On a bit more than strictly necessary – Ian Buruma in The New Yorker:

‘Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.” The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view.
Of course, opposition to Zionism does not itself amount to antisemitism. And right-wing politicians who accuse pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism are hardly credible arbiters. The Trump Administration, which poses as a defender of Jews, has nurtured links to antisemitic extremists; Trump himself has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers and once said that neo-Nazi marchers raging against Jewish “replacement” of non-Jewish whites included “some very fine people.” A hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists which claims to be the protector of a Jewish minority would once have seemed very peculiar indeed.’

(…)

‘Mazower, a scrupulous historian, disagrees. Antisemitism is far from new, he observes, but the nature of this hostility has changed radically over time. In his survey of antisemitism, Mazower largely skips over the religious prejudices of pre-modern Christians. Like Hannah Arendt before him, he treats Jew-hatred as a consequence of European modernity, which gathered force in the late nineteenth century, when many nation-states were formed. This was an age of political parties, newspapers, high finance, and the rule of law. In much of Europe, emancipated Jews were now citizens in large cities, with equal rights, and no longer minority subjects of noble houses.’

(…)

‘But more was at stake. Dreyfus became the lightning rod in a clash between two visions of France. The Dreyfusards, his defenders, were largely liberal supporters of the secular, democratic Republic; the anti-Dreyfusards were mostly Roman Catholic reactionaries who despised everything the modern state represented. They hated liberals, leftists, cosmopolitans, and Jews, though not necessarily in that order.’

(…)

‘One witness to the Dreyfus Affair was Theodor Herzl, a liberal, assimilated, secular Austro-Hungarian Jew who covered the trial in Paris as a journalist. Watching Dreyfus stripped of his rank before a jeering crowd, Herzl (about whom Mazower has surprisingly little to say) concluded that the only way Jews could live in safety was to establish a nation-state of their own. He sensed the danger of surging nationalist sentiment in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews under Emperor Franz Joseph had no nation to fall back on, unlike the Czechs or the Hungarians.’

(…)

‘Hitler’s idée fixe about Judeo-Bolshevism was real enough, but so was his belief that Roosevelt and Churchill were puppets of “finance Jewry.” He was convinced that Washington and London were “Jewified.” This had been a common belief among nativists and racists. Houston Stewart Chamberlain—who was born British, became a German citizen, married Richard Wagner’s daughter, and admired Hitler—was among those who saw the U.K. and the U.S. as horribly tainted by their immigrant populations. The far greater savagery of the Nazi war against Soviet citizens, compared with that against the Anglo-American Allies, had less to do with ideology than with race: the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were, in Nazi eyes, “inferior races,” rather than merely dupes of those rich, all-powerful Jews.’

(…)

‘Many Jews from Europe and the Middle East moved to the new state out of idealism or desperation. Most Jews in the diaspora, though, did not yet see Israel’s fate as bound up with their own. Whatever Gentiles might have thought in private, the Nazis had made overt antisemitism unfashionable, even odious. As Mazower notes, “American Jews benefitted from postwar prosperity and joined in the consumerist boom and the joys of suburban life.” Ben-Gurion nonetheless cast Israel early on as the homeland of all Jews. In 1952, his government declared, “The State of Israel regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.” He saw the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi administrator of the Holocaust, held in Jerusalem, in 1961, as an opportunity to tether Israel’s fortunes to the memory of genocide. In his opening speech, the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, said that he was not standing alone: “With me are six million accusers.” Hannah Arendt, who was present, wrote that the trial was meant to show young Israelis “what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life.”’

(…)

‘He rightly calls “preposterous” the claim that American universities are hotbeds of institutionalized antisemitism. Still, to adapt an old Jewish joke, some anti-Zionists dislike Israel a little more than is necessary. Much of this, too, goes back to 1967. Especially once Israel occupied Arab lands beyond the 1948 borders, the Palestinian struggle was folded into a global fight against colonialism and neocolonialism. Since colonialism is often treated as the West’s original sin, Israel was made to bear the guilt of five centuries of European empire. The state had not been founded to build an empire—Jews had no imperial metropole—but the settlement of Jewish communities on Arab land after 1967 did turn Palestinians into colonial subjects of a kind.’

(…)

‘In 2002, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago compared the plight of Palestinians in Ramallah to that of Jews in Auschwitz. Such comparisons are too easily drawn, with too much self-righteousness, as though the guilt for what was done to the Jews could be lightened just a little by likening them to their own murderers. As the German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder once said, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”’

(…)

‘When Shimon Peres lost the 1996 election to Netanyahu, he is said to have remarked, “The Israelis lost, the Jews won.” He seems to have meant that Israel had split into two nations, like France in the Dreyfus era: “Israelis” as citizens of a modern state, “the Jews” as members of a blood-and-soil community. It was one way to describe the collapse of secular, left-of-center politics in Israel.’

(…)

‘In fact, Khalil had been negotiating on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that sees Israel’s violence against Palestinians as part of a global system of capitalist, colonialist, racist oppression. “Palestine,” in its view, “is the vanguard for our collective liberation. . . . We support freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, and for all people.” This may sound simplistic or wrongheaded, but it is not antisemitic. Indeed, it fits squarely within the left-liberal, universalist tradition of Jewish resistance to antisemitism. Khalil himself—a Syrian-born Palestinian married to an American—might even be called a rootless cosmopolitan. That he should have been jailed by an “America First” Administration in defense of a government filled with racists who condone the killing and starving of civilians is damaging to the United States, disastrous for the Palestinians, not good for Israel, and certainly bad for the Jews.’

Read the article here.

Jews appear to be the favorite minority of governments and political parties thar thrive on nationalist sentiment and an intense dislike of everything that appears to be foreign.
This favoritism is instrumental, Jews are respected as long they are willing to leave to their own country or that they are tolerated because they are needed to bring Jezus back to this world, or they are respected because some people believe that Israel (i.e. the Jews) are fighting a war against the Islam. The enemies of our enemies are our friends, for the time being at least.

Still, one could argue that the nation state is an outdated vehicle for self-determination and security.
Peres was right in 1996, the Jews won, i.e. theocracy is. On silent feet it came.

Recently I met a lawyer in Israel who openly argued that two Jewish state are needed because he didn’t want to live in a theocracy.

After the two-state-solution, the one-state-solution, the no-state-solution, the four or five-state-solution.