This December 3, 2024 interview of Times of Israel journalist Haviv Rettig Gur with Michael Moynihan of the The Free Press is worth watching in its entirety.
At around 48:00 minutes, Haviv address anti-Zionism. Slightly edited for clarity, he says:
What's an anti-Zionist?
An anti-Zionist is someone who thinks Israel should never have been founded.
That's a really interesting argument because every other Jew in the Eastern hemisphere is dead. What's the argument? Is the argument that the Jews who couldn't get into the West as the pressure was building in Eastern Europe and in Central Europe and in the Arab world because of immigration quotas and laws against them should have been able to get into the West? They should have had other choices other than to become Israeli. Is that the argument? I agree with that, if that's the argument. It would have been really nice if the whole world had opened their doors to these desperate refugees 10 seconds before their genocide, but it didn't.
Or is the argument that those Jews should just have died. They should just have died. Israel is the last living Jew in the Eastern hemisphere...
Jews were emptied out of everywhere. As the world homogenized few places did it as completely and perfectly as the Arab world. The Arab world is still in the process of brutally homogenizing. The Jews found one place, one Refuge, across three continents. The Jews had been living in Baghdad a thousand years before the Arab speakers got to Baghdad. In 1930 there's a census of where 25% of the city is Jewish in 1960 there's 0%. 0% of the city is Jewish. It was twice as Jewish as New York and then 30 years later it's zero Jews. The Arab world empties out every Jew...
Is the argument that they should have died?
Either your argument is history should have gone differently. In which case, I'm with you. It's a damn shame that Zionism turned out to be so prescient and correct. Or your argument is those Jews should have died and then I would be able to sleep better at night. Well then, you're a genocidal asshole. Or you're a Zionist.
