Why Thanksgiving Requires Supporting Israel

Thanksgiving has always struck me as America’s most sacred civic ritual—a national moment in which we acknowledge that a people, fleeing persecution, crossed an ocean to claim their right to live freely on the land where they believed God had led them. It is, in essence, a holiday of sovereignty. A holiday of survival. A holiday born of a people who refused to remain powerless.

And so I cannot help but marvel at the contradiction of the student protesters who denounce Israel as a “colonial settler state” while happily celebrating a holiday rooted in the very history they claim to despise. They luxuriate in their American citizenship—born of territorial conquest and nation-building—yet demand that the Jewish state alone be dismantled. That is not moral conviction. It is intellectual fraud wrapped in slogans.

The American Promise and the Jewish Promise

To be American is to inherit a story shaped by displacement, struggle, and the forging of a nation from the ruins of persecution. It is imperfect, complicated, and real. And it is exactly this same pattern that defines Zionism.

Zionism is not colonialism; it is Judaism’s indigenous heartbeat.
It is the Jewish people returning to the home they never relinquished—spiritually, historically, or physically.

As a Catholic, I cannot read Scripture without hearing how profoundly rooted the Jewish people are in the Land of Israel. Zion is not metaphor. It is literal geography. It appears throughout the Bible as the eternal center of Jewish life and longing. “Next year in Jerusalem” is not poetic sentiment—it is a commandment of return. A 2,000-year political vision disguised as a prayer.

And as modern science reaffirms, Jews did not wander into foreign territory. Their DNA traces unmistakably back to the Levant. The accusation of “colonialism” is not simply false—it is malicious.

Anti-Zionism is the only ideology that demands a single nation disappear from the earth—and that nation happens to be the world’s lone Jewish state. I know the old patterns of Jew-hatred. I recognize them instantly. This is the same hatred, repackaged in the language of human rights.

An Assault on Self-Determination

Anyone who condemns Zionism while celebrating Thanksgiving has already contradicted themselves. You cannot praise America’s right to exist while denying Israel’s right to exist.
You cannot honor the Pilgrims’ struggle for refuge while scorning the Jewish struggle for refuge.

To reject Zionism is to reject the very principle of self-determination that defines American liberty. It is to extend centuries of attempts—religious, political, and genocidal—to erase the Jewish people, now dressed in fashionable academic jargon.

Anti-Zionism does not critique policy.
Anti-Zionism critiques existence.

The Hypocrisy Laid Bare

If an American truly believed that territorial displacement invalidates national legitimacy, then honesty would demand they renounce their citizenship and leave this land. But they do not. They only apply this standard to Jews.

America’s own founding was driven by people who fled persecution, just as Jews fled Europe when the world abandoned them. Six million were murdered because they had no borders, no army, no shield. Israel’s creation ended that vulnerability forever. It is a moral triumph, not a crime.

The people who sneer at “Zionism” forget—or prefer not to know—that Zionism is the Jewish people insisting they will never again be marched to slaughter.

Supporting One Nation Requires Supporting the Other

To be American is to honor sovereignty, survival, and the right of a persecuted people to build a homeland.
To be a Zionist is to honor those same principles.

These two nations—America and Israel—are bound not by politics but by purpose. Both were forged by refugees seeking safety. Both declared independence against impossible odds. Both insist that human beings deserve borders strong enough to protect them.

To oppose Israel while celebrating America is moral nonsense. It is hypocrisy that collapses under its own weight.

This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for both nations—one that gave my family refuge, and one that gives the Jewish people refuge. May the spirit of freedom and self-determination endure in both, and may those who love truth never be silent in defending Israel’s right to live.

Happy Thanksgiving.
May God bless America, may God bless Israel, and may He strengthen all who stand for life, liberty, and the sanctity of sovereignty.