Letter to an Antizionist Idealist

Key Findings:

In this letter, Hakakian challenges the most commonly held Antizionist viewpoints coming from the American public, rebutting them with historical facts meshed with her personal testimony of growing up under an oppressive regime. 

The author shares her family’s personal story as Jews fleeing Iran, and her experiences of going to school under the Islamic Republic. She describes a life upended by an ideology of terror and hatred. 

The Islamic Republic considers the West as its enemy. With the same outstretched arm, its authoritarian, religious fundamentalist ideology eventually landed in the Palestinian territories. The spawn are the terror groups Hamas, ISIS, and the Islamic Jihad, who rule over the majority of Palestinians in the region and readily harm their own people.

The inability to understand the geopolitical and ideological context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what Israel is essentially up against and defending, is a unique privilege. Antizionist Americans, unaware of varied realities and existing threats that are not democratic and free, speak from this blindspot.

Though there is room for criticism towards any democracy, those who vehemently oppose the existence of the State of Israel are unwitting foot soldiers to fundamentalist propaganda, and to the perpetual violence of hateful ideology. Ironically, these ideals are completely in opposition with the liberal values that most Antizionist Americans believe to align themselves with.