Activism at Swarthmore College Proves Antizoinism is Antisemitism
Recently, student activists at Swarthmore College held a pro-Hamas rally on its campus that included multiple sites of vandalism, including graffiti of inverted red triangles. Unshockingly, like many other previous incidents on different campuses, the crux of the administration’s statement described the incident as “misplaced anger” that “does not advance any cause.” It seems that no further language or action from the school has been taken publicly. This language minimizes the problem: the inverted triangle sign was more than a symbol of anger; it is used to express solidarity with Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza War. Thus, it is extremely inappropriate to use this symbol on a campus with a 17% Jewish undergraduate population while categorizing such acts as misplaced anger.
The issue is not simply that students expressed anger inappropriately. The issue is that symbols associated with violence against Jews and Israelis continue being normalized on campus under the banner of anti-Zionism. This reflects a broader problem in contemporary campus discourse: anti-Zionism is often treated as categorically separate from antisemitism. However, when anti-Zionism denies Jewish collective existence, demonizes Zionists, and regularly uses language that alienates local Jewish communities , it becomes as clear as daylight that anti-Zionism is itself a form of bigotry.
The fundamental problem with anti-Zionism is not its criticism of the Israeli government, but the rhetorical sleights of hand used to justify hostility that would otherwise be indefensible. Two arguments are especially common. The first claims that because Arabs are also Semites, anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitic. As Bernard Lewis famously observed, this logic would mean that “an Arabic version of [Mein Kampf] published in Cairo or Beirut cannot be anti-Semitic, because Arabic and Hebrew are cognate languages.”
The second argument is more sophisticated: that antisemitism concerns Jews as a people or religion, while anti-Zionism concerns only a political movement. Its persuasiveness rests on an ambiguity built into the term itself. “Antisemitism” is often used in two different senses at once: as a general category of hostility toward Jews and as a historically specific form of prejudice associated with Nazis, white supremacists, and explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric. Anti-Zionist discourse exploits that ambiguity.
By avoiding the most recognizable markers of historical antisemitism, activists can insist that their views are not antisemitic at all, even when they produce many of the same attitudes, behaviors, and consequences.
Contemporary institutions often fail to recognize antisemitism when it is expressed through anti-Zionist language. One reason is that the Soviet Union’s anti-zionism successfully recast hostility toward Jewish national aspirations as anti-racist and anti-colonial politics, creating a vocabulary that remains influential today on campus. That helps explain why administrators can view symbols and slogans that many Jewish students experience as threatening as merely political expression or “misplaced anger.”
These arguments, the legacy of Soviet propaganda in leftist scholarship and activism, and chronic lack of trustworthy reporting suggests that the solution to this problem is not simply punishment or censorship. The first step is to accurately call out the problem because spray-painting support for Hamas does in fact “help spread the [anti-Zionist]cause.” The problem is anti-Zionism itself and should be called out for what it is: violent bigotry. The next step would then be for the school to educate students about how all of the ideas associated with the ideology eventually lead to supporting crimes like 10/7 .. Only with the involvement of the University can the students learn the difference between legitimate policy criticism and denying Jewish peoplehood.
If universities are serious about fighting bigotry, they cannot protect Jews only when antisemitism appears in its most obvious forms. They must also confront the forms of anti-Jewish hatred that present themselves as social justice. Antizionism, when it denies Jewish peoplehood and legitimizes hostility toward Zionists as a class, is one of those forms. Calling it “misplaced anger” is not enough. It must be named for what it is.
