Anti-Zionism – The gaslighting of a people

With the spread of the post-October 7 enhanced turmoil in the Middle East, we can look beyond the widespread denial of sexual assault despite plentiful broadcast of the carnage during Hamas’s massacre on Israel even deeper to the larger scale gaslighting that seeks to delegitimize the very need for a Jewish state.

Indeed, despite Hitler’s writings labeling Jews a non-Aryan, “dark-haired” – and therefore not part of the superior – race, Islamists and the Western far left alike often claim that the Nazis never took issue with the Jews’ race, but with their socioeconomic status. This notion has been echoed by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and serves to further the idea that the majority of Jews (Ashkenazim with diaspora history in Europe) are and have always been Western, ethnic white people. In this view, Jews at their core represent the ultimate oppressor class. The “anti-racist” far left in the West today ironically often identify as Marxist, despite the Nazis having opposed Marxism, yet another show of the far left and right meeting in a horseshoe over the Jews. Ironically, many of these reactionary far-left “Marxists” now paint Jews as only a religion to decry Israel as an inherently theocratic and Western state, even though Hitler cited the Jews as a race rather than a religious group, and Ashkenazi trace their original ancestry to the Middle East. In fact, even Europeans such as the philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized the Levantine roots of Jews living in Europe with the quote “Palestinians living among us” (Kant, p.100).

Although the horrors of both the Holocaust and mass expulsion of Jews from Islamic countries support the case for a Jewish state, anti-Israel (and many antisemitic) people often insist that Zionism itself is not only inherently racist but also unnecessary. On an even more insidious level, some even claim that most Zionists are not Jewish, thus highlighting the “good Jew” archetype represented by anti-Zionist Jews. This claim obviously fails in the fact that the majority of Jews are, in fact, Zionist.

By divorcing the importance and very concept of a Jewish homeland from the Jewish people, anti-Zionists perpetuate a form of antisemitic gaslighting that seeks to dissuade Jews against both their own history and need for security. Jews – even far-right Israelis such as Ben-Gvir who, according to many Islamists, allegedly counts as a legitimate Jew thanks to having diaspora history in an Islamic rather than an “evil colonizer” European country – are not allowed to retaliate against “oppressed, non-white people”, even when sovereign nations such as Iran and Lebanon attack first. According to them and some in the West, an Iranian ballistic missile attack and Hezbollah’s scorching much of northern Israel simply don’t warrant a response from the “powerful, Western-backed Jewish state” and constitute the emotionally charged and Holocaust-associated term “genocide”. Need we remind everyone that the West also supports the Kurds against an oppressive Arab regime and donates billions to the Palestinians themselves, but of course, that is neither here nor there.

Therefore, while many Jews today insist that the main issue of antisemitism lies with the far right, far-left anti-Jewish sentiment remains insidious in its guise of social justice. However, the association of Jews with wealth, privilege and power has far from disappeared. Indeed, this blood libel has spread from the far right to the far left in an especially malicious form of antisemitism wherein Jews are painted as such malevolent oppressors that even many Jewish people themselves have fallen for the ruse. Suddenly, the “this didn’t happen in a vacuum” line ubiquitously used to justify October 7 rings true for many even despite the multiple preceding wars against the Jewish people in today’s Israel, even before its founding as a state.