Ben Shapiro says most people, Jews included, often mistakenly define Zionism.
The superstar American pundit told a Toronto symposium on anti-Zionism that Zionism is not about Jews having the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Instead, he said, it’s self-determination that is backed up with action.
A people have to earn their state, he said — and he made it clear he believes Jews created a very successful state on the land of their ancestors.
“It turns out that if you want a state, you have to earn it, you have to show on a moral level that you will become a good and positive state, and most of all, you have to do the work to build the state. You have to be able to defend it yourself. You have to be able to actually create and innovate. Well, Zionism won, the baby was born, and that’s why there is a state of Israel today,” he said.
Shapiro – one of the most prominent religious Jews in the media – said if the “thousands of ethnic groups all over the world,” all had self-determination, there would be, by definition, many more countries in the world.
Zionism was “predicated on a moral call to action,” he said.
Zionism means that the Jewish state ought not to be eliminated and “that people ought not do unto Israel, what they would not have done unto them. So, no extermination, and no double standards. That’s the whole thing. That’s modern Zionism.”
Anti-Zionism, he said, argues the opposite: that the Jewish state of Israel, should be destroyed. “That Israel ought to be treated unlike any other country, because Israel is somehow uniquely evil.”
He was the final of nearly 30 speakers at the World Symposium Against Antizionism in Toronto on Sunday — a who’s-who of Zionist activism.
Produced by Tafsik, a Toronto-based pro-Israel group, and Stop Antizionism, it brought out many marquee names, including U.S.-based Eve Barlow and Lizzy Savetsky, Montrealer Gad Saad, and non-Jewish online allies American vet Nick Matau, Syrian-born Rawan Osman, and UAE-based Loay Alshareef.
Saad, author of the new book Suicidal Empathy, and a former Concordia University professor who has announced he is moving to the U.S., told the symposium that “anti-Zionism is simply the latest mutated form of a longstanding Jew-hating virus, and so again you see the analogy with the immune system, how it mutates.”
Canadian Natasha Pein, an academic with a forthcoming book on the history of antizionism, said the movement has been propelled by “the convergence of the progressive Marxist and the Islamist ideologies” that was “repackaged through the language of human rights, social justice, and liberation, DEI, and intersectional framework became that its delivery system.”
“Old libels were not abandoned, they were modernized,” she said. “Israel became a symbolic source of global injustice. Jews were recast as ‘privileged colonizers and oppressors,’ and antizionism was framed as moral cause. The result was ideological capture. Jew hatred entered the moral mainstream and became socially sanctioned, and what made this space especially so dangerous is that it no longer resembled traditional hate. It spoke the language of compassion and social justice, while denying those same rights of Jews.”
She said antizionism “follows a predictable pattern: a cycle that begins with words, evolves into exclusions, escalates into violence, and ends with denial and erasures.”
Toronto-based media entrepreneur Jesse Brown, founder and editor in chief of Canadaland, noted “this is not a Zionist conference. There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is not a Zionist conference. This is not a conference against antisemitism. The first symposium against anti-Zionism, specifically, and it’s happening in Toronto, a city that’s been plagued by gunfire and arson and assaults and threats, and it is the first one in the world, and it shouldn’t be necessary.”
He said the “anti-Zionist movement” has entered newsrooms “as a political movement,” and that connecting it to hate is “anathema to the mentality of the editors and producers who are making decisions, and that’s a problem.”
Naya Lekht, founder of Stop Antizionism, whose organization co-organized the symposium, told the Post that the event was aimed at being “a catalyst that will help our community shift the paradigm” in order to understand that “antizionism is Jew hatred.”
The call, for her, was so that “everybody can speak in one voice, to have the consensus… to equip people with the correct language to describe the correct problem.”
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