You Can’t Be Antisemitic If You’re Semitic

The term “Semitic” originally comes from the Biblical figure Shem (one of Noah’s sons) and was later used by linguists to describe one of the major branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family – a linguistic and cultural, not racial, classification. It includes Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic (Ethiopia), and others.

The word entered modern scholarship through philology, not theology, naming a network of languages whose roots intertwine across the Near East and North Africa. By that simple, stubborn fact, Arabs and Jews are both Semitic: cousins in language long before they were rivals in politics.

Historically, the term referred to peoples who spoke these languages, including Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Arameans, Hebrews, and Arab tribes of antiquity. Today, their linguistic and cultural descendants – Arabs, Jews, Assyrians, and the Amhara and Tigrinya peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea – continue that legacy.

Thus, “Semitic” is a linguistic and cultural, not racial, category, born from the study of shared tongues rather than divine lineage.

Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is an Abrahamic tradition whose first holy language grew from that same Semitic soil. When we speak of “Semitic,” we are speaking about a vast civilizational grammar shared by peoples who, for millennia, prayed in cognate syllables and told their origin stories with overlapping names.

And yet, in the late nineteenth century, “antisemitism” was coined in Europe as a pseudoscientific varnish for an old hatred directed specifically at Jews. The term stuck, not because it was philologically precise, but because it gave respectability to bigotry. Today, its conventional meaning remains “hostility toward Jews as Jews.”

One can accept that historical usage and still recognize the problem: a linguistic confusion has allowed some to silence legitimate political critique by collapsing it into an accusation of racial or religious hatred.

If “Semitic” is a linguistic-civilizational category that includes Arabs and Jews alike, then charges of “antisemitism” must be handled with surgical care. Otherwise, we end up in the absurd position of branding Arabic-speaking peoples “antisemitic” for opposing state policies made by a government that is no less Semitic in origin than they are.

Arabs are often themselves accused of being “anti-Semitic,” a charge that collapses under its own irony – for if we follow this flawed logic, then Arabs would, absurdly, be accused of hating their own heritage, since to be “anti-Semitic” would also mean being anti-Arab.

This is not a pedant’s quibble. Language shapes law and public morality. In Morocco, as across much of the Arab world, public opinion reflects a lived distinction many people make every day: deep respect for Jewish neighbors, heritage, and worship – alongside sharp, often visceral criticism of Israeli state conduct.

The Moroccan moral vocabulary treats the two as separate spheres. Judaism is a faith and a civilization, one of our three Abrahamic pillars. Zionism, as commonly discussed in civic life, is a political ideology tied to a particular territorial project and current state policies. To erase that distinction is to commit an injustice twice over: once against Jews, who deserve to be seen apart from any government of the day, and once against Palestinians, whose suffering cannot be waved away by accusing their defenders of hatred for a religion they, in many cases, honor.

This distinction is visible in social discourse, in media arguments, and even in Friday sermons. Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the occupied territories is widely condemned as brutal and expansionist – characterized by apartheid-like segregation, collective punishment, and the systematic dehumanization of a captive population.

Many Moroccans call that regime colonial and racist, not as a slur against Judaism, but as a judgment about the practices of a state. The charge is ethical, not ethnic. It arises from the same conscience that preserves synagogues, cemeteries, and archives, and that teaches schoolchildren about the Jewish chapters of Moroccan history with pride. It is precisely because Judaism is respected as a religion of justice that policies violating justice are denounced without hesitation.

Critics will reply: “But the world understands antisemitism to mean anti-Jewish prejudice. Why complicate it?” Because the present confusion is being exploited. Conflating anti-Jewish hatred with anti-Israel dissent makes all Jews answerable for a state’s actions and makes all dissenters suspect of bigotry. Both are corrosive. Jews become unfair proxies for policy. Arabs become perpetual defendants in a rigged trial.

In such a climate, any public outrage at bombed homes, strangled economies, or confiscated lands can be dismissed with one magic word: antisemitism. A term invented to name a real, abhorrent hatred is thus weaponized to protect a government from accountability – an outcome Jews and non-Jews of conscience should equally resist.

Most people around the world associate Islam and Arab identity with Saudi Arabia. But when one criticizes Saudi policies, it does not mean being anti-Arab or anti-Muslim. The same logic applies to Israel: Zionism can be viewed as a political ideology, much like Islamism is a political manifestation of religion – and being against Islamism does not mean being against Islam itself.

Likewise, opposing Zionism is not opposing Judaism. Many Jewish organizations – such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Neturei Karta, and others – have long argued along these very lines, rejecting the conflation of Jewish faith with political Zionism and insisting that criticism of state policies is not hatred of a people.

There is a better vocabulary. If the target is Jews as Jews, say so: anti-Jewish bigotry. If the target is Israelis as a nationality, say anti-Israeli prejudice. If the target is a government’s actions or an ideology about land and sovereignty, say anti-Zionism or opposition to Israeli policy. Precision is not a luxury; it is moral hygiene. It spares Jewish citizens the burden of collective guilt and it spares Arab critics the stain of an accusation they do not deserve. Most importantly, it keeps the focus where it belongs: on the justice or injustice of concrete acts.

Morocco’s own civic ethos underscores the point. The country maintains and restores synagogues, protects Jewish burial grounds, and treats Jewish memory as part of the national tapestry. At the same time, many Moroccans reject the normalization of oppression. They refuse to equate respect for Jewish life with endorsement of policies they view as colonial or supremacist.

For them, defending Jewish dignity and resisting Zionist expansionism are not contradictions. They spring from the same moral root: a commitment to coexistence with neighbors and resistance to the degradation of any people. One can acknowledge the historical and human suffering of Jews – from exile to persecution – and still condemn a military doctrine that inflicts collective punishment on Palestinians. One can celebrate Jewish religious festivals in Casablanca and still march against blockades in Gaza. That is not hypocrisy; it is coherence.

Let us then say clearly what should have been obvious. Arabs are Semitic in the original and accurate sense of the term, just as Jews are. Islam speaks in a Semitic tongue and venerates Abraham as Judaism does.

To brand Arabs “antisemitic” merely for opposing Israeli power is, at best, sloppy and, at worst, cynical. It hijacks a word that should protect a vulnerable community from hatred and bends it into a shield for a state. It replaces ethical discernment with semantic fog. And it insults the long, shared history of intertwined languages and ideas that made the very notion of “Semitic” possible.

We owe ourselves a cleaner discourse. Honor the historical meaning of antisemitism as hatred of Jews, name and fight it wherever it appears, but also extend that vigilance to all other forms of Semitic persecution and prejudice – against Arabs and other peoples who share the same linguistic and cultural lineage – and refuse to dilute it by using it as a catch-all against political critics.

We must honor the linguistic and civilizational reality that Arabs and Jews are kin in speech and story. In fact, we call for the term itself to be reclaimed – to encompass Arab suffering as well, not just Jewish suffering – for Arabs too have endured centuries of demonization, dispossession, and erasure rooted in the same racial hierarchies that gave birth to antisemitism.

To limit the word’s moral reach to one people while excluding another born of the same Semitic lineage is to betray its very spirit. True justice demands that our language reflect shared humanity, not political convenience.

With that clarity, we can finally retire the lazy conflation that has poisoned debate for too long. Then, perhaps, we can speak more honestly about what truly matters: ending the oppression of Palestinians; safeguarding Jewish communities everywhere; and rebuilding a politics in which neither people is asked to deny its own Semitic reflection to defend its moral claims.