No Mistake About It—Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism

There are those who insist that they are not antisemitic, but merely anti-Zionist. The distinction, however, is often a deception—the product of historical ignorance, ingrained antisemitism, or, too often, both. Granted, criticism of Israel or its policies is not inherently antisemitic. But anti-Zionism is fundamentally different: it denies the Jewish people the same right to sovereignty over their historic homeland that other peoples are afforded. That desire did not emerge from a European colonial whim. It is deep-rooted in thousands of years of Jewish history, religious tradition, cultural identity, and a lasting attachment to Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel.

The historical record is clear about the Israel’s significance to Jewish identity. The ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed and thrived on that patch of land, with Jerusalem serving as the political and spiritual center of Jewish life, 1500 before the advent of Christianity and more than 2000 years before the birth of Islam.

This connection was preserved not merely through archaeology or theology, but through Jewish religious and cultural life: Jerusalem and Zion in daily prayer, the Passover declaration “Next year in Jerusalem,” the centrality of the Land of Israel in Jewish law, and festivals and traditions that continually recalled the land from which Jewish national life emerged. Jewish communities maintained a presence there across successive imperial periods. Modern Zionism did not invent this connection; it transformed an ancient and enduring attachment into a modern national movement.

Jewish religious and spiritual attachment to Zion (the name originally referred to ancient Jerusalem) has endured for millennia but the meaning expanded to encompass the Land of Israel.

It was Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century, who advanced political Zionism as he sought to establish a secure Jewish national home in the land to which Jews traced their historical origins. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 were important milestones in that movement’s political and international history.

To portray Jews as foreign colonizers with no legitimate historical connection to Israel is therefore not a neutral historical observation. It requires dismissing Jewish scripture, collective memory, archaeological evidence, documented ancient statehood, centuries of Jewish communal presence, and the modern history of Jewish immigration and national revival.

The double standard becomes particularly revealing when Israel is condemned as uniquely illegitimate while dozens of other nations—many shaped by conquest, partition, population transfers, or the dissolution of empires—are accepted as legitimate members of the international community. Case in point: most of the Middle East’s present-day nation-states are modern political formations, particularly those whose borders emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent British and French mandates. In the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire newly minted Arab nations emerged: Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Why is the Jewish state expected to surrender its national identity as the price of acceptance? Why is Jewish self-determination treated as an injustice rather than a right?

When opposition to Zionism demands the dismantling of the world’s only Jewish-majority state, denies Jews a legitimate connection to their homeland, or insists that Jews alone must forfeit national rights granted to others, the claim of being “merely anti-Zionist” becomes a sham.

The call for the elimination of the Jewish state is obvious in slogans such as: “From the River to the Sea, Israel Will Be Free,” “Death to Israel,” “Intifada,” “Free Palestine,” and “Go back to Poland.” Those menacing utterances cross the line from political disagreement into the blatant antisemitism.

But what of Jews, Jewish sects and organizations that are anti-Zionism, surely, they are not anti-Semitic.

Yes. There are Jewish groups that are explicitly anti-Zionist, but their justifications are based upon vastly different ideological and religious foundations.

The best-known examples are the Neturei Karta and Satmar Hasidim. Those two sects oppose Zionism on explicitly religious grounds. But their opposition is temporary, and not a permanent call for the elimination of Israel. Their theology argues that Jews should not establish Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel until the coming of the Messiah.

Then there are Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists whose objections to a Jewish state are not based on theological considerations but on a political and social factors. The most prominent American examples are Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. They claim their opposition to Zionism is rooted in an anti-nationalist and anti-state religion dogma. Although having a state religion is not unusual, those anti-Zionism advocates are not protesting the world’s other state religion countries. There are 43 countries which recognize a particular religion as their state or official religion.

Thus, Israel is not unique in defining itself in connection with a specific religion. What is unique is that the Jewish people have only one sovereign state in the world. To deny them that small parcel of land—land that bears the footprints of their ancestors, preserves the artifacts and religious texts of their forebears, and embodies a unique history of introducing monotheism and a moral code to the world—is to deny a people their historic connection to their ancestral homeland. That history is indelibly inscribed in the stones, soil, and sands of the sacred ancestral home of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel.