I am Roman Catholic, non-practising, and I stand firmly behind Israel’s right to exist. And yes, I consider myself a Zionist. I was raised Roman Catholic, but I am not actively involved in the Church. My beliefs are not dictated by a church, a political party, or any particular group. I form my own opinions based on my values, my understanding of history, and my own sense of justice. I am not Jewish. But why should you have to be Jewish to support the Jewish people’s right to their own state? Why should you have to belong to a particular group to understand that its people deserve security, freedom, and the right to determine their own future? For me, that is a fundamental principle. The Jewish people have a long history of persecution, exclusion, and antisemitism. The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered, is one of the most horrifying examples of what hatred against Jews can lead to. And sadly, the history of antisemitism did not begin there, nor did it end there. That is one of the reasons I understand why Israel’s existence is so important to so many Jewish people. It provides a place where the Jewish people can exercise national self-determination and where their security does not have to depend entirely on the willingness of others to protect them. To me, Zionism means, first and foremost, recognising and supporting the Jewish people’s right to their own state. That does not make me Jewish, but it does make me someone who supports that right. And no, that does not mean I automatically approve of everything the Israeli government does. No government deserves a blank cheque. Israeli politicians and military leaders can and should be held accountable and subjected to scrutiny when necessary. But criticising government policies is not the same as denying Israel’s right to exist. What concerns me is that the word Zionist is increasingly used as an insult. As though anyone who defends Israel’s right to exist must automatically be wrong, indifferent to Palestinian suffering, or responsible for every decision made by the Israeli government. That is a caricature, not a serious argument. I can acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian civilians while defending Israel’s right to exist. I can believe that Palestinians deserve security, dignity, and a future without denying the Jewish people their right to national self-determination. Those two principles do not have to contradict each other. What I will not accept is the trivialisation of Jewish history, the excusing of antisemitism, or the justification of terrorism against Israeli civilians. The atrocities committed on 7 October 2023, the murder of innocent people, the sexual violence, and the abduction of men, women, and children must never be dismissed or portrayed as an understandable footnote to a conflict. You can stand up for Palestinians without glorifying Hamas. You can criticise Israel without holding Jewish people collectively responsible for the actions of its government. And you can support Israel as a non-Jew without being blind to the complexity of the situation in the Middle East. My position is simple: the Jewish people have the right to security, national self-determination, and their own state. Israel has the right to exist and to protect its citizens. For me, this is not a question of ancestry. It is a matter of principle. I am Roman Catholic, non-practising, and not Jewish. Yet I support Israel’s right to exist. If that makes me a Zionist in the commonly understood meaning of the word, then I have no problem saying so. I will not allow my convictions to be dictated by insults, peer pressure, or the fear of being placed in a particular political box. You do not have to be Jewish to oppose antisemitism. You do not have to be Jewish to defend Israel’s right to exist. And you do not have to agree with every Israeli government to be a Zionist. For me, these principles are entirely compatible.

I’m not Jewish. I’m a Canadian atheist with Arab roots. I’m a Zionist because Israel has as much right to exist as any other country. I’m grateful Jewish people now have one tiny piece of refuge on this planet where they can be (relatively) safe from all the violent hate.

Great reporting by Asra Nomani, who is all over these organizations who are seeking to wholesale destabilize the West. Asra is the go-to intel source on this global op. Nobody else is asking these questions—and finding answers.

I just read that a historian who set out to prove that Leonardo DaVinci was not Jewish ended up instead proving that in fact he was born to a Jewish teenager named Caterina, who was captured by the Tatars and sold into slavery. Around 1439 she was shipped across the Black Sea to Constantinople, then sold to Venetian merchants and taken to Venice, then on to Florence by about 1442, in the household of Donato and Ginevra. Donato had traded in the Levant and the Black Sea and already used Circassian slaves in textile work. In Florence she did household and workshop service and was rented out as a wet nurse. The Tablet article says she was also used as a sex slave, and that she already had children by the time Piero “borrowed” her as a nurse for his daughter and then freed her after Leonardo’s birth. She would have been about 15. The historian Carlo Vecce found an emancipation act in the Florence State Archives dated November 2, 1452, about six and a half months after Leonardo’s birth on April 15, 1452. It was drafted and signed by Leonardo’s father, the notary Piero da Vinci, acting as solicitor. It frees a woman named Caterina, described in Latin as filia Jacobi eius schiava seu serva de partibus Circassie: “daughter of Jacob, his slave or servant from the parts of Circassia.” Apparently, Circassian women were especially sought after. “Caterina” was a name often given on forced conversion to Christianity. “The most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.” His background: Carlo Vecce is a historian and philologist. He is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” and a specialist in Renaissance literature and civilization. His doctorate, at the Catholic University of Milan, was on that field. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Commissione Vinciana, the official body for Leonardo studies, and he has edited Leonardo manuscripts — the Libro di pittura (Codex Urbinas) and the Codex Arundel — plus a Leonardo biography and a reconstruction of Leonardo’s library. In 2023 he was named a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei in the class of moral sciences, under philology and linguistics.

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