When Anti-Zionism Becomes Normal — and Why That Should Trouble Us

A friend from out of town recently visited me at the synagogue where I work and commented on the heavy security in and around the building. It is significant, and it struck him immediately. I barely noticed.

I am so used to it by now that the fortress I work in has faded into the background of daily life. Of course, I am aware that people who attend other houses of worship rarely encounter this level of security simply to pray and gather as a community. But to me, it feels unremarkable. It feels normal.

And that is the problem.

Normal, after all, is simply whatever we have grown accustomed to.

Jewish history teaches us to be wary of what becomes normal too quickly. The most dangerous shifts rarely announce themselves as threats. They arrive gradually, through repetition and habituation, until what once would have alarmed us barely registers at all. This is true not only of concrete barriers and armed guards. It is also true of ideas.

In my corner of the internet, there is an ongoing conversation that insists on drawing a bright line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Sometimes it appears as a confident assertion: one is a legitimate political position, the other a form of hatred—and opposing Israel, we are told, has nothing to do with endangering Jews. At other times, it takes the form of academic deep dives, parsing ever-finer distinctions meant to keep the two phenomena neatly separate.

These conversations are often thoughtful. And they miss a critical point.

The connection between antisemitism and modern anti-Zionism is not that they are identical, but that they are constructed in the same way—through lies, propaganda, and moral distortion. Like all dangerous ideas, they become most destructive not when they are shouted from the margins, but when they are absorbed into the mainstream: normalized, repeated, and accepted without resistance.

Antisemitism has always relied on fabrication rather than fact. Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as simultaneously weak and omnipotent, parasitic and powerful, rootless and controlling. The contradictions did not matter. Propaganda does not seek coherence; it seeks effect. It persuades not through truth, but through repetition, imagery, and emotional activation. Lies repeated often enough cease to feel like lies at all.

After the Holocaust, open racial antisemitism became discredited in much of the world. But hatred did not disappear. It adapted. The Soviet Union perfected this adaptation by replacing “the Jew” with “the Zionist,” recasting ancient antisemitic tropes in the language of ideology—portraying Jews not as a vulnerable people, but as agents of imperialism and oppression. Zionists were depicted as uniquely malevolent, uniquely powerful, and uniquely illegitimate. Israel was singled out as the world’s great moral crime. Jewish collective identity itself became suspect.

This was not incidental. It was deliberate. Soviet anti-Zionism functioned as a political weapon—used to suppress Jewish life at home, delegitimize Israel abroad, and launder antisemitism into a form that could circulate freely in Western intellectual and political spaces. The nouns changed. The narrative structure did not.

Over time, this worldview was absorbed into Western moral discourse so thoroughly that its origins faded from view. On many college campuses, it has been accepted not as argument but as dogma. What began as propaganda now feels like mainstream ideology. When propaganda succeeds, it no longer announces itself.

Jewish tradition has a language for this danger. The rabbis teach: mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveirah—a positive religious act draws another positive religious act in its wake; a destructive act generates further destruction. Human beings are shaped less by abstract principles than by habit. What we repeat becomes normal. What becomes normal stops feeling dangerous, even when it is.

That is where we find ourselves today.

Many people now say, often sincerely, “I am not an antisemite. I care deeply about Jewish safety. I simply oppose Zionism.” The current mayor of New York City has built his public identity around this claim. It is expressed without hesitation and increasingly treated as morally cost-free. Within some Jewish spaces, it is welcomed as just another viewpoint within the “big tent” of legitimate discourse. In other cases, Jews themselves actively champion the very ideology.

But Jewish history gives us no reason to believe this distinction will protect Jewish lives.

Zionism is not a marginal ideology. It is the modern expression of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, rooted in thousands of years of longing for return and forged in the shadow of catastrophe. To deny Jews that right—alone among the nations—is not a neutral political critique. It is a demand that Jews relinquish sovereignty, self-defense, and collective agency, precisely where history has shown such relinquishment to be most dangerous.

And while there are Jewish leaders who seek to engage anti-Zionists and welcome them into the broad discourse of Jewish life, I approach this question through a different lens. Yes, Jewish tradition values debate. The Talmud itself is built on argument, its pages alive with disagreement among our sages. But our tradition is equally clear that not every argument is sacred.

The rabbis praise machloket l’shem shamayim—argument for the sake of heaven—precisely because some arguments are not for the sake of heaven at all. Moral boundaries exist. Not every position deserves legitimacy simply because it can be articulated.

A worldview that denies the Jewish people the right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, that dismantles Jewish self-defense, and that consistently aligns—intentionally or not—with movements committed to Israel’s destruction cannot plausibly be described as constructive moral disagreement. History teaches us that Jews are not attacked first. They are delegitimized first.

To engage publicly with anti-Zionism (and anti-Zionists) today is to participate in a framework that others will exploit. It is to share moral space with those who do not distinguish between Israelis and Jews—and who have demonstrated, again and again, that they are willing to harm both. Good intentions do not neutralize dangerous ideas. They obscure their consequences.

This is why normalization matters. When anti-Zionism is treated as benign, when it is absorbed into the moral vocabulary of educated discourse, it ceases to be scrutinized. Aveirah goreret aveirah. Destructive norms reproduce themselves unless they are named.

History has already told us where these ideas lead. The only question is whether familiarity will once again dull our moral sight before we recognize the danger.