Zionism is the most successful national liberation movements in modern history. And that is exactly why its opponents spend so much effort trying to redefine it. Let's start with what Zionism actually is. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people - an ancient nation originating in the Land of Israel - have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Nothing more. Nothing less. It does not require supremacy over anyone else. It does not require expelling anyone. It does not require domination. It simply states that Jews, like Greeks in Greece, Armenians in Armenia, Poles in Poland, Arabs in dozens of Arab states, and countless other peoples around the world, have the right to national self-determination. Ironically, most Jews throughout history were not Zionists in the modern political sense. For nearly 2,000 years, Jews lived as minorities scattered across the world. Yet every Passover ended with "Next year in Jerusalem", Jewish weddings commemorated the destruction of Jerusalem. Daily prayers repeatedly expressed the hope of returning to Zion. In that sense, almost every Jew was spiritually Zionist. What most Jews were not was politically Zionist. Many believed that one day they would return, but that return would come through divine redemption rather than political action. That changed because reality changed: The pogroms of Eastern Europe. The massacres throughout the Russian Empire. The Dreyfus Affair in France. The Hebron massacre of 1929, when Jews who had lived continuously in the city for centuries were slaughtered by a mob and the surviving Jewish community was expelled. And finally, the Holocaust. The central Zionist argument was simple: A people that cannot defend itself cannot guarantee its survival. History proved that argument correct. Had a sovereign Jewish state existed before the 1930s, millions of Jews would have had somewhere to flee. Instead, nation after nation closed its doors while European Jewry was being exterminated. The Holocaust did not create Zionism. It validated Zionism's warning. Soviet propaganda claims Zionism is racism. The historical record says the opposite. The founders of Zionism repeatedly envisioned a society where Jews and Arabs would live together. Jabotinsky, often portrayed as one of the more nationalist Zionist leaders, explicitly argued for equal rights for Arab citizens and wrote: "There will always be two nations in Palestine - which is good enough for me." Israel's Declaration of Independence promised: "Complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex", and Israel delivered. When Israel was established, the Arabs who remained and accepted citizenship became citizens of the new state. Today Arab citizens vote. They serve in parliament. They serve as diplomats, professors, doctors, journalists, entrepreneurs and military officers. They have sat on Israel's Supreme Court. They enjoy legal and political rights that are rare in much of the Middle East. That reality is difficult to reconcile with the accusation that Zionism is a form of racial supremacy, but "Zionism is racism" did not emerge organically. It was a Soviet propaganda project. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union increasingly aligned itself with anti-Western and anti-Israeli movements while simultaneously suppressing Jewish identity within the USSR. Soviet propagandists reframed Jewish national self-determination as a form of colonialism and racial oppression. The campaign culminated in the notorious UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared that Zionism was racism. A lie repeated often enough became international policy. Then history caught up. In 1991 the United Nations repealed the resolution. Even the UN eventually acknowledged that equating Jewish self-determination with racism was indefensible. Today the same propaganda survives under a different label: "Anti-Zionism." Its defenders claim they oppose Zionists, not Jews. History suggests otherwise. Every major anti-Zionist regime eventually became hostile to Jews. The Soviet Union persecuted Jewish institutions, Jewish culture, Jewish activists and Jewish religious life in the name of anti-Zionism. Across the Middle East and North Africa, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled, dispossessed or forced to flee. Communities that had existed for centuries - long before the rise of Islam - largely disappeared. The pattern repeats because anti-Zionism is not simply opposition to a government policy. It is opposition to Jewish collective existence as a people. There is also something profoundly dishonest about the way this conversation is often framed. People speak about Israel as if they are debating whether a state should have been created in 1948. As if we are standing before a blank page of history, deciding whether a country should be born. But that is not the question. Israel already exists. It has existed for nearly eight decades. It is home to roughly ten million people, including Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, atheists and others. Nearly a quarter of its citizens are not Jewish. When someone says they are "anti-Zionist" today, they are not debating a proposal from 1947. They are talking about dismantling an existing country and replacing it with something else. They are talking about the fate of millions of people who were born there, built lives there, raised families there and have nowhere else to go. No serious person would propose eliminating France, Japan, Egypt, Greece or Poland and then casually shrug when asked what happens to the people living there. Yet somehow this conversation is considered acceptable when the country in question is the world's only Jewish state. And not just any state. A tiny nation that has made extraordinary contributions to humanity. Israel has produced groundbreaking advances in medicine, agriculture, cybersecurity, computer science, water technology, emergency medicine and countless other fields. Its scientific and technological contributions are vastly disproportionate to its size. By many measures, it has contributed more innovation per capita than almost any nation in modern history. The debate is therefore not about creating a state. It is about destroying one. Not about a theoretical political movement. But about the future of millions of human beings. And in the West, the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism often collapses immediately. The people attacking synagogues are not checking whether the Jews inside support a particular Israeli government. The people assaulting visibly Jewish pedestrians are not conducting opinion polls about Zionism. The people vandalizing Jewish schools are not asking children for their opinions on borders, settlements or peace plans. They target Jews because they are Jews. "Anti-Zionism" has become the socially acceptable vocabulary through which very old prejudices are expressed. Every generation invents a new accusation. "Jews poisoned wells". "Jews spread plague". "Jews controlled banks". "Jews controlled governments". Today Jews are accused of being uniquely responsible for all suffering in the Middle East, by people who find point Israel in a map, if their life dependent on it. The language changes. The structure remains the same, with the language of human rights. History also teaches another lesson. When societies begin treating Jews as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely dangerous, or uniquely undeserving of rights enjoyed by every other people, Jews are rarely the final target. They are usually just the first. The same movements that demonize Jews frequently attack liberal democracy, freedom of speech, religious liberty, pluralism and individual rights. A society that turns on its Jews is usually revealing deeper pathologies within itself. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people deserve the same right granted to every other nation: The right to exist. The real question is not why Jews support Zionism. The real question is why so many people believe Jews should be the only people on earth denied that right. Zionism is not racism. Antizionism is.