What the Arab World Taught Us About Anti-Zionism Long Before Ezra Klein

Dear Ezra Klein,

I am a Jewish community leader based in San Francisco, California, directing a national nonprofit that focuses on advancing the heritage, history, and rights of nearly one million Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Their descendants now comprise more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.

Your assertion that “anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing” in your recent New York Times opinion piece, This Is Why There Is No Liberal Joe Rogan, treats anti-Zionism as a new phenomenon—a political reaction, a byproduct of Israeli policies. But the one million former Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa have seen it before and understand it differently.

Throughout the 20th century and beyond, “Zionist” became the accusation that led to the state-sanctioned persecution of  Jews across the Middle East and North Africa. Jews who had lived continuously in these lands for thousands of years were recast as suspect, disloyal, or expendable not because of their views on Zionism and Israel, but because they belonged to a people that could not disavow its history, its faith, its people, or its ancient and unbroken connection to the place where Jewish civilization was born.

The consequences were not abstract and reached into every layer of life. Jewish children were excluded from schools. Forced declarations became routine. Jobs were lost. Hundreds were murdered in pogroms and riots. Over 3,000 Jews were imprisoned for the crime of “Zionism,” and at least 20 lost their lives through extrajudicial killings. Over $9 billion of property was seized. Citizenship was stripped, and thousands of years of Jewish life in the Arab and Muslim world came to a painful end.

This history teaches us a critical distinction. While Israeli policies can and should be debated, when criticism of policy mutates into anti-Zionism, the target is no longer a government. It becomes a people.

For Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, that shift is not theoretical. It is historical memory and a reminder that the Jewish bond to Israel and Am Israel is older than every modern ideology enlisted against it.

I urge you to approach this subject with the full weight of that history in mind. The normalization of anti-Zionism does not begin with violence—it begins with language. And language, as we know, shapes what follows.

As Proverbs teaches, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

Thank you,
Sarah Levin