‘Pro-Israel’ a euphemism

Charles Krauthammer occasionally frets that one or another political figure may be anti-Israel (“Sanders is unabashedly anti-Israel,” June 4). I’m interested in testing what it would mean to be “pro-Israel.”

“Pro-Israel” is a sort of euphemism for pro-Zionist, for Israel is the Zionist state. The Zionist project emerged from the racist thinking of the 19th century, pursuing the notion that “the Jewish nation” should gain an ethnically pure state of its own.

The Zionists sought to establish an exclusionary settler-colonial state. Unlike the white South Africans who depended heavily on black labor, the Zionist settlers developed an independent economy. When the moment came for creating a Jewish-supremacist state in the Palestinian homeland, the Zionists simply cleansed most of the native Palestinians from the land, taking everything they left behind.

Racist movements have been in retreat since World War II. South African apartheid was dismantled in 1994. But Americans can still see the sort of moral reasoning that provides an alibi for supremacist states in the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and, of course, in the American entities that support Zionism.

Nowadays, however, Charles Krauthammer notwithstanding, the notion of states for one kind of people has fallen into bad repute.

Wayne Kraft

Spokane