Ben Shapiro: Anti-Zionism Is A ‘Shallow Cover Story’ For Jew Hatred

Anti-Semites and Jew-haters cloak bigotry underneath claims against the existence of a Jewish state, according to Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, host of The Daily Wire’s “The Ben Shapiro Show,” delivered a speech at the University of Florida on Wednesday evening and said that anti-Zionism, the belief that the nation of Israel should not exist, is synonymous with Jew-hatred.

“Anti-Zionism is an incredibly shallow cover story for Jew-hatred – and because it is a cover story, it’s easier to proclaim your support publicly,” Shapiro said. “But as Karen Attiah of The Washington Post admitted, what Hamas did to Jewish babies is, in fact, part and parcel of the ‘decolonization’ process. You can’t destroy a Jewish state without killing a s***load of Jews.”

Anti-Zionism typically appears in different forms, according to Shapiro: first, Israel was a historical mistake; second, Israel is inherently immoral; third, Israel simply should not exist.

On the claim that the founding of Israel was a “historical mistake,” Shapiro said that no other country has ever had to argue for its existence like Israel.

“No functioning democratic state, by the way, on the planet Earth has ever had to justify its own existence the way the state of Israel is constantly called upon to do. There is only one state on Earth that happens to be called upon to justify its existence this way. It happens to be the only Jewish state on Earth,” Shapiro said.

The Daily Wire host then pointed out that Jews have lived in Israel for “time immemorial”; the historical record in the Bible traces a Jewish presence in the Holy Land back to about 1,400 BC. Jews have maintained a presence in Israel in some form ever since. The land was renamed “Palestine” after the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, by the Romans as an insult to Jews.

“There has never been at any point an independent Palestinian Arab state in the land of Israel. Never,” Shapiro said.

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On the assertion that the state of Israel is immoral, Shapiro said it rests on several false claims: that the idea of a Jewish state is inherently racist, that Israel routinely violated human rights, and that Israel has been a bad-faith partner in the “so-called peace process.”

Shapiro called the accusation of racism “ridiculously idiotic” because Judaism is a religion, not just an ethnic category. “You can’t convert to become a black person. You can convert to become a Jew. That is why there are black and brown and white Jews all over Israel,” Shapiro said.

He also pointed out that Israel is a religiously diverse nation as well, with significant populations of Muslims and Christians.

Claims that Israel violates human rights ignore that “Israel preserves human rights in ways its enemies would never even dream of, as everyone knows,” Shapiro said.

“This week, for example, Israel has been issuing warnings to Palestinian civilians in Gaza to leave military target areas, and Hamas has literally blocked roads to force them to stay so they will be killed in air strikes,” he said.

The claim that Israel forcibly expelled some 700,000 Palestinians from the country during the 1948 war is also a lie, Shapiro said before quoting from Israel’s declaration of independence: “WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”

While historians have argued over how many Arabs left Israel during the war because of a lack of supporting institutions and how many were “driven out,” Shapiro pointed out that hundreds of thousands of those Palestinians remained in Gaza, Judaea, and Samaria, and many refugees of the war were abandoned by Arab states surrounding Israel. Israel, on the other hand, took in hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Muslim states.

Shapiro said that accusation that Israel has not been a willing partner for peace is a “pure lie” that ignores numerous offers for peace the Jewish state has attempted and been rebuffed. Those offers included Palestinian control of wide swaths of Israel. In 2008, Israel offered for Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall are located, to fall under the control of a joint committee that included the Palestinians. That deal was also rejected.

“The final reason” people claim to be anti-Zionism, Shapiro said, “is just the reason we all know: Jew-haters don’t want Israel to exist because they don’t like Jews. That’s the one they don’t want to say out loud, but that happens to be the ugly reality.”

“Israel exists because Jews require a state to protect them. This is what history shows and [is] proven again today,” Shapiro said. “There is tremendous, sick irony that in the wake of the latest Jew massacre, there are those who are calling for the destruction of Israel. Israel is the guarantor of “Never Again.’”