Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism
The false distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has utterly collapsed in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities. Good.
Over the past five months of war in Gaza, there has been an outpouring of protest in favor of the Palestinian cause and against the nation of Israel from radical leftist quarters across the West. The virulent demonstrations, often involving slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have proliferated in cities and on campuses. They have sometimes become violent and destructive, targeting visible Jews and Jewish institutions. But of course, if you listen to the pro-Palestinian faction, these protests-cum-riots are merely against Israeli policies and politicians. They only want to make Israel stop its genocidal war against the innocent civilians of Gaza, who have done nothing wrong. They insist that they are simply anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, and that there are anti-Zionist Jews among their ranks. This is the mask they wear to court mainstream respectability. But the mask is slipping, and what it reveals is a deep hatred not just for Israel, but for the Jewish people writ large.
Before delving into exactly how anti-Zionism operates as a front for plain old antisemitism, we need to understand what Zionism is, its history and relation to Judaism as a faith, and general Jewish attitudes towards the idea. In short, Zionism is the basic idea that Jews should have a national homeland in the land of their ancestors, Israel. Its modern iteration, the one that resulted in the fulfillment of the Zionist dream with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, began in Europe in the late 19th century. This was a time of national movements for the creation of states for specific peoples, most powerfully felt in Europe. Various ethnic groups, especially in the imperial lands of Eastern Europe, sought either to create or reclaim ancient nations. The Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, and, yes, the Jews, all fit into this intellectual program.
Some Zionists, including the father of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl, sought a Jewish state regardless of location, but others, including more religious Jews, saw the only location as the historic homeland of the Jewish people: Israel. The latter group won out in the end, and Zionism was embraced by the British government in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for Jewish immigration to the territory of British Mandate Palestine. With fits and starts afterwards, more Jews purchased land and moved into what would become the nation of Israel in 1948.
Anti-Zionists argue that Jewish connection to the land of Israel is either deep in the historical past or entirely made up. As one can see by investigating maps, Jews have lived consistently in the area of modern Israel long before the Balfour Declaration or even the foundation of Zionist political ideology in 1800s Europe. Their presence in the Levant is attested throughout the past two millennia in the historical record, and most Israeli Jews share that connection. Israelis come in all races and national backgrounds, and, despite the leftist claims of Israel as a land of white settler-colonialists from Europe, a majority of Israelis have Arab heritage and genetic ties to the region. The Jewish connection to Israel is not tenuous, but tenacious. And it stretches deep into the ancient past.
The land of Israel was indeed home to the only Jewish state that existed before 1948. The links to this national homeland are profound. Archaeological evidence has conclusively shown that Jewish presence in the Holy Land dates back millennia, including in the form of an organized polity. Historical evidence is just as persuasive. All contemporary ancient sources, from Greece and Rome to Persia and Egypt, testify to the kingdom of the Jews in Judea. They write contemporaneously about Jewish kings, relations with bigger imperial dynasties, and wars and revolts that Jews were involved in. We have records of the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BC and the subsequent forced Jewish exile, the return from exile under Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great, the construction of the Second Temple under the allowance of his successor Darius I in 516 BC, and the destruction of that temple by the Romans under Titus in 70 AD. The diaspora of Jews which was created by the Romans after the Third Roman-Jewish War ended with the defeat of Simon bar Kokhba in 136 AD was intended to scatter these troublesome monotheists to the winds, ending their threat to Roman imperial hegemony in the Levant. This is the veritable Mount Sinai of evidence that anti-Zionists deliberately ignore to pretend that Israel was simply a project of modern Europeans.
Zionism is also a significant aspect of the Jewish faith as understood by its orthodox practitioners. Myriad Jewish prayers, including many dating back millennia, mention the Holy Land or Jerusalem by name. Longing for a return to the land of David and Solomon is encoded within the religion itself. Prayers are spoken facing Jerusalem, the holiest site in the Jewish faith is the lone remaining retaining wall standing after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (in Jerusalem, of course), and multiple Jewish holidays revolve around Jewish history in what is today Israel. Even many non-Jews have heard the phrase “next year in Jerusalem” uttered at the end of a Passover seder; this phrase dates back over 1000 years and has been used in Passover prayers since at least the 1400s. The vast majority of Jews across the world consider themselves Zionists. Obviously, Israeli Jews are Zionist – why else would they choose to live in Israel? – but so are American Jews. Those diaspora Jews who have the least connection to Israel also have the least connection to the Jewish faith altogether. These are, in the term coined by the writer Eli Lake, the ‘AsAJews’, who use their ethnic identity as a tool to deflect from the antisemitism inherent in the anti-Zionist views of their political allies.
Now that we’ve discussed Zionism and its profound ties to the Jewish people, their history, and their faith, we must plumb the depths of anti-Zionism and see just how it acts as a mere fig leaf for virulent antisemitism.
First, we need to understand what antisemitism and anti-Zionism are, definitionally. The most comprehensive definition of antisemitism comes from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The importance of this definition is its inclusion of several key ideas: Holocaust denial, dual-loyalty accusations, arguments against the state of Israel’s existence, and holding Jews accountable for the actions of the Israeli government. All of these are antisemitic actions that would also be considered anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism generally is opposition to the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It is not mere criticism of Israeli policy, but can include said criticisms – for instance, thinking that Israeli judicial reform is bad is not anti-Zionist, but falsely claiming that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is. The vast majority of self-described anti-Zionists do not simply disagree with the Likud government, but with the very fact of Israel itself.
Anti-Zionism is, interestingly enough, a far younger phenomenon than the Zionism it opposes. Modern anti-Zionism truly takes it roots from the antisemitic propaganda of the Soviet Union, which was supercharged after it became clear that the nascent state of Israel – in spite of its early dalliance with socialism – would not be a Soviet satrapy in the Middle East. The tide was already turning five years after Israel’s declaration of independence, when Joseph Stalin attacked the so-called Doctors’ Plot, a wholly fictional attempt by “Zionists” and Jews to murder Soviet officials and destroy the USSR. This antisemitic outburst was linked directly to Israel, something that future Soviet leaders would run with. In its attempts to gain the confidence and the alignment of the Arab states, the USSR went all-in on pushing its anti-Zionist message – and the leaders and publics of these nations were primed to lap it up.
The Soviet Union pushed the very same ideas that characterize the anti-Zionist left today: the genocide smear, the idea that Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial entity, and the claim that Zionism is inherently racist. That final libel had a great degree of success when it was incepted into the intellectual ecosystem by the Soviets. In fact, the United Nations, that paragon of antisemitism and villainy, adopted a resolution saying just that back in 1975. That infamous resolution, although it would be revoked in 1991, colors anti-Zionist arguments to this day. Reading Soviet propaganda from the 1980s and leftist agitprop from 2024 together shows exactly how little the message has changed. Although the USSR fell 30 years ago, its bankrupt ideology has gained steadfast support in the progressive elite class and the youth cohort of the West.
That support has been visible on the streets and campuses of Western cities since October 7, and has only increased in its aggressiveness and outright antisemitism in the months since. These street agitators have not limited their protests to Israeli consulates and embassies, but instead have deliberately targeted Jewish people, institutions, and businesses. They cannot know the opinions of these targets when it comes to Zionism because they do not ask; they simply become enraged at the sight of anything even Jewish-adjacent. From the common tactic of ripping down hostage posters – such a blow against Israeli government policy! – to the chanting of eliminationist slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the supposed discrepancy between anti-Zionism and antisemitism was minimized. As of March 2024, it has collapsed entirely. The Venn diagram is now a circle.
In the past week alone, we have seen repeated demonstrations of the truth of the matter: that anti-Zionism is entirely indistinguishable from rank antisemitism. Progressive staffers in Congress have been revealed to be behind antisemitic social media accounts, with little to no punishment. Synagogues have been repeatedly targeted for protest because, in the words of one activist, these religious institutions have “been overrun with Zionists” and transformed into “unsacred factories of genocidal violence.” Sounds to me like a call to violence that would not be out of place in a Hamas screed. These words have been turned into reality over and over again, notably at a synagogue and Jewish day school in Canada, where pro-Palestinian protestors chanted “long live the intifada,” a reference to the terrorist massacre campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s, and claimed that Jews “tried to oppress and colonialize South Africa and Germany.” (The inclusion of Germany here is pretty startling, even for someone as familiar with antisemitic rhetoric as myself.) Following up on this sentiment, riotous demonstrators have also targeted Holocaust museums, vandalizing them and shouting (in Arabic, naturally) totally-not-antisemitic slogans like “Death to Israel, death to the Jews.”
On college campuses, student groups have referred to themselves as “militant” and seeking “armed struggle” against the “Zionist entity” (aka Israel). Other campuses have dealt with swastika graffiti and stolen mezuzahs on door frames – to which the Smith College administration responded with condemnations of Islamophobia and meetings about divestment from Israel. Jewish students at Tufts University have been accosted and libeled at student government meetings, being called “dogs” and “stinky Jews.” Activists at Cornell have ignored repeated rhetorical attempts by the school administration to stop them from disrupting campus, responding that they “don’t take [their] cue from some bullshit Student Assembly,” but “from the armed resistance in Palestine,” namely Hamas. Protestors at Hunter College in New York City confronted Jews on campus, demanding that they “pick a side.” The students aren’t the only radicals, however. Zionists should, to one Australian academic, be denied “cultural safety” and any sort of space to “espouse [their] Zionist racist ideology.” Other professors have celebrated the barbaric atrocities of Hamas on October 7 as virtuous acts of resistance against genocidal oppressors.
That is, in a (admittedly quite sizable) nutshell, why anti-Zionism is just another manifestation of antisemitism. It cloaks itself in respectability, but at root it is the same age-old hatred. It is even worse that the cover story for this particular form of antisemitism was cribbed directly from Stalinist agitprop. These facts are highly inconvenient to progressives and the media, so they simply evade them and label the idea as controversial. Democrat politicians are so afraid to call a spade a spade that their caucus fractured over a simple resolution stating the truth of the matter. This is not because the anti-Zionist crowd is large, but because it is loud and influential in the places that politicians look for advice and information: the press, NGOs, their staffers, and social media. Those precincts are chock full of radical left-wingers for whom Israel is their bête noire. And the measured yet successful Israeli response to the terrorist assault of October 7 strikes directly at the heart of their pet Palestinian cause. As such, the anti-Zionism dial has been turned to the maximum, making the antisemitism inherent within it all the more obvious.
There is no controversy for anyone who cares to investigate with an open mind. The mask has not just slipped, it has been discarded entirely. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, end of story.