"I'm fine with Jews, just not Zionists"

Try it in a different register entirely: “I have nothing against Christians. I just can’t stand people who believe Jesus is the Messiah.” That sentence is absurd on its face – believing Jesus is the Messiah isn’t an add-on to Christianity, it’s the whole religion. Object to that belief and you haven’t found a narrow, reasonable exception to your tolerance. You’ve objected to the thing itself, wearing a mask of reasonableness.

Here’s the inconvenient number for anyone insisting this is only about Zionists, not Jews: across the most rigorous recent surveys of American Jews – Jewish Federations of North America’s 2025 study, AP-NORC’s 2026 poll – only about a third describe themselves using the word “Zionist.” Critics have seized on that gap as proof that “Zionist” is a fringe minority position. It isn’t. The same surveys found that upwards of 88 percent of American Jews affirm the actual substance of Zionism, unadorned: that Jews, like other peoples, have the right to a state of their own. What’s collapsed isn’t the belief – it’s the word. JFNA’s own research found that Jews who reject the “Zionist” label overwhelmingly do so because they’ve absorbed a redefinition of the term invented by its opponents: that “Zionist” now means “supports whatever Israel does” – a claim most self-identified Zionists themselves reject. Strip the word back down to what it actually means, and the number of Jews who hold the belief looks nothing like a fringe. The people telling you “it’s just Zionists, not Jews” have, often without realizing it, redefined the word specifically so that the number sounds smaller than it is.

Watch what actually happens on social media and the “just Zionists” distinction collapses further. Search any large account – not a political one, not an Israeli government account, just a public figure or organization (Jewish or not) – posting something as apolitical as “Shabbat Shalom” or a note about a Jewish holiday. No mention of Israel. No mention of Zionism. No policy claim of any kind. The replies fill with “Free Palestine,” with “Zionists should die,” with the same venom aimed at people who said nothing about a state, a war, or a policy – only that they’re Jewish, on a Jewish holy day. If the target were really “Zionism” and not “Jews,” that reply pattern wouldn’t exist. A belief about Israeli statehood isn’t insulted by a Shabbat greeting. Only the person saying it is.

The land the argument is fought over isn’t incidental to the Jewish story – it is the Jewish story. Hebron is where Abraham bought a burial cave for Sarah, the first parcel of the land ever legally purchased and deeded to the Jewish people, and where Jewish presence has been continuous for millennia. Shechem, in the heart of Samaria, is the traditional burial site of Joseph. Mount Moriah, in Jerusalem, is where Abraham bound Isaac and where the Temple stood. Shiloh, further north in Samaria, held the Tabernacle for over three centuries before Jerusalem ever became the center of Jewish worship – a place scripture describes as where heaven and earth met. Most Jewish holidays are about returning to the land – further illustrating how you can’t separate Zionism from Judaism. Judea and Samaria aren’t a backdrop to the biblical narrative, they are its return address.

That’s the poisoned root the “anti-Zionist” argument grows from, and everything built on top of it inherits the same poison. Consider what’s actually happening on the ground in Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords place under exclusive Israeli civil and planning authority. In August 2009, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad launched what became known as the Fayyad Plan: building “facts on the ground” – institutions, infrastructure, entire unauthorized settlements – with quiet backing from the European Union and the Obama administration, explicitly designed to establish Palestinian statehood without negotiating it. The Israeli watchdog Regavim has since documented over 100,000 unpermitted Palestinian structures constructed in Area C by this method, funded by hundreds of millions of EU euros, flying the EU flag over land its own signed treaty says isn’t theirs to build on. Land theft, carried out by the very governments that lecture Israel about the rule of law – funded by fruit from a poisoned tree, then sold to the West as a grassroots liberation movement.

The “settler violence” narrative that dominates Western coverage runs on a similar sleight of hand. It’s the difference between dying with a diagnosis and dying from it. An incident becomes “settler violence” the moment a settler is anywhere near it, regardless of who instigated it, who was defending whom, or whether a settler was involved in the harm at all. The label does the work the evidence hasn’t done yet, and by the time anyone checks the underlying facts, the headline has already traveled around the world.

And the movement claiming to speak for “Palestine” doesn’t even speak for everyone it claims. Bedouins living in Israel are Sunni Muslims, ethnically and culturally distinct from Palestinian Arabs, and a great many of them don’t identify as Palestinian at all – some serve, voluntarily, in the Israeli military. Druze citizens of Israel serve in the IDF at some of the highest rates of any community in the country, including in elite combat units, and have for generations. Both communities have been targeted by the same terror organizations the “anti-Zionist” movement excuses or romanticizes. The story requires a single, unified “Palestinian” identity in permanent opposition to Israel. The people on the ground are more complicated than the story has any use for.

The legal terrain is just as tangled, and just as telling. I’m currently tracking a case where a widow is trying to sell property that’s been in her husband’s family for generations. Because of ambiguity over exactly when title to the land was established, the transaction defaults to whichever legal regime was in force at that unclear starting point – which, in this case, may reach back to Ottoman-era law, under which women couldn’t independently buy or sell property at all. The workaround exists: her sons sign on her behalf, power of attorney, layers of paperwork. The sale gets done. But stop and notice what that means: in the year 2026, a living woman’s ability to sell her own family’s land can still hinge on what a defunct empire’s legal code said about women a century before Israel existed. That’s not ancient history. That’s Tuesday, in a legal system nobody has bothered to finish updating.

None of this requires Israel’s defenders to agree on everything, or even like each other very much. Coalitions are never clean. Anyone waiting for a perfectly pure ally before taking a side will wait forever, in this fight or any other – that standard has never once been met by any coalition in the history of politics, and demanding it now is just another way of ensuring nothing gets defended at all. You don’t have to agree with every Israeli policy, or love the government, or approve of the full uniform of anyone standing on that side, to recognize the actual choice in front of you. If the terror organizations currently fighting to erase a state and its people are not defeated, there is nothing standing between them and the rest of us. The mask doesn’t change what’s underneath it. It just makes it easier for people who’d never say the quiet part out loud to say the loud part instead. “I’m fine with Jews, just not Zionists” is “know your place” with a different target.