No, Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism—Except When It Is

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. “Anti-Zionism is a negation of Jewish history, a denial of Jewish humanity.”

Given the fact that almost all mainstream media organizations rely on Greenblatt’s organization as their source for antisemitism statistics in the U.S. and journalists tend to quote these uncritically, the debate tends to reflect the ADL’s contention that literally every demonstration on behalf of Palestinian rights or in opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza is by definition an act of antisemitism. As a result of these and other similar statements by Greenblatt, Wikipedia’s editors recently took the unusual step of warning against the use of the ADL’s statistics as a source. The editors also objected to Greenblatt’s claim that pro-Palestinian protesters against Israel on campuses were actually Iranian proxies.

In the wake of a nationwide outbreak of student demonstrations against Israel and its invasion of Gaza, Greenblatt’s position—that authorities refuse any distinction between pro-Palestinian agitation and antisemitism—is also what appears to be animating both wealthy Jewish donors to elite universities and Republican representatives in Congress. The combination of these donors promising to withhold future donations and refuse to hire students who participate in these actions, along with a series of congressional hearings in which college presidents were grilled about their policies regarding student and faculty actions related to Israel and Palestine, have so far claimed the professional scalps of four college presidents. The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Cornell—all of them female, as it happens—all resigned their posts in the past year rather than continue to try to navigate the narrow (and extremely rocky) shoals of simultaneously protecting the free speech rights of their pro-Palestinian protesters and the fundamental precepts of academic inquiry that are the foundations of university life, addressing the feelings of threat experienced by their Jewish students who feel themselves under attack, and dealing with the constant drumbeat of funders and politicians demanding that they punish the people participating in the “encampments” and the increasingly angry anti-Israel campus protests.

The protesters, almost without exception, insist that in targeting “Zionists” rather than “Jews” as the subject of their ire, they cannot fairly be accused of being antisemitic. Indeed, many of them turn out to be Jews themselves, and they see their anti-Zionism as an expression of their Jewish values rather than the opposite. These Jews, while no doubt growing in number among young people, are nevertheless a decided minority in the Jewish community and are barely represented at all in mainstream American politics. For many if not most American Jews, Israel remains a—if not the—primary source of Jewish identity. They may not like Bibi Netanyahu. They may wish for a cease-fire in Gaza. But their synagogue services include prayers for the state of Israel, and Israeli flags by the bimah. They sing the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” and raise money for Israeli causes in the same rooms where they say their prayers. Those who do not pray regularly, which is most of them, often donate to professional American Jewish organizations that devote far more attention and resources to raising money and lobbying for Israel, and attacking its opponents, than any issue related to Jewish religious practice, education, or communal support.

Anti-Zionist activists argue that this almost universal commitment to Zionism makes mainstream Jewish religious and cultural institutions fair game for protests and (far too often of late) harassment. They receive (and deserve) little sympathy for this, given that they surely know that many Jewish institutions, especially religious ones, are filled with people who want nothing to do with Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians. What’s more, there are plenty of symbols, organizations, even official outposts of the Israeli government that would provide legitimate targets of protest. (And why, by the way, do protesters never target Christian Evangelical Zionists in their protests? After all, they are actually far more supportive of Israel’s extremist government than are American Jews.) When, last year, the anti-Zionist group Within Our Lifetime published a map of Jewish and pro-Israel organizations in New York, insisting that they had “blood on their hands,” its purpose was to “make these locations a stop in your protests. Picket and leaflet outside of them.” Such actions are morally and strategically misguided, to put it mildly. This same nefarious logic was at work more recently with the vandalizing of the home of Anne Pasternak, the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum, as the Times reported, “by smearing red paint and graffiti across the entry of her apartment building and hanging a banner that accused her of being a ‘white-supremacist Zionist.’”

But it is also true that the history of antisemitism and Jewish persecution can be, and frequently is, deployed by “pro-Israel” forces to silence entirely legitimate criticism of Israel by interpreting support for the Palestinians as somehow consistent with pogroms, the Nazi Holocaust, or the policies and rhetoric of Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah. Is it antisemitic for progressives to call out the nefarious role that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is currently playing in the Democratic Party—harnessing the donations of Republican and other right-wing funders to systematically take out one progressive Democrat after another in primary battles in order to silence anti-Israel criticism in Congress? (Oftentimes these campaigns don’t even mention Israel, but that is obviously the entire point of AIPAC’s multimillion-dollar interventions.) Or what about the fact that Sheldon Adelson—who used to brag, falsely, of being “the richest Jew in the world”—and, now, his widow, pay what are essentially political bribes to Donald Trump to buy his indulgences for Israel’s right-wing government’s policy? (Maggie Haberman writes in her recent book on Trump that his price to the Adelsons for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was a cool $20 million.)

The fact that these actions are, sadly, consistent with anti-Jewish stereotypes in history has the effect of protecting them from entirely legitimate criticism, lest the speaker making such legitimate criticism be accused of employing exactly the same smears to which Jews have been subjected, now, for nearly two millennia. No one in Congress wants to find themselves on the wrong side of what is undoubtedly one of America’s toughest and wealthiest lobbying groups, especially if doing so results in accusations of antisemitism.

This tension is likely what New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had in mind recently when, in a conversation she hosted with two prominent members of Jewish professional organizations, she noted that “antisemitism, hate, and violence against Jews because of their identity is real, and it is dangerous,” and that “when the Jewish community is threatened, the progressive movement is undermined.” But she accurately warned of the way that “false accusations of antisemitism are wielded against people of color and women of color by bad-faith political actors” intent on “weaponizing antisemitism” in order “to divide us.”

Pro-Zionists engage in a similar sort of sleight of hand when they employ the same antisemitic tropes to accuse liberal Jews of being insufficiently supportive of Israel. The king of this tactic is none other than Donald Trump. Yes, the very same guy who defended violent neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “good people”; whose party repeatedly ran election ads featuring Jewish financiers’ faces, attacking their alleged “globalist” conspiracies; and who hosted the unapologetic antisemitic agitators Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, nevertheless feels himself empowered to make frequent assertions that Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and hate “their religion.”

In addition to insulting most Jews—approximately 70 percent of whom consistently vote Democratic and can be expected to do so in this year’s presidential contest—Trump and other Republicans are employing the “dual loyalty” trope holding that Jewish loyalty belongs to Israel rather than to their home country, with the implication that they can therefore not be patriotic Americans the way Christians can and should not be trusted to do what’s best for America should it conflict with what Israel—a foreign government, after all—wants them to do.

In other words, precious little of what one sees and hears in mainstream media discussions of the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism can be taken at face value. The people with the largest megaphones are almost always pursuing political aims that have nothing whatsoever to do with promoting understanding on the part of those in the public who find themselves genuinely concerned and confused. It’s that very confusion, in fact, that empowers those who seek to manipulate the inevitable complications this question raises to make political demands on either side that bear no relationship to the lived experience of the victims of either phenomenon.

Owing to these competing ideological, religious, psychological, and political crosswinds, one can see what a difficult challenge is faced by those people who are actually charged with making real-world decisions about which forms of anti-Zionism can fairly be termed antisemitic and which ones deserve the protections of freedom of speech and thought. It’s almost impossible to know what motivates a speaker, especially given the entirely understandable—even appropriate—passions inspired by the spectacle of what Israel is doing in Gaza with the de facto blessing of the American government. The issue comes down to this question: When is the word Zionist employed as or at least understood to be a simple stand-in for the word Jew?

The easiest cases to adjudicate are those that occur when people are screamed at on the street or on their college campuses because they are wearing kippahs or attending a Jewish holiday gathering. There can be no question that it is sometimes the case that a relatively sophisticated antisemite will use the term Zionist in order to plead innocent to the charge of antisemitism. The complicated ones arise when Jews honestly experience these attacks as expressions of antisemitism regardless of the intent of the speaker.

This is the problem that so many college campuses now face in trying to make certain that Jewish students, staff, and faculty feel welcome there in the midst of what seems like a never-ending series of increasingly angry protests inspired by Israel’s war in Gaza. Columbia’s appointed task force on antisemitism, which released two reports this year, observed in a jointly written (and later much-debated) op-ed in the school’s newspaper, The Spectator, that the word Zionist has become “a general-purpose accusation. It is usually only Israelis and Jews who are asked to assure people, as the price of acceptance, that they are not ‘Zionists.’ That is about as clear-cut a case of discrimination as one can find.”

The op-ed notes that many Jewish students “feel that they cannot belong to a wide variety of student activities if they consider themselves to be ‘Zionist.’ This happens in graduate student union settings, in student government organizations, and in other student groups—even ones with no obvious relationship to religion or Middle East politics.” Attempts to address this problem are also noted in reports issued by task forces reporting to the administrations at Harvard and Stanford, and one can see the same problem arising in a significant proportion of cultural institutions and left-wing magazines, websites, and political organizations where anti-Zionism has come to be seen as the ideological price of admission to participate in addressing any issue on the progressive agenda, no matter how distant its relation to Israel-Palestine. The Columbia task force authors observe: “Many Jewish students are Israelis, or have close family members in Israel. Many have traveled to Israel regularly throughout their lives. The Jewish state is inextricably part of their identity, and on the Columbia campus they see it being treated as fundamentally malign and illegitimate in ways that no other country is, and in ways that make them feel ostracized and threatened. This is simply unacceptable. It is wrong.”

Here again, the Harvard and Stanford reports make exactly this point as well. And they are right. Again, anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, but it can be, and sometimes is, expressed that way. Moreover, fairly or not, it is often experienced as such. And just as the accusation of antisemitism should not be deployed to silence or stigmatize (extremely) well-deserved criticism of Israel, nor should we allow those attacks on Israel to hide what is antisemitic in effect, if not necessarily in intent. We need to be able to talk to each other respectfully, even as we honor the moral and political principles that, as with our identities, make us who we are.