Sorry, I know I am chiming in late on this, but I just cleaned out my inbox
and wanted to make this response:

Israel is a secular state. It is the extreme Zionists who want us to believe
that Israel is somehow implicitly "Jewish" in the sense of religion. Perhaps
it is somewhat ethnically Jewish, but that is an important distinction. But
the extreme Zionists actually go against Jewish scripture in supporting the
Israeli state as Jewish in a religious sense.

-- David
In a message dated 3/5/2 7:04:32 PM, you wrote:

>Well, my response is that there is a valid anti-zionist position.  It is
>the same position that I would have on any religion-based state.
>Namely, all states should be secular, so a Jewish state is no more
>ethical than an Islamic state or a Christian state.  For some reason,
>the world has coined a term for advocating a Jewish state, zionism, but
>there is no corresponding term for any of the other religions, is
>there?  Anyway, based on the claim that all states should be secular,
>and only on that claim, it is possible to be anti-zionist without being
>anti-semitic.  Note also that claiming that all states should be secular
>is not a claim that Israel should not exist.  It's just a claim that
>Israel should be a secular state.  Then calling Israel a Jewish state
>would be nothing more than a recognition that most of the people who
>live there are Jewish.  If Israel is already a secular state, then there
>is no valid anti-zionist position.  I don't know if Israel is
>technically secular or not, but if it is, then I would say that secular
>means less there than it does in the US, which is to say the US needs to
>clean up its own separation of church and state act, before it can start
>"preaching" separation of church and state to the world.