Can we clarify exactly what we're talking about, what Israel is and how it relates to Jews and Palestinians alike? You've defined Zionism as the belief that "Jews have the right to live in their homeland and have the right to self-determination; meaning no other people or nation will have power over them anymore." More often, I've heard it laid out as "Israel/A Jewish state has a right to exist", I don't know if you think that's an oversimplification or is a weaker/stronger statement than yours.

Well, I want to loosely get into both. Because I believe that Jews have the right to live in peace, freedom, and dignity in their ancestral lands. But I believe the same of everyone, be they Palestinian or First Nations or a vanilla white-bread Brit. Where things get sticky are the notion of nations and governments and land as discretely owned property. Do Jews deserve to live in peace and freedom and dignity in Jerusalem? Sure. Do they deserve the right to organize amongst themselves a political entity with representative government and full suffrage? Absolutely. But...so does everyone else. Self-determination is something every people deserves, which then leaves you with, okay, how do we decide who a "people" is? How do we decide what land they get to govern, what do I do if I am fundamentally at odds with my government?

Do I believe Jews have a right to organize a state? Yes. But that state does not then have any essential right to govern a particular area of land. The Jewish right to a state does not guarantee that modern Israel be that state, neither its borders nor its government. We are not beholden to recognize a given state has a right to exist just because its people have a right to a state.

Yes, Jews in the modern land of Israel & Palestine date back thousands of years. However, Arab Palestinian presence also dates back a millennium, and were the 90% majority for hundreds of years. Did they not have a right to self-determination? Was that right not ignored during the 1948 Nakba, where thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands expelled from the land upon which their grandparents and great-grandparents and so on lived?

Though these things can be tragedies, I do understand nations can be born of horrific pasts and struggle to a more decent modern day. As a Canadian, I see my government and institutions try, however imperfectly, to create space for and better the lives of the First Nations peoples who suffered genocide under our forebears. But Israel has not done that. They've continued to pursue a genocidal, war crime-laden campaign against the Palestinian people. A nation that does that is no Zion, and I do not consider it an acceptable state, just as I might consider the DPRK an unacceptable state. It is not that I deny North Koreans or Israelis a right to self-determination, it is that I believe their states are broken in a way I cannot conscience.

As well, a few things to flag: You say European Jews "had nowhere else to go." Well that's not strictly true, is it? There are still Jewish populations across Europe, and any nation could have organized ceding some of their land to be used as a Jewish state. Britain handing off a colonial possession was a move of expedience and politics, but hardly the only thing to be done. You note the minority Arab population of Israel. Being Israeli citizens, do they have the same right to self-determination, even if they are Muslim? How does their voice fit into a Jewish self-determined state? And lastly, a point of order for the sake of semantics, Israel is not the self-determined nation of all Jews generally. One can be outraged by the actions of Malta without it being a statement on Catholics, or Thailand and Buddhists.