Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? It doesn’t matter
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.
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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.