https://jacobin.com/2024/01/shaul-magid-interview-zionism-anti-zionism-judaism-history/
…after 1945, the world was dealing with a tremendous refugee problem, of hundreds of thousands of Jews, who were displaced people. For the most part, European countries and the United States weren’t interested in taking these highly traumatized refugees. So it kind of made sense on the world stage to make some kind of place for the Jews to go. The statist Zionists took that opportunity and went with it. Many of those Palestinians who were living in Mandate Palestine and then Israel in 1948 were dispossessed of land, were displaced. Seventy-five percent of people living in Gaza now are either refugees or children or grandchildren of refugees from ’48. There’s irony here that Israel comes into existence to solve a refugee problem, on some level, and in doing so it creates a refugee problem. There was a big debate in’48 and ’49 about whether to let many of those refugees from the ’48 war back to their villages and towns in Israel. Ben-Gurion was dead set against it. He wanted the fewest Arabs possible within the Jewish state. Other people like Martin Buber argued vociferously with Ben-Gurion that you have let these refugees back — we were just refugees a few years ago, you have to allow at least some number of them return. Ben-Gurion said no, and I think that was a tragic mistake that Israel is still living in the aftermath of. That’s what we’ve come to: what determines whether you are for the Jews depends what your stance on Israel is. I know it’s hard for people to get their head around, but there are many pro-Israel antisemites. Their pro-Israelism is part of their Christian dispensational ideology that Jesus is going to come back, the Jews are going to have a chance to accept him, and if they don’t, the earth is going to open up and they’re going to fall in. That’s the Book of Revelation. That’s ok. But if you’re an anti-Zionist, you are an enemy of the Jews. I worry that this equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, alongside the actually existing Zionist state’s monstrous actions in Gaza, will or is already fueling actual antisemitism. Obviously, nothing Israel does can excuse antisemitism, but we have Israel doing these horrific things in the name of all Jews at the same time that pro-Israel figures who are telling people who oppose Israel that they are in fact antisemites. When the antisemite is going to point to the Jew in the street in New York City and say, “You’re committing genocide” or “You’re destroying the Palestinian people,” and that person is saying, “No, I’m an American Jew. That’s not me,” and then when Israel in 2018 in the Nation-State Bill says “Israel is the nation-state of the entire Jewish people,” Israel has essentially put into law what the antisemites are arguing: that every Jew is complicit in everything Israel does. They have different ways of articulating it, but it’s the same structural equation.Jewish insistence on vulnerability is often brought up alongside an insistence on Jewish supremacy and strength, sometimes including an openly annihilationist strength vis-à-vis Palestinians. It’s a discourse that can normalize ongoing Israeli settlement into the territories between the river and the sea, while insisting that the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is inherently genocidal against Jews — as if Palestinian freedom inherently means genocide of Jews.