I just put my phone down. Literally…more like an hour ago. After I finished reading an article that hit me right in my soul. I needed a minute before I could do anything else, including write this.

It’s a long article. Dense. Beautifully written, but written for people who are already paying close attention and have the patience to work through a serious argument. The people reading Tablet Magazine already know what’s in it.

That’s exactly the problem.

Because the people who need this message are on Facebook. They’re watching Instagram reels. TikTok. Reddit. All the etceteras. They’ve seen the arguments. They’ve seen the facts. And they’re still not accepting what’s right in front of them. And they need these facts in a more digestible, scannable, easily understandable way. Not that they’re about to listen anyway.

Zionism isn’t some radical idea. It isn’t a dirty word. It isn’t a colonial project or an ethnic slur or a political extreme. It’s one single, simple belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That’s it. The same right that no one questions for any other people on earth. It’s not the Jews that turned it into the weapon that it is now, it’s the critics.

The article, however, takes a question….why does Zionism provoke so much rage? It reframes it in a way I hadn’t seen before. And it’s quite brilliant.

The nations making the most noise about Zionism are the same nations that have been slowly surrendering their own national identities, their own sense of people and place and belonging. They’ve been told that kind of attachment is dangerous. That holding onto land, language, history, and continuity is something to be ashamed of. And then they look at Israel, a country that hasn’t let go of any of it, and something in them can’t tolerate it. Maybe they don’t recognize where their anger is coming from, but Israel triggers it.

Here’s something else I’ve been thinking about a lot, and the article reminded me because it relates to it. Antizionists accuse Zionists of being brainwashed. Zionists say the same thing back. From the outside it can look like two teams with equal conviction screaming at each other. But they’re not equal. Not remotely. They aren’t even adjacent. Because one side’s argument lives in the present tense. It’s about governments, policies, leaders, grievances that change with every single election cycle. The other side’s argument is sitting in the dirt, thousands of years old, untouched by any current government or any living politician. It’s encased in a peoplehood. A nation that goes beyond borders, all with a deep longing for a speck on the map.

Zion isn’t a Netanyahu invention. It’s DNA.

Antisemitism isn’t a response to Israeli policy. Both predate the modern State of Israel by centuries. By millennia. You can’t brainwash someone into an archaeological record. You can’t manufacture a coin that’s been in the ground for two thousand years.

That’s what breaks the tie. Not that there was a tie to break.

It’s why I talk about what I do on this platform. To share receipts, to speak a truth that one side has decided are nothing more than a bunch of lies spread for $7000 per post. Not to argue politics, I despise politics. But sadly, because of how political being Jewish has become, I now need to pay attention to something I didn’t want to. It’s become political to show people what the record actually says. Yet the record has been sitting there patiently while an entire movement was built on top of the lie that it doesn’t exist. The coins, the scrolls, the inscriptions, the tombs, the temples, the names of villages that haven’t changed in three thousand years. I don’t need to go on, even critics get the point.

Israel isn’t a colonizer. It’s a people going home. But we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion had all of this been happening to, say the French. Or the Japanese. But, because it’s the Jews, that’s where the political issue comes in. It wouldn’t matter if it was Israel that was our ancestral home, or some remote island in the middle of an ocean.

I’m angry. Jews are angry. Because the refusal of so many people to look at what’s right in front of them isn’t confusion or a lack of information, especially when you have a world of knowledge literally sitting in your palm all day long. It’s a choice some are claiming as being the “right side of history.“

I could go on. There’s so much to unpack from that article. The link is in the comments. I hope you read it if you haven’t already. It deserves a much wider audience than it probably got.

(c) 2026 Melissa Brodsky

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