In response to the Gaza massacre, Lottenberg denounces 'anti-Zionism'.

247 – President Dilma Rousseff has once again spoken out against the “massacre” carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu's country is losing the support of international public opinion. In light of this scenario, the president of the Israelite Confederation of Brazil, Claudio Lottenberg, denounces what he calls a new form of discrimination following antisemitism: anti-Zionism. Read more: 

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

After the Holocaust, the old antisemitism was replaced by anti-Zionism. The mask is new, but the horrific soul is an old acquaintance.

The debate about the Middle East currently seems to be regressing to the pre-1947 era, when the UN decided to divide Palestine into two countries, one Arab and one Jewish. Here and there, there is a renewed denial of the right to national self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancestral land.

The attempt to demonize Zionism is simply this: the denial of a people's right to self-determination. No other national movement has suffered or is suffering such an overwhelming opposing campaign.

It's fashionable to say that Zionism and Israel are colonial entities. It doesn't even work as a joke. Those who falsify history would need to explain why the USSR voted in the UN in 1947 in favor of a "colonial enterprise." A vote in which the biggest colonizer of the time, the United Kingdom, abstained. Incidentally, the USSR was the first country to recognize Israel.

We ourselves are citizens of a country whose independence was supported by the British Empire. So what? So nothing. It is common for nations seeking self-determination to exploit intercolonialist and interimperialist contradictions.

The division of a country into two also occurred during another decolonization, around the same time as the partition of Palestine, the jewel in the British crown, when India and Pakistan became two countries. And the criterion for the delimitation was also ethno-demographic, including population transfers—which today have become synonymous with ethnic cleansing.

The right to separation for peoples and nationalities who do not wish to live together was also ensured, more recently, in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.

Arguments that delegitimize Zionism barely disguise prejudice and discrimination.

Wars have winners and losers. The end of World War II witnessed dramatic and tragic population displacements, consequences of realities produced on the battlefield.

A well-known case is that of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, even today the Palestinians are paying the debt that their leaders of that time incurred by allying themselves with Nazi Germany. Arab countries also invaded the nascent Jewish state shortly after its independence in 1948.
Another argument against Zionism is that Jews are not a people, but merely a religion.

Each nation must define its own identity. If Jews define themselves by a religion (Judaism), a language (Hebrew), and a land (Israel), nobody else has anything to do with it.

Imagine the scandal if Israel changed its name to "Jewish State of Israel." But we don't hear complaints against, for example, "Islamic" in "Islamic Republic of Iran" or "Arab" in Arab Republic of Egypt.

Zionism was and is simply this: the modern expression of Jewish national self-determination. And Israel emerged from decolonization in the post-war period, benefiting from the right alliances in the victory over Nazism. That is the historical truth.

The only path to peace is the recognition of historical realities and the division into two countries based on demographic criteria. Two states for two peoples.

Old antisemitism went out of fashion after the world discovered the Holocaust. It was replaced by a new form of discrimination: anti-Zionism. The mask is new, but the horrendous soul is an old acquaintance. A true abomination.