FROM WOO-WOO TO KOOKOO
ANTISEMITISM HISTORICALLY WAS BASED ON SPIRITUAL OOGA-BOOGA. ANTI-ZIONISM SEEMS LIKE A MENTAL DISORDER. THEY BOTH HAVE THE SAME AIM: USHERING IN GLORIOUS END TIMES BY DEFEATING THE DASTARDLY JEWS.
Anti-Zionists hate it when you accuse them of antisemitism. It really gets their brown shirts in a knot.
I probably spend too much time tearing down the idea that “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” There is so much that bugs me about this imagined tautology.
First, it is an abrogation of what is probably progressive rule #1, which is that, at the slightest hint that we might embody prejudice, we interrogate our motives. We do not shut down dialogue and insist we have nothing to improve upon.
Second, and related to the rejection of introspection, it assumes antisemitism only looks like tiki-torch-carrying conspiracy-obsessed suburban preppie daddies. Antisemitism is an often far more subtle complex of ideas and assumptions and to ignore this fact undermines the very idea that we should confront racism in all its forms.
Third (but far from last; I could go on and on but I have other things to do), the perpetrators believe they can move on after asserting, without any evidence, that ideas about Jewish people can be hermetically sealed away from ideas about the Jewish state.
Anti-Zionism and antisemitism have a complex relationship. It is not simple — and simple slogans like “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” insult the intelligence of all reasonable people and spit on our most cherished antiracist values.
Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are like conjoined twins — not interchangeable, but formed together, growing in tangled proximity, sharing vital organs. Or like a thorny vine that wraps itself around a tree: you may say you’re just pulling at the vine to save the tree (although, in this metaphor, the perpetrators don’t even bother trying), but the damage almost always rips through the bark.
You can’t hate Zionism in the real world without brushing up against or reinforcing antisemitism. And often, you end up embracing it, even if you didn’t intend to.
To understand how this works, compare classical antisemitism with newfangled anti-Zionism.
First, antisemitism.
Throughout history, antisemitism has portrayed Jews not just as outsiders, but as the ultimate embodiment of evil — the source or symbol of everything a given society feared, hated, or wished to destroy. These portrayals have shifted depending on era, culture, and political need, but the core strategy — equating Jews with cosmic, moral or societal evil — has been horrifyingly consistent.
Let’s get into the wayback machine and start at Matthew. Although all of Jesus’s disciples were Jews, the one that is infamously held up as an exemplar of Jewish perfidiousness is the one who betrayed Jesus. Judas Iscariot became the archetype of Jewish betrayal and evil in Christian theology.
Relatedly, Jews were blamed collectively for the death of Jesus, leading to centuries of persecution. (I’ve said this before … even if Jews, not the Roman imperial forces, were the ones responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion, why are ordinary Jews 2,000 years later responsible? It was the Romans who actually killed Jesus. Why aren’t we smashing pizzerias or trying to intifada Italy? See how stupid that sounds?)
From the Middle Ages literally until today, the Blood Libel maintains as a myth that Jews kidnap and murder Christian children to use their blood for religious rituals. As a result, Jews have been cast as demonic and inhuman. This slander led to massacres, expulsions, and ghettoization.
Throughout the history of Western civilization, Jews have been depicted not only as inherently wicked but as the literal agents of Satan. Depictions in art showed Jews with horns, hooked noses, and demonic features.
When people could not explain pandemics, notably the Black Plague, they blamed the Other (Jews) for deliberately poisoning wells to kill Christians. This false accusation led to massacres across Europe.
In the spectacular dystopian fiction, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews were framed as the puppet masters of capitalism, communism, banking, media, and revolution. In short, of all things evil in the eyes of the author and the voracious readers (who include vast swaths of the Middle East today).
Under the Nazis, Jews were depicted as vermin and parasites. Hitler called Jews the root of all social decay — the enemy within, responsible for Germany’s defeat, degeneracy, and moral collapse.
Across time and place, Jews have been accused of fomenting all conflict. No matter how remote Jews may have been from the center of the action, they have been accused of being the gnarly force behind revolutions, wars and conflicts of every variety in every place.
In brief: Jews have been depicted as the eternal enemy, the root of moral and societal decay, and the ultimate “Other” — not just people with whom one disagrees, but a force that must be defeated. This is what makes antisemitism so unique and so persistent: it doesn’t just marginalize Jews — it mythologizes them as malevolent.
Now. Anti-Zionism …
Israel, in the fevered imaginations of its “critics,” is not merely a country that has made some bad choices or has a few bad apples. It is a “genocidal state” that is rotten at the core. “Genocide” (an imagined crime, in this instance) is not only an offense ostensibly committed by Israelis, mass murder is the very essence of the state’s character. Israel is, in as many words, the embodiment of evil, which is the traditional role ascribed to Jews.
Israel is depicted as the root and paradigm of global injustice. This is an echo of the idea that Jews embody everything good people detest. Israel is responsible for wars, instability and racism worldwide — again, the things we used to pin on Jews. Activists claim Israel trains US police to kill Black people (the “Deadly Exchange” conspiracy) and, of course, those devious Zionists control US foreign policy (“Zionist lobby” rhetoric) and manipulate the powerful — the parallel of the Jewish control narratives and Jewish responsibility for all war and conflict.
Today, we hear Israel accused of killing children. Do we see Vlad Putin accused of this? Bashar al-Assad, who is responsible for exponentially more deaths, including children, than those killed on both sides in the current Israel-Hamas conflict? No. Because “child-killing” is a crime we ascribe to Jews — in this instance, the Jewish state.
Just as Jews have been the barrier to human redemption — the embodiment of the devil who must be overcome and defeated in order for human redemption and perfection to be realized, Israel now plays that role. When Israel is defeated, rainbows will prevail and utopia will be upon us.
Consider: The idea of intersectionality is inverted to paint Israel as the barrier to all good things.
“No climate justice without Palestinian liberation.” “From Palestine to Ferguson to Standing Rock.” “No walls! Mexico to Palestine!” “No queer liberation without Palestinian liberation.” “From Gaza to Gitmo — end all occupation.” “From Palestine to Turtle Island — settler-colonialism is a crime.” “Abolish ICE, Abolish Israel.” “Smash the patriarchy, free Palestine.” “Decolonize everything — start with Palestine.”
And so on and so forth. If we could just defeat the Jewish state and all it represents, humankind would finally return to the Garden. Depending on your level of theology, the defeat of Israel, like the overcoming of the Jews, would usher in the Messianic Age, a time of Heaven on Earth. All troubles would wash away, all sins cleansed. The great Golden Age would finally be upon us.
The End of History would bring a new Eden. The revolution would be realized. Universal liberation and a just world would be upon us. The Final Redemption would arise.
All it takes is defeating Israel.
Our ancestors believed that all it would take for the perfection of humankind was victory over the holdouts against their idea of God. Christian and Muslim eschatology view the conversion of and/or victory over the Jews as a precursor to end times awesomeness.
Contemporary progressive and other anti-Zionist ideologies (interestingly, usually embodied by agnostics and atheists, in what is no doubt a perverted form of discarded theology) see the defeat of Israel as the gateway through which human perfection will be ushered.
Israel plays the same symbolic function Jews have played in human imagination throughout history.
Israel is no longer a state that, like any human endeavor, can make mistakes. No, it alone among the family of nations is uniquely the embodiment of evil itself.
This demonization crosses the line from criticism to delegitimization, creating moral justification for Israel’s eradication.
Anti-Zionism is rooted in antisemitic soil.
It’s not as simple as “I hate Jews so I hate Israel.” It is the existential ascribing of a good-versus-evil motif in which the triumph of righteousness depends on the defeat of the Jewish state.
There are so many socio-psychological distortions going on here. Projection. Displacement. Scapegoating. Confirmation bias. Moral derangement. Magical thinking. False equivalence. Victim inversion. Dogmatic blindness.
Basically, you could open the DSM to any page and find an explanation for anti-Zionism.
So when people say “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” maybe they’re right.
Maybe it is something much more sinister, pathological and intrinsic.
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Excellent essay. So-called "anti-Zionists" find it convenient to claim that "Judaism" is a "religion" and, "mercy me, we would never be prejudiced against a religion!"
Scientific studies have confirmed unique genetic markers in modern day Jews that can be traced back thousands of years. These are found in both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, so they predate the split (which was due to conquerers--i.e actual colonizers--who expelled the Jews to different countries). One of these markers is found almost exclusively on the Y-chromosome of men with surnames related to the "Cohanim," the high priests of Israel (e.g., "Cohen," "Kahan," "Kagan," etc.). Based on mutation rates, scientists date the first appearance of this marker to a single ancestor who lived about 3,300 years ago. Remarkably, this would be consistent with the biblical Aaron, brother of Moses, whose descendants were the Cohanim. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/07/980714071409.htm
Religion is only one aspect of the Jewish people, who are also bonded by over 3,000 years of history, customs, language, lore, moral code and, yes, a particular land, Israel. I would propose that it's less an intertwined tree and vine, or set of conjoined twins, than it is a family home. Each aspect of Judaism is a room in that house. A given family member may choose to spend more, or all, of one's time in some rooms rather than others, and still be a member of the household.
Israel is the land on which that house has rested for over 3,000 years, since the kingdoms of Saul and David in the 11th century BCE. "Zionism" is simply the desire of the Jewish people to have self-determination in that indigenous land, home to its holiest places. It is inseparable from Judaism itself.
As an addendum, the fact that Constantine incorporated Christianity, the "underdog" religion of the Roman Empire, into the fabric of that same Roman Empire might have something to do with the continued scapegoating of Jews by the Romans--I mean Christians.