so. i'm going to answer a little biased. my family is from a place in europe where religious tolerance was the norm from ~300-1883. i think a jewish state, just like any ethnonationalist state, theocratic state, or if i'm being honest any state is a mistake. i do not think zionism being equated to racial/religious violence is a mistake given that the entire project of creating a jewish homeland started with deciding if it shoud be in the levant, modern day Ukraine, or the united states. the levant was ultimately selected less based on the historical merits of some manner of landback movement, but instead based on operational military realities.

in other words: modern day israel is where it is mostly because it was assumed Florida and Lviv would be places too hard to take over via violence. i cannot endorse this course of action in good conscience. during the rise of zionism as a political ideology, another one also rose: the concept of Doikayt. zionism is neocolonialism. zionism is "we have learned the oppressors ways through the last 12k years and now it's time we were on top." Doikayt is "no one should suffer as we have and i cannot be free as long as anyone is not free."

i very much believe that safety for the jewish people will not come from a jewish state, or any other state. it will come from meeting our neighbors, making friends with them, dancing and eating with them, and helping them achieve freedom from our united opressors. the thing to understand, as i see it, is that states are illusions of order. they are coagulations of violence that mimic acting in their people's best interest not in order to provide for their people, but in order to maintain control.

so. no. i don't think we need a new word. the old word has been a problem we've been working to combat for 140 years. the old word represents an entire ideology of hate and pain that will not ever provide us the safety it promises. and if we do need a new word to describe the problems with a jewish state, it should be in yiddish to represent that zionism is not rooted in the jewish identity, but rather in ashkenazic trauma response, much as Doikayt, hereness, is a yiddish word.