...the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is… - Joseph Massad

Since its emergence on the international scene, the PLO has always distinguished between Zionists and Jews.

What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left?

Paramount among such events is the Jewish holocaust during World War II, which Zionists used for propagandistic purposes to assert their "right" to Palestine to which they had laid their suspect colonial claim half a century earlier. In appropriating the holocaust and its victims, Zionism and Israel asserted that any acknowledgment of the holocaust is an acknowledgment of Israel's "right to exist," and conversely that any attempt to deny Israel its alleged right to exist was perforce a denial of the holocaust.