1987-1993 and the second from 2000-2005, forced Israel to annex Palestinian territories as a buffer zone as organized terrorism camped out around its borders, became an increasingly dire threat to Israel and its citizenry.  Hezbollah, a terrorist organization was created in 1982 by Iran – now radicalized by the Ayatollah after the fall of the  Shah in 1979. This proxy of Iran began to tear apart Lebanon using it as its base to destroy Israel. Hamas emerged in the Gaza Strip during the 1990s, and the Palestinian Authority was based in the West Bank. So, Israel had increasing terrorist threats along its borders.

The barbaric attacks on innocent civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023, were a well-planned, coordinated attack by the anti-Zionist terror network.  Globally, Islamist fundamentalists have adhered to the mission to conquer Israel, and along with this comes not only a hatred for Israelis, but hatred of global Jewry (antisemitism). The Free Palestine movement and its slogan from the “River (Jordan) to the Sea (Mediterranean)” was created as a revolutionary call for Palestinian justice and is marketed as such. But in reality its mission is twofold: statehood for Palestinians but at the demise of Israel and its people.  Thus, the violence against Israelis and Jews worldwide comes from the propaganda that the Islamist network has crafted. Moreover,  sophisticated underground infrastructure was built by Hamas with funds given to the Palestinian people to be used for humanitarian purposes. Instead, the money was used towards building shelters for terrorists that put Palestinian civilians purposely in harm’s way so an Israeli response to Hamas terror would create the optics that the Israeli military targets Palestinian civilians.  So be aware that Islamists “play dirty” in the world of diplomacy and humanitarianism. Now, they are well into their next chapter for dissolving the Western bloc as we know it: integrating Islam into Western culture and thinking. They have been successful using monetary influence, i.e., donations to higher education institutions and political campaigns, opening up beneficiary institutions to their extremist views and narratives. So now the Western world is a boiling frog as its democracy is at the mercy of left-wing socialism that champions anti-Zionist narratives, but also right-wing Christian nationalism, which is the extremism that has emerged to fight non-Christian influence in the West. Per usual, the Jews have become their scapegoat. is the frog that is slowly boiling.