John writes: ‘Here’s a curly one for you, Kel: what about the word Islam? It seems a strange word. Can you explain it?’

‘Islam’ is an Arabic word meaning ‘submission’. It seems to have come into English via Turkish around 1603. The word ‘Muslim’ comes from the same Arabic source word and means ‘one who submits’. Classical Islam divides the world into two spheres – the House of Islam and the House of War: meaning all those who submit and all those who don’t and who need to be conquered into submission.

What does the term ‘anti-Zionist’ mean? If someone calls themself an ‘anti-Zionist’ are they really a Jew-hater who is trying to conceal the truth?

The more familiar word ‘antisemitic’ really means nothing or less than ‘Jew hater’ – and I have written about that word and its origin in the past. So, what about ‘anti-Zionist’? Is that in the same category? The positive form of the expression, ‘Zionist’, is recorded from 1891 with the meaning of ‘an advocate or supporter of a movement among Jewish people for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine’. This notion was embodied in the Balfour Declaration – a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 announcing its support for the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine (some thirty years before the United Nations did just that in 1948). The source word, ‘Zion,’ is a Biblical name for Jerusalem. The negative form, ‘anti-Zionism’ is recorded from 1899 – so even before the state of Israel was re-established there were people opposed to Jews having their own homeland. I find it difficult to understand this opposition. They claim Jews arriving in the new state of Israel drove out the Palestinians. This is historically untrue – the Palestinians who left chose to flee rather than live in Israel (and were encouraged to do so by radical Islamists). Sometimes they say Jews and Palestinians should have equal rights – but in modern Israel they do. There are around seven million Jews and two million Arabs living in Israel – all with exactly the same civil, political and legal rights. There are Arabic members of the Israeli parliament, and Arabic judges in Israeli courts. Palestinians who live in Israel have greater freedom and greater prosperity than Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank. Given the mixed, democratic, and egalitarian nature of modern Israel it is hard to see how a so-called ‘anti-Zionist’ can be anything except anti-Jewish. The argument that Jews should not be allowed to live in their own ancestral homeland (occupied by Jews three thousand years ago) can be nothing but racist hatred of the Jewish people. To argue that every other people in the world should be allowed their own homeland except the Jews can mean nothing else. I may be wrong, but it looks to me as if people who call themselves ‘anti-Zionist’ are really just ‘antisemitic’ – but are too cowardly so say so.