Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment

The brutal shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship: Is anti-Zionism by definition antisemitism?

The question has deeply divided congressional Democrats when Republican leaders, seeking to drive a wedge between American Jews and the political party that three-quarters of them call their own, put it to a vote in the House.

It has shaken the country’s campuses and reverberated in its city streets, where pro-Palestinian protesters bellow chants calling for Palestine to be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

It surfaced in the Republican presidential debate a few weeks ago, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said, “If you don’t think Israel has a right to exist, that is antisemitic.” The following night, lighting the national menorah behind the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, warned, “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity, and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.”

Zionism as a concept was once clearly understood: the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors. The word still evokes joyful pride among many Jews in the state of Israel, which was established 75 years ago and repeatedly defended itself against attacks from Arab neighbors that aimed to annihilate it.

If anti-Zionism a century ago meant opposing the international effort to set up a Jewish state in what was then a British-controlled territory called Palestine, it now suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews. That, many Jews in Israel and the diaspora say, is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.

Yet some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state. That effort animates an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank that some Israelis, as well as the United States and other Western powers, had proposed as a separate state for the Palestinian people.

Expanding those settlements, to Israel’s critics, conjures images of settler colonialists and apartheid-style oppressors.

So for some Jews, the answer to the question is obvious. Of course anti-Zionism is antisemitism, they say: Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.

Many Palestinians and their allies recoil just as fiercely: The equating of opposition to a Jewish state on once-Arab land — or opposition to its expansion — with bigotry is to silence their national aspirations, muffle political dissent and denigrate 75 years of their suffering. But perhaps nowhere is the question more fraught than among Jews themselves. Younger, left-leaning Jews, steeped in the cause of antiracism and terms like “settler colonialism,” are increasingly searching for a Jewish identity centered more on religious values like the pursuit of justice and repairing the world than on collective nationalism tied to the land of Israel.

Many older liberal Jews have also struggled with the Israeli government’s lurch to the far right, but they see Israel as the centerpiece and guarantor of continued Jewish existence in an ever more secular world.

For Republicans, the issue is simple and convenient. The raising of anti-Zionism in the debate over antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war pushes aside the presence of white-nationalist bigots on the fringes of the Republican coalition and instead forces Democrats to defend the pro-Hamas demonstrators on their own coalition’s fringes.

For the broader Democratic community, by contrast, the debate has been wrenching, pitting allies against one another, splintering more conservative Jewish Democrats who absolutely believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic from progressive Democrats, especially Democrats of color, who argue just as strongly for the latitude to criticize Israel, and leaving a huge middle unwilling to draw bright lines.

The definition of antisemitism as drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and embraced by the Trump White House includes phrases that critics say squelch political — not hate — speech:

- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

- Applying double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

- Comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The definition of Nexus Task Force, a group of academics and Jewish activists affiliated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, agrees that holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions, as pro-Palestinian protesters did a few weeks ago outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia, is Jew hatred. It also holds that it is antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people and exercise self-determination, as some on the left do in arguing that Jews are a religion, not a nation.

In other words, virulent anti-Zionism and virulent antisemitism ultimately intersect, at a very bad address for the Jews.

Still, Democrats worry that the debate is blurring the line between political speech and hate speech. Tibetans pressing for freedom from the Chinese are considered unserious or even repugnant in Beijing, just as Native American activists demanding to reclaim parts of the United States might be to the owners of that land. But are they bigoted?

To the young Jewish activists of left-wing groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which have themselves been accused of antisemitism, the search for a Jewish identity unrooted in the land has not been complicated. Jews, after all, survived without a state for nearly 2,000 years after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and scattered the inhabitants of the Holy Land to the four corners of the earth.

To which younger, leftier Jews might respond by asking what it even means to suggest that American politics should be focused on securing a safe haven for Jews abroad when the First Amendment ensures that the United States is such a safe haven.

In all of this, a generational divide is palpable. Older Jews lived through the trials and triumphs of the early Jewish state. Middle-aged Jews remember the hope of a peace that recognized the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish and Palestinian people, embodied in the Oslo accords of the 1990s, and a diplomatic process that was pursued vigorously until the early years of the 21st century.

The young Jews joining pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the last two months know only an Israel they see as powerful, violent against Palestinians and ruled by leaders far to their right.

The New York Times