I see Herzlians say this about Jews all the time, and it really doesn’t impress me. Aside from being an argumentum ad populum, it is a worthless assertion because the overwhelming probability is that very few of these Jews know better. None of these people have any idea just how brutal the settlers were to the Palestinians in the late 1940s, nor are they likely to be aware of Theodor Herzl’s and Ben-Gurion’s nauseating remarks about other Jews, nor are they likely to have a deep understanding of Haavara, to name only a few facts from which Herzlians shy away. The upper classes don’t want to teach anyone about any of that, so they give the Jewish public a Disneyfied oversimplification of Zionism instead.

The reasons that many Jews approve of Herzlianism are similar to why most diasporic Italians approved of Benito Mussolini. Many Italians were casually profascist because the Fascists made them look tough and offered them obvious examples to cite proving that Italians weren’t weaklings or failures. They were desperate for role models, so they could hardly afford to be picky. In any case, probably only a minority of them were deeply interested or committed to Fascist politics anyway, so it would be an overreaction to ‘hate’ all of them. Most of them simply didn’t know better.

In sum, I don’t care all that much if most Jews believe that it’s ‘wrong’ to oppose Herzlianism, since I find it extremely unlikely that they support the movement being fully aware of all its horrible history. Sooner or later they’re all going to outgrow it, just like many Italians outgrew Mussolini. Every day the apartheid regime moves closer to collapse.