For two thousand years, Jews lived with a simple vulnerability: their safety depended on the goodwill of somebody else. They could prosper when rulers and neighbours were tolerant, and suffer when they were not. Israel did not abolish antisemitism. It did something more fundamental. It gave Jews the means to defend themselves. The claim that Jews would be more acceptable if Israel disappeared therefore deserves a rather more searching question: acceptable to whom—and at what price?

Would Jews Be More Accepted Without Israel?

Here is a question that ought to trouble anyone who believes that Israel is the principal obstacle to Jewish acceptance: would Jews really be more welcome if Israel did not exist?

The historical record offers little comfort to those who think they would.

For much of the past two millennia, Jews lived as minorities scattered across other people’s countries. Their security was contingent upon the tolerance of those who happened to govern them. When that tolerance held, Jewish communities could flourish. When suspicion, economic resentment, religious fanaticism or political expediency took hold, Jews discovered how quickly tolerance could evaporate.

The essential achievement of Zionism was to change that equation.

A Jewish state meant that Jews would no longer depend entirely on the goodwill of others for their collective security. Whatever one’s view of Israel’s policies, that fundamental proposition is difficult to dismiss after the history of European Jewry.

The Old Bargain With History

The traditional Jewish experience was an unstable bargain: behave, prosper and hope that the majority remained benevolent.

Sometimes that bargain worked.

Sometimes it ended in expulsion, persecution or worse.

The establishment of Israel did not make Jews universally loved. Nor could it. No country can legislate away prejudice. What it did provide was something Jews had rarely possessed in their long history: sovereignty backed by the ability to defend it.

That distinction matters.

It is possible to criticise an Israeli government, oppose Zionism as a political programme, object to settlements or condemn particular military actions without concluding that Jews should be denied the right to collective self-determination.

Yet increasingly, the word “Zionist” is used as though it were itself an accusation.

That should give pause.

When ‘Zionist’ Becomes a Convenient Label

Consider the recent case of Rasha Zaid, a pro-Palestinian activist reported to have called for Zionists to be “locked up”, describing them collectively as racists and terrorists.

Such language raises an obvious question. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, would the hostility necessarily disappear with it?

There is little reason to think so.

Indeed, history suggests that antisemitism has always been remarkably adaptable. Jews have been accused of being capitalists and communists, cosmopolitan and nationalist, too religious and insufficiently religious, too powerful and too weak. The particular grievance changes. The target does not.

This is why the insistence that Israel is uniquely responsible for hostility towards Jews deserves scepticism.

Israel can be criticised. Israelis can be criticised. Zionism can be debated. But turning Jews around the world into moral suspects because of the existence of a Jewish state is another matter entirely.

The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between criticising a government and holding an entire people collectively responsible for it.

What Zionism Was Supposed to Solve

Zionism emerged from a stark conclusion: Jewish security could not permanently depend upon the benevolence of others.

Its advocates differed profoundly over religion, borders, politics and the character the eventual state should take. But at its heart was a straightforward proposition—that Jews should have a national home in their historic homeland and the capacity to determine their own future.

The religious case for that return is, of course, older still.

For Jews, the land of Israel is inseparable from the biblical story. For many Christians, too, the return of the Jewish people to the land has profound theological significance. But one need not share those beliefs to understand the political case for Jewish self-determination.

National movements are rarely born in a vacuum. Jewish nationalism was shaped by centuries in which Jews repeatedly discovered that assimilation offered no guarantee of safety.

The Holocaust made that lesson impossible to ignore.

Israel Did Not Invent Antisemitism

There is an uncomfortable temptation in contemporary debate to treat antisemitism as a by-product of Israel’s existence.

The chronology tells a different story.

Antisemitism long predates the State of Israel. Jews were persecuted in Europe for centuries before the modern Zionist movement emerged. The Holocaust was conceived and perpetrated in a Europe in which there was no Jewish state.

Israel therefore cannot plausibly be the original cause of hatred of Jews.

Nor does the disappearance of Israel logically follow as the remedy.

Indeed, there is something deeply perverse about demanding that Jews surrender the one political institution created, in part, to ensure that they would never again be entirely dependent upon other states for their survival.

Would the Jewish diaspora then become safer?

There is no obvious reason to believe so.

A Jewish State Is Not a Licence for Anything

None of this means that Israel should be placed beyond criticism.

A Jewish state, like any other state, is accountable for the conduct of its government and armed forces. Palestinian civilians have rights. Israeli civilians have rights. Governments can commit grave errors, and military operations can cause terrible suffering.

Defending Israel’s existence does not require defending every decision taken by an Israeli government.

That distinction is increasingly important because the debate often presents a false choice: either one supports everything Israel does or one opposes Zionism itself.

There is a third position—and arguably the more intellectually serious one.

One can believe that Palestinians deserve self-determination while believing that Jews deserve it too. One can oppose the policies of Israel’s government without believing that Israel itself should cease to exist. And one can recognise the legitimate grievances of Palestinians without pretending that Jewish national aspirations are somehow uniquely illegitimate.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

So return to the original question.

Would Jews be more accepted if Israel did not exist?

Perhaps some critics of Israel genuinely believe that they would. But history gives Jews little reason for confidence.

For centuries, Jews sought acceptance by accommodating themselves to the societies in which they lived. Yet acceptance was repeatedly withdrawn. The problem was not always what Jews did. Sometimes it was simply that they were Jews.

Israel cannot guarantee Jewish safety everywhere. Nor should the existence of a Jewish state become an excuse for ignoring antisemitism in Britain, America or elsewhere.

But it does alter the balance of power between a vulnerable minority and the world around it.

That is why the disappearance of Israel cannot sensibly be presented as the cure for antisemitism. It would instead remove the principal mechanism through which Jews exercise collective self-defence and national self-determination.

The Jewish people should not have to pass an examination in respectability before being permitted a homeland.

Nor should Palestinians.

The better ambition is not a world in which one side’s national aspirations must disappear so that the other can be accepted. It is a world in which both peoples can exist without being required to apologise for their identity, and in which disagreement over governments and borders does not become hatred of an entire people.

Israel is not the reason antisemitism exists.

And Jews should not have to surrender Israel in the hope that the world will finally learn to accept them.