I Am a Zionist.

Please Continue Having Your Nervous Breakdown.

Apparently one of the most terrifying creatures on Earth is a Jew who refuses to die on schedule.

A dead Jew gets candles.

A persecuted Jew gets documentaries.

A historical Jew gets museums, speeches, memorial plaques and solemn promises that humanity has learned something.

An armed Jew?

A Jew who says, “No, actually, I live here, this is my homeland, and I intend to defend it”?

Suddenly the room catches fire.

Emergency meetings.

Emergency statements.

Emergency moral philosophy from people who discovered the Middle East fifteen minutes ago.

So let me save everybody some time.

I am a Zionist.

Not the apologetic kind.

Not the version sanded down until it fits comfortably inside somebody else’s political vocabulary.

I believe the Land of Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people.

I believe Jewish sovereignty here is not an historical accident, not a colonial project, not a temporary political arrangement and not a favor granted by the international community.

I believe it is the political restoration of an ancient people to the land that formed its religion, language, civilization, law and national identity across millennia.

And I do not believe there is a separate Palestinian national right to sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

There. Now everyone knows what argument they are actually having.

I believe Palestinians are human beings and possess human rights.

I believe individuals deserve dignity, security, due process, economic opportunity and protection from arbitrary violence.

But human rights and national sovereignty are not the same thing.

Every human being has rights.

Not every political movement automatically acquires a sovereign state wherever it demands one.

That distinction matters.

My position is that the Arab national space east of the Jordan River already exists in the form of Jordan, and that the historic Land of Israel west of the river is the Jewish national homeland.

You may hate that position.

You may call it maximalist.

You may call it offensive.

You may perform interpretive dance about it in a public square.

I do not care.

Disagreement does not turn history into fiction.

And I absolutely reject the language that describes Jews living in Judea and Samaria as foreign occupiers in somebody else’s homeland.

Judea.

Read the word again.

Judea.

The term “Jew” itself is historically tied to Judea.

Hebron is one of the oldest centers of Jewish memory.

Shiloh sits inside the biblical and historical landscape of ancient Israel.

Jerusalem has stood at the center of Jewish prayer, law, liturgy and national consciousness for thousands of years.

So when somebody announces that Jews in Judea are alien colonizers, I begin wondering whether language has resigned from its position and gone fishing.

A Jew in Judea is not a Spaniard in Peru.

A Jew in Hebron is not a Belgian in the Congo.

A Jew in Jerusalem is not an Englishman in Bombay.

Those analogies collapse because they erase the entire historical relationship between the Jewish people and the land.

You can argue politics.

You can argue borders.

You can argue military administration.

You can argue law.

You can argue demographics.

But if your argument begins with the proposition that Jews are historically foreign to Judea, you have not begun with analysis.

You have begun with amnesia.

And then, somehow, I am told this position is “extreme.”

Interesting.

The Jewish people maintained a continuous civilizational connection to this land through exile, prayer, law, literature, ritual and repeated return.

For centuries Jews ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Not “Next year in a mutually negotiated administrative zone subject to international mediation.”

Jerusalem.

The Jewish national imagination never packed its bags and relocated to Wisconsin.

Then came modern Zionism.

And here is the part that causes ideological gastrointestinal distress.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish connection to the land.

It turned an ancient national connection into political sovereignty.

That is the scandal.

The Jew stopped being merely historical.

The Jew became sovereign.

The Jew began making laws.

The Jew began defending borders.

The Jew began flying fighter jets.

The Jew began answering violence with force.

And apparently this violated the international expectation that Jews remain inspirational victims.

Sorry.

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Now let us discuss the moral vocabulary that gets sprayed around this conflict like cheap perfume.

Rape is a crime.

Kidnapping civilians is a crime.

Deliberately murdering civilians is a crime.

Murdering Jews because they are Jews is antisemitic violence.

A political grievance does not wash those crimes clean.

A national claim does not convert murder into virtue.

A revolutionary slogan does not transform atrocities into humanitarian work.

Context explains.

Context does not absolve.

That principle applies universally.

If an Israeli soldier commits a crime, investigate it.

If an Israeli politician says something grotesque, criticize it.

If the government makes a disastrous decision, challenge it.

But apply the same adult standard to Hamas.

Hamas is not weather.

Rockets do not grow naturally from Gazan soil after sufficient rainfall.

Tunnels do not spontaneously form under hospitals because geology became angry.

Hostages do not accidentally wander underground and remain there.

People make decisions.

Organizations make decisions.

Leaders make decisions.

Palestinians have agency.

Israelis have agency.

And treating Palestinians as moral adults means recognizing responsibility as well as suffering.

Otherwise you are not respecting them.

You are infantilizing them.

Then comes one of the strangest ideological circus acts of the modern age: people who claim to defend women’s equality, gay rights, religious freedom and liberal pluralism romanticizing an Islamist armed movement.

This political structure has the engineering integrity of a deck chair assembled during a hurricane.

It is a chicken campaigning for Colonel Sanders.

It is a vegan crocodile.

It is a toaster demanding recognition as a submarine.

At some point the intellectual machinery has simply detached from the vehicle.

Now let us address Israel’s army.

Yes.

Israel has one.

A serious one.

Aircraft.

Armor.

Intelligence.

Infantry.

Missile defense.

All the terrifying machinery that appears when a people concludes that outsourcing its survival has produced disappointing historical results.

For centuries Jews depended upon rulers, neighbors and governments for physical protection.

Sometimes that worked.

Sometimes rulers protected Jews.

Sometimes the same rulers expelled them.

Sometimes the police defended Jewish neighborhoods.

Sometimes mobs arrived first.

Sometimes states offered citizenship.

Sometimes states confiscated everything.

The recurring problem was dependency.

Zionism ended that dependency.

That is what sovereignty means.

It means the Jewish people now bear responsibility for Jewish security.

That responsibility carries moral limits.

It carries legal obligations.

Civilian life matters.

Restraint matters.

Distinction matters.

Accountability matters.

But those obligations do not require national suicide.

They do not mean that because war is tragic, Israel must simply tolerate armed organizations dedicated to attacking Israelis.

They do not mean that because civilians suffer, Jewish self-defense becomes illegitimate.

War is horrible.

That is precisely why starting one has consequences.

And proportionality does not mean playground arithmetic.

It does not mean one rocket for one rocket.

One corpse for one corpse.

One building for one building.

International humanitarian law deals with military objectives, anticipated civilian harm, distinction, precautions and necessity.

It is complicated.

Which is unfortunate for people hoping to learn the laws of war from three slogans and a cardboard sign.

My Zionism is therefore extremely simple.

I believe the Jewish people have national rights in the Land of Israel.

I do not believe those rights disappear because another population developed a competing national movement.

I do not believe historical Jewish land becomes foreign soil merely because Jews were exiled from parts of it.

I do not believe that Jewish return to Judea somehow becomes colonialism because history inconveniently predates modern political branding.

And I do not believe Jewish sovereignty requires somebody else’s permission.

This does not mean I hate Arabs.

It does not mean Arabs should be stripped of human dignity.

It does not mean every government policy is correct.

It means exactly what I said:

I reject the claim to a separate Palestinian sovereign state in the Land of Israel.

That is my politics.

Not yours.

Mine.

You are perfectly entitled to disagree.

What you are not entitled to do is rewrite Jewish history until my position becomes incomprehensible.

Because I know where I stand.

I stand with a civilization that carried Jerusalem through exile.

I stand with a people that preserved Hebrew when it had no state.

I stand with communities that prayed toward this land from Yemen, Morocco, Poland, Iraq, Persia, Ethiopia, Russia and everywhere else Jews were scattered.

I stand with a people that survived empire after empire and eventually returned to political sovereignty.

And no, I am not embarrassed by that.

Quite the opposite.

The helpless Jew is not coming back.

That exhibition is permanently closed.

The Jew waiting for foreign protection?

Closed.

The Jew depending upon a sympathetic government communiqué after the massacre?

Closed.

The Jew apologizing for existing on Jewish land?

Definitely closed.

Shiva finished.

Chairs folded.

Caterer paid.

Key thrown into the Mediterranean.

The Jewish people came home.

We rebuilt Hebrew.

Built cities.

Built farms.

Built hospitals.

Built companies.

Built an army.

And rebuilt the one thing history repeatedly tried to take from us:

control over our own destiny.

I am a Zionist.

A maximalist one, if that is the term you prefer.

I believe the Land of Israel is Jewish national land.

I believe Jews have the right to sovereignty here.

I believe Arabs living here have human rights, but I reject the proposition that those rights automatically create a second sovereign national claim inside the Jewish homeland.

You can disagree with every word.

You can scream.

You can protest.

You can invent another slogan.

But do not expect me to apologize for believing what Jews have believed, prayed, written and remembered for generations:

This is our homeland.

And after millennia of other people deciding what Jews were permitted to possess, where Jews were permitted to live and whether Jews were permitted to survive, we finally regained the power to make those decisions ourselves.

That is Zionism.

Not a slogan.

Not an apology.

Not a negotiation with history.

Sovereignty.