Distinguishing Anti-Zionism from Antisemitism

Claiming that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism makes it harder to defend Zionism and harder to fight antisemitism because it muddles both terms. We need to understand anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and how to tell the difference.

I am a Zionist. I worry about rising antisemitism. This is personal for me.

The claim that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism is basically that if Zionism is the right of Jews to a homeland in part or all of what is now Israel and the West Bank, and if you are against that, then it must be for three reasons:

1. 1. You hate Jews; or
   2. You don’t realize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, or
   3. You don’t realize that Jews need a state of their own because centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, prove that a state is essential for Jewish physical survival.

It’s not hard to understand why some people feel this way. We are all concerned about rising antisemitism. We’ve seen well-publicized examples of anti-Israel protests bleeding into antisemitism. In some cases, any of these three reasons might explain anti-Zionism.

If we were brought up to see Israel as a weak country surrounded by powerful enemies who sought its destruction, we understandably see protests against Israel and harsh criticism of Israel as threats to Israel itself–and to us.

The question is how we apply these feelings to the reality around us. Our challenge is that facts are often more nuanced than emotions. The three reasons above are not the only explanations for anti-Zionism. Securing a safe Israel and fighting antisemitism successfully requires us to understand the interplay between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

We cannot say that someone is antisemitic because they are anti-Zionist without understanding what we and they mean by Zionism. As David Schraub writes, we or they can believe

• • “Zionism” is the policy set of the current Israeli government.
  • “Zionism” is the broad sweep of policies that characterize how the Israeli state generally operates across history (and different governments).
  • “Zionism” is the belief in the validity of an autonomous Jewish state in Israel.
  • “Zionism” is the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination.

“As one moves down the list,” says Schraub, “the charge of antisemitism for anti-[that form of] Zionism becomes increasingly plausible.”

We cannot say that someone is antisemitic because they are anti-Zionist without understanding what antisemitism is. Antisemitism is hatred of Jews. President Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism defines antisemitism as “a stereotypical and negative perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred of Jews. It is prejudice, bias, hostility, discrimination, or violence against Jews for being Jews or Jewish institutions or property for being Jewish or perceived as Jewish. Antisemitism can manifest as a form of racial, religious, national origin, and/or ethnic discrimination, bias, or hatred; or, a combination thereof. However, antisemitism is not simply a form of prejudice or hate. It is also a pernicious conspiracy theory that often features myths about Jewish power and control.”

Ken Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and now the Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, writes that antisemitism is, at its heart, “conspiracy theory: seeing Jews as conspiring to harm non-Jews, thus providing an explanation for what goes wrong in the world.”

So is anti-Zionism antisemitic? The answer is obvious: It depends. The Nexus Document describes what is and is not antisemitic in relation to Israel and Zionism. The document is succinct, short, and hard to summarize without repeating almost all of it. Read it. T’ruah’s guide to antisemitism is also an excellent resource.

Stern asks us to imagine we “are a Palestinian whose family was displaced in 1948—and not merely displaced but also dispossessed from your home and from a sense of control over your own identity and life. The exercise of Jewish self-determination clearly had a negative impact on you and your family, not only on your past but your future. Is your objection to Zionism because you see a Jewish conspiracy, or because someone else’s national expression harmed you and your national aspirations?”

Stern asks, “is it antisemitism if you [are not a Palestinian] and do not consider Jewish claims to the land as having equal merit to the Palestinian ones? Conversely, does that mean that others, also with no ‘skin in the game,’ are anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab if they champion the Israeli narrative and ignore or dismiss Palestinian perspectives?”

In addition, Stern told me, there is a “growing number of young Jews whose Judaism leads them to anti-Zionism. They had a strong Jewish education and feel lied to and betrayed [by that education]. To them, at its core, Judaism is about how do you repair the world and how do you treat the stranger.” They see Zionism in its practical application (and perhaps even in theory) as antithetical to those values.

Stern’s essay addresses almost every issue related to the question of whether and when anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

What about people who support a binational state or one state with equal rights? Isn’t that necessarily antisemitic because that one state might not be a Jewish state per se? That’s a hard argument to make considering that Israel’s Declaration of Independence, not an unreasonable standard to hold Israel to, calls for “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

A few weeks ago, in an email exchange, Emily Tamkin told me this:

“It’s true that there are some who use ‘Zionist’ as a kind of code for Jew and for whom ‘anti-Zionist’ means Jews are not a people. But it’s also true that there are those for whom anti-Zionism means believing Israel should not be an exclusively Jewish state, a belief they have come to because of Israel’s history…

“[They believe that] in theory Zionism may be fine, but the lived experience of Palestinians has made it equivalent to dispossession and displacement, the right of one people to self-determination at the expense of another.

“And I think the problem with saying that anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic is that…it says that every person who supports, say, a binational confederation or one state with equal rights is doing so because they do not believe Jews are a people. It says that every Jew hears ‘I’m an anti-Zionist’ as a threat. These things are not true.

“When we say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, we harden the categories. We assign thoughts to the anti-Zionist and, for that matter, to Jews. It is precisely the lived experience, the gray area where we actually exist, the chance to talk to one another and exchange ideas and disagree without trying to cancel one another’s truths, that gets erased.”

We need to frame discussions about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic differently. Rather than argue about labels and definitions, we should ask ourselves and those criticizing Zionism what we/they propose to do going forward.

The reality is that roughly seven million Jews and roughly seven million Palestinians live in what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Neither is going anywhere.

If we can agree that mass murder and mass expulsion should be off the table for both sides, the question of what Zionism is and whether it was justifed prior to Israel’s creation, whether Zionism in practice is less defensible than Zionism in theory, whether and when Palestinians became a people, and who did what to whom, and when, becomes less relevant. Interesting, but less relevant.

What matters is where we go from here. You can trace every national conflict further and further into the recesses of history back to Adam and Eve, and we still don’t know what Cain said to Abel in the field before he murdered him.

We might never agree on how we got here. But here we are, and we have to agree on how to move forward. I favor a two-state solution. If you favor a democratic, one-state solution, I will have significant policy differences with you, but are you antisemitic for wanting a democratic state with equal rights for all? Am I prepared to concede that the concept of democracy is antithetical to the concept of a Jewish state? The answer to both questions is no.

The question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic because Zionism is central to Jewish identity, and thus anti-Zionism is anti-Jewish, begs the question. Is it central to Jewish identity? Perhaps in the sense that Jews, like all people, have a right of self-determination, but not necessarily in other possible definitions of Zionism. We are back to context.

The question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic because Israel is essential for Jewish survival also begs the question. Is it essential for Jewish survival? Half of world Jewry has chosen not to move to Israel. Do we really want to define our Zionism as support for a state where others do the hard work so that it exists for us as a place to send our kids for the summer or in case we are ever forced to move there (which assumes that if that day comes, those who do live there will define us as Jews)? The question is not as self-evident as some think it is.

I’m not telling you that all anti-Zionism is not antisemitic. Some clearly is. All I’m asking is that we avoid sweeping generalizations like “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and instead, if we take Zionism and antisemitism seriously, do the hard work of figuring out, case by case, when it is and when it isn’t.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: We are now seeing–I kid you not–people spelling “anti-Zionism” as “antizionism” in a pathetic attempt to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“Antisemitism” is often not spelled “anti-Semitism” because “antisemitism” means prejudice against Jews, not against all Semites. The thought was that by removing the hyphen, it would be clearer that it was one word meaning Jew-hatred, not hatred of or “anti” Semites writ large.

I’m not aware of any empirical evidence showing that using or not using the hyphen changes any minds, but that was the rationale. I spell it “antisemitism” because it has become the more common spelling and its rationale, however shaky, is one I agree with.

Now, we are seeing some people spelling “anti-Zionism” as “antizionism,” always by people who seek to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism (you’ll notice it now that I’ve pointed it out to you).

But “anti-Zionism” is accurate. The rationale for “antisemitism” (no hyphen) does not apply to anti-Zionism. By “anti-Zionism” we do mean “anti” Zionism. If anything, spelling it with the “Z” lower-case demeans Zionism, which should be capitalized, and it demeans Zionism by using Zionism as a means to camouflage false accusations of antisemitism. Don’t fall for it.

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