The always complicated relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has become an exceptionally fraught one. Especially since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing war on Gaza that Israel launched in retaliation, the topic has been upending traditional alliances in American politics and creating new and deeply divisive fissures in elite educational and cultural institutions. (This is to say nothing of what it is doing to Jews themselves.) There are countless forces at work and many debates taking place simultaneously; some honest and legitimate, but at least as many not so much. Much of the discourse about this relationship seeks to exploit the fact that we do not, either as a society or among scholars of the topic, have even the most basic agreement of what constitutes antisemitism, what constitutes anti-Zionism, and how and when the two interact to the detriment of us all.When I put the words “antisemitism and anti-Zionism” into a Google search while researching this article, the first result that popped up was from the American Jewish Committee. This venerable organization, which was originally founded by a self-selected group of wealthy and influential Jews back in 1906, was (ironically, given its stance today) one of the very last holdouts among American Jewish organizations in opposing the founding of the state of Israel, almost until it became a fait accompli. After that, the committee took a distant, somewhat critical stance toward the state and the harsh treatment meted out toward those Arabs who remained in its borders, as well as the refusal to take any responsibility to resettle any of the Palestinian refugees who had been forced out.Today, however, its position could hardly be more different. Under the subheading “How Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic?” it explains: “The belief that the Jews, alone among the people of the world, do not have a right to self-determination—or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid—is inherently bigoted.” The second response from Google took me to the website of the World Jewish Congress. Under the headline “Defining antisemitism: Why anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” there follows a rather lengthy history of the Jewish people since biblical times. It goes on to give a series of reasons as to how and why all forms of anti-Zionism ultimately either rely on or inspire antisemitism and thereby endanger Jews whether inside or outside of Israel.If I scroll further down, I reach the URL for the website of Jewish Voice for Peace. Here, beneath the subhead reading, “Why is it dangerous to confuse antisemitism with anti-Zionism?” I learn that “opposition to the political movement of Zionism and/or the policies of the state of Israel is no different from criticism of any other political ideology or policies of any other nation-state, such as the settler colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy at the foundation of the United States.” The confusion arises, however, because “the Israeli government, U.S. government, and anti-Palestinian organizations run concerted campaigns to redefine and misstate the meaning of antisemitism, aiming to falsely conflate it with criticisms of Israel or Zionism. They do this so the Israeli government can avoid accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”One key reason why, even with the best intentions, this debate is so difficult to resolve is that both Jewishness and the state of Israel do not fit any traditional categories or disciplines of study. Is Jewishness a religion? A culture? An ethnicity? A “people”? Yes (but also sometimes no). Is the American Jewish relationship to Israel one of what the scholar Benedict Anderson termed “long-distance nationalism,” like that of Irish or Italian Americans to their families’ country of origin? Well, no. Ever since the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967—when it appeared to many people, albeit falsely, that Israeli Jews faced what could have become a “second Holocaust” but instead won an inspiring military victory that resulted in Israel’s conquest of massive amounts of Arab lands along with millions of their inhabitants—Israel has become the primary component of American Jews’ Jewish identity. This is true despite the fact that most of them have never even visited Israel, much less lived or come from there. A tiny percentage of them understand its language (or its complicated form of government). They’d probably be shocked to hear that almost a quarter of Israelis are not even Jews, a percentage that rises to more than half if you include “Judea and Samaria”—that is, the occupied West Bank—as so many Israelis and their American supporters do.Israel itself is also something of a massive outlier in the history of nation-states. The relationship of its creation to the Holocaust is the topic of much dispute among scholars, but it is fair to say that it is impossible to imagine that Israel would have been formed when it was in the form it was without the world sympathy that the Jewish people benefited from as a result of Hitler’s attempt to wipe them out. The previous history of Jewish persecution in Europe and elsewhere was also a crucial factor. It is fair to call Israel today an “ethno-nationalist” state because, despite the fact that more than 20 percent of its citizens are not Jews, a “basic law” passed by the Knesset in 2018 defines it as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” and promotes the “establishment and development … of Jewish settlement,” rather than that of all its citizens.The frequent description one reads of Israel as a “settler colonialist nation” is easier to deny given the long-standing relationship of Jews to the land of Palestine, together with the fact that Jews had nowhere else to go to escape persecution, first by the czars and then by Hitler and his murderous minions, especially after 1924, when the United States all but shut its doors to most immigrants. And yes, Israel did forcibly expel most of the 750,000 or so Palestinians who ended up as refugees in other nations in the wake of the 1948 war. That resulted in the fact that Israel is not only surrounded by enemy states on its borders that would like it to disappear but is also home to a significant population that agrees with that sentiment. Right or wrong, this is a unique historical circumstance. Finally, there is the fact that it is carrying out an especially brutal—and illegal, under international law—military occupation in the West Bank, and, in response to the terrorist attacks of October 7, a shockingly inhumane war that is visiting a previously unimaginable level of death and destruction upon the people of Gaza: a campaign that has been denounced by almost every nation in the world save its sponsor, the U.S.Speaking purely philosophically, the position denying equivalence between antisemitism and anti-Zionism rests on far stronger ground than its opposite. It’s not merely the fact that the Jewish diaspora arose, and in many cases flourished, for thousands of years before there was a Jewish state to be loyal to, and the vast majority of Jews did not see mass Jewish settlement in the land of the Bible as in any way central to their self-understanding as Jews. Both the most intensely Orthodox, even in what is now Israel, as well as the largest religious denomination in the U.S., Reform Jews, were dead set against the creation of the state until just a couple of decades before it happened. There is also the simple fact that anti-Zionist attitudes—and here again, definitions are a problem; see my TNR article on this—can still be found today among all sorts of people, many of whom are not only quite favorably disposed to Jews but are also Jews themselves. The late Robert Wistrich, who directed Hebrew University’s International Center for the Study of Antisemitism for over a decade and was universally considered to be among the world’s most respected authorities on the topic, came to share the belief with many conservative supporters of Israel that the ideologies of antisemitism and anti-Zionism had “tended to converge” in recent decades. Yet even he felt forced to admit:There have always been Bundists, Jewish communists, Reform Jews, and ultra-Orthodox Jews who strongly opposed Zionism without being Judeophobes. So, too, there are conservatives, liberals, and leftists in the West today who are pro-Palestinian, antagonistic toward Israel, and deeply distrustful of Zionism without crossing the line into anti-Semitism. There are also Israeli “post-Zionists” who object to the definition of Israel as an exclusively or even a predominantly “Jewish” state without feeling hostile toward Jews as such. There are others, too, who question whether Jews are really a nation; or who reject Zionism because they believe its accomplishment inevitably resulted in uprooting many Palestinians. None of these positions is intrinsically anti-Semitic in the sense of expressing opposition or hatred toward Jews as Jews.The very fact that, as Haaretz reports, the Jewish seminaries in the U.S. that are charged with training tomorrow’s rabbis are currently grappling with the issue of an apparent surfeit of anti-Zionist Jews who wish to dedicate themselves to a life of serving other Jews in the rabbinate demonstrates the hollowness of the simplistic “anti-Zionism equals antisemitism” equation. You may have noticed, however, that philosophical or even political consistency is rarely a crucial component, much less a deciding factor, in our nation’s political discourse. It is perhaps nowhere rarer than in arguments related to Israel and Palestine. The individual who has likely played the largest role in driving the conversation, at least to judge by cable news appearances and journalistic sound bites, is undoubtedly Jonathan Greenblatt, who heads up the Anti-Defamation League. Greenblatt purposely eschews all complexity or nuance in the position he has staked out for his once venerable and respected organization (see my 2023 profile of the ADL under Greenblatt). “Let’s make this very clear: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Greenblatt argues.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185587/anti-zionism-vs-antisemitism