One must begin by refusing the usual grunt and eye roll worthy tired blackmail: that any criticism of Israeli Zionism is antisemitic, being a prejudice or hatred toward all Jews. That vulgar conflation is not only so disingenuous, but has done immense intellectual and moral damage.
Zionism, in its political form, is a 19th-century nationalist project, born in the age of ethnic romanticism and imperial cartography. It proposed, quite explicitly, that people of Jewish faith were not merely adherents of a religion or participants in a rich, diasporic civilization, but a singular nation that required territorial consolidation in historic Palestine. That proposition, even before one examines its consequences, is already a narrowing of Jewish identity. It reduces a vast, plural, diasporic tradition into something closer to a flag and a border. Now, how does this harm Jews?
First, it entangles Jewish identity with the actions of a state. When any coprotized government acts unjustly, repressively, violently, or genocidally, as Israel has been doing for decades and continues to do at the time of this recording, it ought to be criticized on its own terms. But when that state insists on presenting itself as the embodiment of a people, it effectively drafts millions of Jews worldwide into a moral conscription they never volunteered for. The result is a grotesque inversion: Jews in Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires are made to answer for policies they neither chose nor control. That is not protection, it is exposure.
Second, it has fueled a catastrophic alliance between Jewish identity and permanent conflict. A settler-colonial framework, where one supremacist population establishes dominance over another which had already been living in the land, does not produce tranquility. It produces resistance, resentment, and cycles of violence. Ask a 5 year old, "do you think it's a good idea as a small country to have all the other countries around you, most of which are larger than you, do things so that they either like you or not like you?" To hitch Jewish safety and flourishing to such a globally disliked project is to guarantee perpetual insecurity, not resolve it. One might say, with some understatement, that building a safe haven in the middle of an ongoing dispossession is rather like constructing a bomb shelter out of matches.
Third, Zionism has often empowered the most illiberal and chauvinistic tendencies within Israeli politics itself - religious fundamentalism, opacity of government, a propagandized population, ethnonational supremacy, and a disdain for universal rights. These are not merely unfortunate side effects, they corrode the very ethical traditions that have historically animated Jewish life. And as a result, you have physically smoking hot Israeli women who have psychotic ugly minds. All this being said, Zionism builds an imperial monotheistic civilization not only known for its spyware but intellectual dissent.
Fourth, and far from least, it has provided a convenient alibi for genuine antisemites. Nothing delights a bigot more than being able to say, “You see? it's the Jews" or "The Jews are the problem,” in a broad sweeping generalization, while pointing to the actions of a state that claims to represent all Jews. This is horeshit just as suicidal fundimentalist radicalizd Muslim morons with ugly ass scruffy beards do not represent all muslims nor Hindu or Christian Nationalists represent all Hindus or Christians. Zionism, in this way, hands ammunition to the very forces it purports to defend against.
None of this is to deny the historical suffering of Jews, or the real and persistent horror of antisemitism that literally mass gassed people or put them in ovens. On the contrary, it is precisely because that history is so grave that one should be wary of political projects that claim to solve it through exclusion, domination, or mythologized entitlement. The absolute tragedy then, is a movement that began as a response to persecution has, in many respects, reproduced the very conditions: fear, isolation, moral compromise, and fascist like fervor that it sought to escape. And in doing so, it has not only genocided Palestinians similarly to how Jews were genocided by Nazi's, but has also, more subtly and insidiously, placed Jews themselves in a position of moral and political jeopardy.
If one actually cares about Jewish safety, dignity, and continuity, one can conclude that tying them to any form of ethnonational supremacy is not merely misguided, but profoundly self defeating.