Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? It doesn’t matter

Source: The Times of Israel

by Yossi Klein Halevi

While there is an obvious overlap between antisemitism and other forms of hatred against the “other,” Jew-hatred is unique. No other antipathy to any group has such deep historical roots, beginning in pagan Egypt and the Hellenistic world, where the Jewish refusal to acknowledge the divinity of kings was regarded as intolerable arrogance and monotheism as an affront to the “religious pluralism” of the gods. No other hatred is so adaptable to seemingly any ideology and circumstance.

In its way, the persistence of antisemitism through most of recorded history is as astonishing as Jewish survival. Antisemitism has even managed to outwit its most formidable challenge, the Holocaust.

Conflating antisemitism with racism does an injustice to both. Each is distinct; each creates its own misery. Depending on the era, antisemitism has been nurtured by religion, secularism, utopian longings, racism, and anti-racism.

The term “anti-Semitism” is an invention of nineteenth-century European racists. Acknowledging that there is no such thing as “Semitism,” many now prefer the term “antisemitism,” removing the capital “S” and the hyphen. Even in its amended form, though, the term is problematic and implicitly reinforces the identification of Jew-hatred with racism. (Given the pervasive use of the term, this article reluctantly uses “antisemitism” as synonymous with Jew-hatred.)

Defining antisemitism

Antisemitism is the transformation of the Jews into “The Jew,” a symbol of whatever a given civilization regards as its most loathsome qualities. For Christians until the post-Holocaust era, The Jew was a Christ-killer, guilty of the ultimate crime of trying to murder the source of hope. For Muslims, The Jew was the “killer of prophets,” the ultimate crime for a faith founded in veneration of the Prophet. For Marxists, The Jew was the ultimate capitalist; Marx, the son of a Jew who converted to Christianity, wrote that money was the “jealous god of Israel.” And for Nazis, The Jew was the ultimate race polluter and, no less dangerous, the inculcator of conscience, undermining the Aryans’ ability to survive in a brutal world.

Along with “symbolization,” anti-Jewishness works through “denialism” – the distortion or outright denial of the legitimacy of Jewish identity and history or the co-option of the Jewish story by others. According to the old Christian doctrine of “supersessionism,” the sinful Jews were no longer worthy of their identity as “Israel,” and their place as God’s chosen people was supplanted by the Church, the “new Israel.” To a lesser extent, Islam adopted biblical stories and claimed biblical figures as its own, accusing the Jews of falsifying their own scriptures.

Arguably, no other people or faith (and the Jews are both) has had to contend through most of its history with a spiritual assault of this magnitude on its right to its own story. In the modern era, that assault assumed a secular form. In much of the Muslim world, led by the Iranian regime, and for neo-Nazis in the West, Holocaust denial is an attempt to undermine the moral argument for Israel as a necessary refuge for the Jewish people.

But there are also more subtle forms of Holocaust denial. The Soviet Union, for example, did not deny the historicity of the Holocaust but rather its Jewish nature. The Soviet regime forbade Jews from publicly mourning their dead. Memorials at the sites of Nazi mass murder commemorated the unnamed as “victims of Fascism” – twice murdered, as Soviet Jews noted bitterly: killed as Jews by the Nazis and erased as Jews by the Soviets.

Defining anti-Zionism

Subsequently, the Soviet regime went a step further, from the erasure of the Holocaust to its inversion, equating Zionism with racism and even Nazism. The notion of Zionism as a form of racism was born in the Soviet Union. The regime understood that the only way to justify Jew-hatred from the left was through anti-racism. That ingenious ideological twist is the Soviet Union’s posthumous gift to Western anti-Zionists.

Is anti-Zionism, then, the latest iteration of antisemitism? Much of contemporary anti-Zionism uncomfortably fits the historic pattern of both symbolization and denialism. In the era of anti-racism and human rights, the Jewish state is turned into the criminal of nations, a symbol of racism and colonialism, and now even genocide. Reaching this conclusion requires a heavy dose of denialism: the erasure of the Zionist narrative, from the millennial-old Jewish roots in the land of Israel to the relentless war against Israel’s existence, which has forced Israel to act in sometimes brutal ways.

According to the anti-Zionist variation of supersessionism, sinful Israel has ceded its story to the Palestinians, who are, in effect, the new Jews, both as victims and as rightful heirs to the Holy Land. We are not only colonialists in our land but, in our story, imposters who must be expelled from both. In their fallen state, Jews have even forfeited the Holocaust; in this retelling, Gaza becomes the “Gaza Ghetto.” When a swastika is painted on the façade of a synagogue, it is no longer clear whether the perpetrators are far-rightists celebrating Nazism or far-leftists branding Jews as the new Nazis.

Astonishingly, the current rise in attacks on Jews coincides with the greatest mass slaughter of Israelis in a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews. The global assault emerged with the first reports of the Hamas massacre – before Israel’s counter-offensive even began. Antisemitism is a response not only to Jewish power, real or exaggerated but also to Jewish vulnerability; a successful attack on Jews rouses the antisemitic appetite.

The pretext offered for the widespread support among anti-Zionists for the Hamas massacre is based on two “denialist” arguments. The first is that the massacre was the inevitable result of the Israeli occupation. This argument ignores the fact that Hamas’ goal is not the end of the occupation of the territories Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War but the destruction of the Jewish state. And it ignores the complicated history of how we have come to this point, including Palestinian rejection of every offer Israel has made over the years to end the occupation.

The second argument in support of the Hamas massacre is that it was not a massacre at all. There were no mass rapes; children weren’t burned alive. This latest expression of anti-Jewish denialism has taken the macabre form of tearing down posters of Israeli hostages, even blacking out their faces – a literal defacement. Embracing Hamas requires adopting its denial of the humanity of Israelis.

The British Jewish writer David Hirsh argues that the term “anti-Zionism” should be treated like “anti-Semitism,” removing the hyphen and lowercasing the “z.” Similar to the absence of meaning in “Semitism,” he notes “Zionism” for radical progressives is a fantasy construct, a demonic ideology with no resemblance to its actual nature. Historical Zionism incorporates almost the entirety of Jewish political and religious life – from social democrats to Marxists, from theocrats to Reform Jews to secular liberals. To reduce “Zionism” to a form of colonialism not only does violence to the Jews’ attachment to their ancient land but to the complexity of Zionism itself.

The real threat of anti-Zionism

And yet, the total conflation of anti-Zionism with classical antisemitism is problematic. To begin with, some anti-Zionists are proudly identifying Jews who argue that Zionism has betrayed Judaism by replacing an ethical tradition with nationalism and power. Many, perhaps most, of the young people demonstrating against Israel on campuses today – even those chanting the Hamas slogan, “From the river to the sea,” which promotes the erasure of the Jewish state – are not inherently antisemitic.

More deeply, the contemporary reality of Jewish power complicates an easy identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In the past, hatred against Jews was based on contrived accusations. “The Jews” did not kill Christ, and no Jew used the blood of Christian children for matzos. But thousands of Gazan children have been killed by a Jewish army.

Like most Jewish Israelis, I believe we have no choice but to attempt to destroy the Hamas regime, which has turned mosques, schools, and hospitals into terrorist centers. Still, in reclaiming power after the Holocaust – “hard power” in Israel, “soft power” in the Diaspora – the Jewish people forfeited the identity of the victim. While acting in self-defense against genocidal enemies does not turn us into victimizers, power does deny us the right to dismiss all accusations against us as absurd.

Still, does it really matter whether anti-Zionism is a form of classical antisemitism? Anti-Zionism is the greatest threat facing the Jewish people today; surely, that should be sufficient to treat it as a menace on its own terms.

Anti-Zionism threatens the Jewish people in three ways. First, its vision of the dismantling of a Jewish state would existentially threaten Israel’s 7 million Jews. To conclude, after October 7, 2023 – when we experienced a pre-enactment of the consequences of the anti-Zionist plan – that Israelis can survive in the Middle East without the protection of national sovereignty and an army defies reason.

Second, anti-Zionism is an assault on the legitimacy of the mid-twentieth-century Jewish story of overcoming annihilation. The fulfillment of the Jewish people’s longing to return home was the foundation of the post-Holocaust recovery. To turn that story of faith, courage, and persistence into a crime is to subvert the pillar of contemporary Jewish identity, shared by the strong majority of world Jewry.

Third, anti-Zionism threatens the historic achievement of American Jewry, which is unconditional acceptance by the non-Jewish mainstream. In the past, Jews were accepted as Americans – provided they “toned down” their Jewishness. Anti-Zionists have reintroduced conditionality; now, Jews must renounce their attachment to Israel as the condition for their acceptance.

Jews and their friends should not be required to prove that a mortal threat is literally antisemitic to be justified in resisting it. We need to shift the conversation over anti-Zionism and focus on its dire implications for the Jewish future.

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This essay appeared in the most recent edition, devoted to antisemitism, of the American Bar Association’s magazine, “Human Rights,” and is published here with permission.

About the Author: Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.