A Jew opposing Jewish statehood displays today historical illiteracy or suicidal self-destructiveness.
By Grant Gochin
Zionism is the Jewish people’s absolute movement for self-determination, security, and sovereignty in their sole ancestral homeland. Born from millennia of exile, genocide, and centuries of lethal powerlessness, its sole objective remains the permanent cessation of exterminating Jews. Far from the “colonial” slur European elites regurgitate, Zionism is an indigenous reclamation and a survival imperative. At its most basic core, Zionism means to stop murdering Jews, while antizionism means to continue to murder Jews.
INDIGENOUS ROOTS: THE BIBLICAL MANDATE
The Jewish tie to the Land of Israel is ancient, indigenous, and enduring. “Zion” appears 152 times in the Hebrew Bible as the geographic designation for Jerusalem and the land. Psalms 137:1 records the trauma of exile: “By the rivers of Babylon… we wept when we remembered Zion.” The Passover command “Next year in Jerusalem” is a political directive of return, not poetry.
Because the Land of Israel is the central stage of the biblical narrative, antizionism is a direct repudiation of the entire Bible. You cannot separate the people from the land without tearing the scriptures apart. Consequently, since the Bible forms the moral and historical bedrock of Western civilization, antizionism is a repudiation of the West itself. To oppose Israel’s existence is to dismantle the Judeo-Christian foundation upon which Western values rest.
It is impossible to be a Jew and an antizionist. To be a Jew is to carry the memory of Zion and the imperative of survival. A Jew who opposes the Jewish state is either historically illiterate or suicidally self-destructive, severing themselves from their own peoplehood and history.
THE ”ANTIZIONIST JEW” DOES NOT EXIST
It is impossible to be a Jew and an antizionist. Judaism is not merely a religion of rituals; it is a collective destiny and a nationhood. As Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy argue, those who attempt to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism are “Un-Jews” — they are undoing the very essence of Jewish peoplehood.
By repudiating Zionism, these individuals repudiate their own Jewishness. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, is explicit: one who separates himself from the community, even if he commits no other transgression, “has no share in the World to Come.” When “Jews” stand with Hamas murderers and call Israelis “Nazis”, or champion the destruction of the Jewish state, they sever their connection to the Jewish people. They are not merely critics; they are deserters who have removed themselves from the congregation of Israel and are deserving of herem (excommunication). There is no such thing as an antizionist Jew; there are only former Jews who have sided with their people’s executioners.
THE HOLOCAUST IMPERITIVE AND THE LESSON OF 1915
The 20th century proved that Jewish powerlessness is a death sentence. But the warning signs were ignored decades before the Holocaust. In 1915, during WWI, the Russian government under Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevitch inaugurated a campaign of extermination against its own Jewish subjects.

● The “Kuzhi Myth”: Using the war as a pretext, the military fabricated a lie that Jews were hiding Germans in cellars to brand the entire Jewish people as spies and traitors.
● Mass Expulsion: On 24 to 48 hours’ notice, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Lithuania, Courland, and Poland.
● Brutality: 600,000 Jews were turned into homeless paupers, packed into cattle cars or forced to walk until they dropped from starvation or insanity.
● Hostages: The military explicitly ordered the taking of Jewish hostages to be executed in case of alleged “treason”.
As I detailed in 107 Years Late for Dinner, this destruction was the precursor to the Holocaust — a clear lesson that without a state, Jewish life is cheap. Zionism in 1948 ended that vulnerability. Israel exists to prevent the next Holocaust, not commit one.
BINDING INTERNATIONAL LAW
The foundation of the Jewish state rests on binding international mandates that have never been revoked:
● Napoleon’s 1799 Acre Proclamation calling for the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews.
● The Balfour Declaration (1917) recognizing Jewish national rights.
● The San Remo Resolution (1920), an international treaty incorporating the Balfour Declaration into international law.
● The League of Nations Mandate (1922) codifying the right of Jewish settlement.
● The UN Partition Plan (1947), an explicit recognition of Jewish statehood as reparative justice.

THE LIE OF DECOLONIZATION
Europe holds Israel to a false standard while securing its own borders with force and retaining colonial vestiges. The hypocrisy is staggering:
● France: Paris administers 13 overseas territories, spanning the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique), South America (French Guiana), and the Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia). In New Caledonia, the 2021 independence referendum failed, yet France clings on, suppressing Kanak self-determination under the same UN Charter it weaponizes against Israel. Paris extracts resources while locals protest inequality.
● Spain: Madrid grips four North African enclaves: Ceuta and Melilla, plus the Plazas de soberanía—territories Morocco brands as colonial relics. Spain deploys razor wire and troops to repel migrants, mirroring the exact security measures it condemns in Israel. These footholds, seized in the 15th century, mirror the “settlements” Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez decries — yet he never suggests “nuking” Madrid for them.
THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF DESTRUCTION: Sánchez’s Self-Negation
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has branded Israel’s defense against Hamas “genocidal” and lamented that Spain lacks the nuclear weapons to stop it.
Apply Sánchez’s logic without exception, and Spain collapses:
1. Reconquista: The Arab-Berber conquest ruled Iberia for 781 years (711–1492). The Reconquista that reclaimed Spain for its prior inhabitants is, by Sánchez’s standard, “colonization.” If Israel’s return after 2,000 years is illegitimate, Spain’s entire national existence is illegitimate.
2. Migrant Claims: Over 70,000 sub-Saharan Africans reaching Spanish soil since 2024 possess superior claims under Sánchez’s rationale that interim occupation creates permanent rights.

ANTIZIONISM: THE IDEOLOGY OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
Antizionism is not a political opinion; it is a weapon of war. For someone to be an antizionist today, they must either be a combatant for the Muslim Brotherhood (knowingly or unknowingly) or completely self-destructive.
The ideology driving the hatred of Israel — from Hamas to European campuses — is the rejection of Western values, individual liberty, and historical truth. Europe funds this subversion via “lawfare” NGOs like Al-Haq and Al-Mezan, pumping millions into groups linked to terror organizations like the PFLP to harass the Jewish state.
CONCLUSION: THE WEST’S FRONTLINE
Israel stands as the West’s frontline against a jihadist ideology that seeks to erase not just Jews, but Western civilization itself. If Israel falls, Europe is next. Israel endures as the antidote: a sovereign refuge where Jews dictate their fate, not Europe’s.
About the writer:

Grant Arthur Gochin currently serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo. He is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs for the African Union, which represents the fifty-five African nations, and Emeritus Vice Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, the second largest Consular Corps in the world. Gochin is actively involved in Jewish affairs, focusing on historical justice. He has spent the past twenty five years documenting and restoring signs of Jewish life in Lithuania. He has served as the Chair of the Maceva Project in Lithuania, which mapped / inventoried / documented / restored over fifty abandoned and neglected Jewish cemeteries. Gochin is the author of “Malice, Murder and Manipulation”, published in 2013. His book documents his family history of oppression in Lithuania. He is presently working on a project to expose the current Holocaust revisionism within the Lithuanian government. Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner and practices as a Wealth Advisor in California, where he lives with his family. Personal site: https://www.grantgochin.com/
Sources:
1. US House of Representatives. (1916). Hearings in front of the USA Committee on Immigration and Naturalization: Russian Atrocities Against the Jews (H.R. 558).
2. Stand Tall Israel. (2025, December 12). He’s Spent 30 YEARS Studying HAMAS — What He REVEALS Is TERRIFYING [Video]. YouTube.
3. Gochin, G. A. (2022, June 22). 107 years late for dinner. The Blogs, The Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/107-years-late-for-dinner/
4. The Jerusalem Post. (2023, November 3). Editor’s Notes: No longer part of us. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-771479
5. NGO Monitor. (2025, December 18). EU Funding to Terror-Linked Palestinian NGOs Since 2011.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).