ANTI-ZIONISM IS NOT ANTISEMITISM. … OR IS IT? AND DOES IT EVEN MATTER?

The argument around whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a waste of time. They are both toxic ideologies and must be fought.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. This jingle is trotted out pretty much every time anyone calls out antisemitism in the Palestinian movement. This thoughtless, dismissive denial would not be so infuriating were it uttered by alt-right bigots. They are the usual suspects who might be expected to make antisemitic remarks and then deny that they’re antisemitic. The problem is, the phrase is almost always invoked by people who self-define as progressive antiracists.

There is a consensus among progressive people that the nature of discrimination, prejudice and bigotry is determined by its targets. African-Americans know what anti-Black racism looks like. Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. LGBTQ+ people are the experts in what is homophobic and transphobic. Women, not men, have the right to define misogyny. The progressive movement’s expressed values assure that every group of people is granted the right to define the bigotry against them. Except Jews. That’s the first big problem.

Similarly problematic: People who throw up this mantra contend that accusations of antisemitism are a decoy, a plot intended to “stifle” or “shut down” criticism of Israel. The mantra then carries a second meaning: Unlike any other identifiable group, Jews do not get to define discrimination against them … plus they’re liars who claim discrimination for crafty political ends; they are so manipulative and devious that they will exploit their people’s history of discrimination and genocide to win a political argument. (Tell me again how anti-Zionism is not suffused with antisemitism?)

Additionally, the idea that Zionists can “stifle” criticism at a time in human history when every individual with an internet connection has more capacity for reaching audiences than any human in history rests on stereotypes of Jewish power that imply a supernatural ability to control what non-Jews say or think.

The construction “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” asserts that the ancient and ever-morphing bigotry of Jew-hatred is somehow hermetically sealed away from opposition to the world’s only Jewish state, which is plainly ridiculous. Of course there is antisemitism in anti-Zionism. It may be 5%; it may be 95%. But the abject refusal to acknowledge that any prejudice is present at all in the movement is itself a symptom of a corrupt ideology and the sort of statement that no self-aware progressive activist should ever utter.

Discussion about Israel is suffused with conscious and unconscious stereotypes and assumptions about Jews and to say otherwise is absurd. 

If we are trying to have a discussion about bigotry, in this case antisemitism, and you say simply, “We are not having that conversation,” (which is exactly what “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” says), it may not mean that you are hopelessly antisemitic. But you certainly don’t get to call yourself a progressive.

It might be excusable if the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” maxim were used on the rare occasion when an argument could be made that a particular criticism of Israel is being condemned as prejudicial when it is demonstrably not. The problem is that it is employed constantly, even when an assertion against Israel is saturated in subtle or unsubtle anti-Jewish stereotypes and blatant bigotry.

The kinds of messaging that anti-Israel activists just simply can’t resist, and which you will see at almost any given rally and on social media, include Jewish vampires, cartoon images of bloodthirsty Jews, Jews deliberately killing children — all accusations that originate in medieval stereotypes and incitement about Jews.

The other most common approach is the use of Holocaust imagery against Israel: painting an Israeli flag with a swastika instead of a star of David, the equating of Israel with Nazis, the depiction of Israeli leaders as SS men. This may not be traditional antisemitism. But, because the accusation is so perverse and the comparison so false, it is clearly not intended to make any constructive political point. Its sole purpose is to rub salt in the most painful Jewish historical wounds. So maybe it’s not antisemitism, exactly, but it is deliberately calculated to injure Jewish people, debase their experience and trigger intergenerational trauma. Does it really matter what term we use for this sort of sadism? However we label it, it is something decent people should never employ — especially, it should never need to be said,  anyone who calls themselves progressive or antiracist.

There are other examples, such as the exploitation of the Jewish religious concept of “chosenness” by people who have no idea of its meaning to depict Jews as racial supremacists, and a host of other tools that rest on decidedly antisemitic foundations.

But let’s consider another facet of “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” that should be obvious, yet seems to perplex those who invoke this refrain. We are supposed to accept that antisemitism is wrong, but that anti-Zionism is just fine.

If you advocate for Palestinian national self-determination but oppose Jewish national self-determination, it is hard to see how this could not fall under the category of antisemitism. If you seek to eliminate the Jewish state — because, by definition, that is the meaning of “anti-Zionism” — but you do not seek to eliminate the French state or the Japanese state or any other national grouping but the Jewish one, the shoe probably fits.

Those who say Israel should cease to exist — or who advocate a “one-state solution” in which Arabs outnumber Jews in a unitary democratic state, which for all intents is the same thing — ignore or flout history that is critical to this discussion.

A quick lesson: Jews and non-Jews took different messages from the events of 20th century. Many people recognize nationalism as the cause of both world wars. On the other hand, many Jewish people recognize that Jewish statelessness was the crucial compounding factor that imprisoned their people in the Third Reich’s Europe and led to the annihilation of their families, language and civilization.

The Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe and half the Jews in the entire world, happened, of course, because of Hitler, the Nazis and their collaborators. But it could not have happened on the scale that it did were it not for the fact that the Jewish people of Europe had nowhere to escape to. At the Evian Conference in France, in 1938, the world gave Hitler a green light by making clear that no country was willing to take Jewish refugees — a crucial and universal lesson for today that is largely forgotten.

Ensuring that there is one country in the world where Jewish people control the immigration policy is not a theoretical matter. The tragedy that a Jewish state did not come into existence until three years after the Holocaust is a horrific paradox of history. And in the past eight decades, since the country was founded, it has been a refuge for Jews forced from countries all over the world, particularly 700,000 to a million Jews ethnically cleansed from the Middle East and North Africa, from Algiers to Baghdad. It may be safe to say that life for Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in the second half of the 20th century was as perilous as it was for Jews in Europe in the first half. The difference? A single, tiny state that would welcome Jewish refugees fleeing murderous persecution.

More than this practical reality, the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” motif ignores the connections that Jewish people worldwide have with Israel — and therefore belies the assertion that anti-Zionists routinely make that Jewish people should not feel the least bit threatened, hurt or affected in any manner by anti-Israel rantings, no matter how savage or bloodcurdling.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world still had its back to the Jews. Those who had survived genocide were faced with meagre immigration and refugee quotas in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Britain strangled migration to the nascent Jewish homeland in Palestine. Many survivors were left in refugee camps located in the very death camps where they had suffered and where their families were murdered.

When Israel was finally proclaimed — and successfully defended itself from attempted annihilation by its combined Arab neighbours at the moment of its birth — Jewish people worldwide rejoiced. The emotional investment that Jews in the Diaspora had — and have — in Israel is something that most North American activists do not understand and that they care not to learn or acknowledge, lest it have any restraining impact on the ferocity of their anti-Zionist assaults.

Consider what Jewish people worldwide must have felt as the magnitude of the Holocaust emerged in the years after 1945. Not a Jewish family in the world was untouched. It is hard to imagine the collective depression that the knowledge of the genocide rightly elicited and how that might have manifested had the extraordinary reality of the rebirth of Jewish self-determination in the State of Israel not created a light in that darkness. Whether they moved to Israel as pioneers of the new state or not, Jewish people around the world followed the news, sent volunteers to defend the state, donated money to build its infrastructure and made Israel’s cause their cause. This is the history that anti-Zionism spits on, whether it is, technically, antisemitism, or not.

And consider today. Violence against Jews in France, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe has large proportions of Jews — in some opinion surveys, a majority — considering fleeing Europe. Rampant antisemitism in Canada and the United States since October 7 has caused many Jewish people to really consider for the first time whether this is a safe place for them and their children.

The writer Howard Lovy has said, “Buried deep in the subconscious of every Jew is not money, power or influence, but an escape plan.”

It sounds trite, but Israel is an insurance policy for Jewish people. If that rings paranoid to your ear, remember the recent mass murders of Jews in American synagogues and the literally incalculable number of assaults and less violent incidents plaguing identifiable Jews in North America. If you had the depth of historical knowledge that most Jewish people do, you would understand the lesson from their grandparents and great-grandparents about waiting too long to make that decision, of hoping against hope that things would get better, until something absolutely unfathomable happened.

Now, can we see how a movement whose core mission is to eliminate the haven that Israel represents could be viewed as a threat to Jewish people? Maybe it is not motivated by overt Jew-hatred. But it demonstrates an insouciance about the fate of the seven million Jews who live in Israel and can be seen as something less than empathetic to the historical experiences of the Jewish people, whatever you want to name that phenomenon.

Israel exists. It has a right to exist. And all the frenzied shrieking of anti-Zionists only serves to remind thinking Jews and empathetic non-Jews that it has an urgent need to exist.

There has been an incredible amount of energy and argument devoted to whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, what defines the two terms, where the line might be between them and whether the latter poisons the former.

It’s all wasted time and energy. The juxtaposition of “antisemitism bad/anti-Zionism just fine” is flawed at its core.

They are both toxic ideologies and should be rejected with equal force.