“Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?”
These days, that question seems most often posed with a touch of venom in it—accompanied with a sneer and keffiyeh. It’s at the root of the American embrace of the anti-Israel rhetoric that has become the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian movement.
It’s a simple enough question with a complicated answer. If everyone were aligned on the definition of “Zionism,” it would be a simpler answer: Yes.
But today, that’s far from the case. Here’s the actual definition of Zionism: Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Hard stop. That’s it. There’s no denial of a right to Palestinian self-determination in the definition. No embrace of apartheid or “Jewish supremacy.” No racism. Just a claim to our indigenous rights. At the same time, let me be clear, again, as to what anti-Zionism is not. Anti-Zionism is not criticizing the government of Israel. Anti-Zionism is not disagreeing with policies or military action or how the Gaza war has been prosecuted.
Unfortunately, the word “Zionism” has been hijacked over the past several years and been made into an epithet. For some, it’s easy to make a distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and they believe to be doing so in good faith. For them, Zionism represents every “bad” thing they associate with Israel, but has nothing to do with “the Jews.”
To get a clearer picture requires an understanding of some history:
1) Zionism as a political movement only really took off in the 19th century. But Zionism as a cultural underpinning of what it is to be Jewish dates back literally centuries, likely referenced in oral traditions as far back as the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, around 70 CE. The diaspora that ensued fostered our aching need to return to our ancestral homeland in Israel. The Jewish holiday of Passover starts in just a couple weeks. The Passover Seder observance (widely agreed to have been observed as Jesus’ Last Supper) ends with reciting: “לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה בִּירוּשָׁלָיִם” which means, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The earliest written form of that goes back to around 11th Century in rabbinical texts. There is much underpinning that simple, short sentence, but at the core of it is the yearning “Am Yisrael” (the people of Israel) share to return from diaspora and rebuild our holy Temple.
2) Political Zionism is a result of antisemitism, not the other way around. Theodore Herzl, the father of the movement, recognized accurately that Jew-hatred was growing at an alarming rate, especially after the Dreyfus Affair, and particularly in France and Germany. He saw that Jewish assimilation would never fully be possible in the West and published pamphlets on it over many years that eventually culminated in his work Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in the late 19th Century. It argued that antisemitism could not be defeated, and it was in Jews’ best interest to return to Israel—which was under control of the Ottoman Empire at that time.
3) Beginning in the mid-19th Century, many Diaspora Jews returned to Israel, rejoining our Jewish cousins who never left, and they legally purchased land in the region belonging to Arabs under Ottoman rule. Here’s a column I wrote explaining the 2021 Al-Aqsa conflict that details that history, and puts it into modern context. This was not stolen land. It was paid for—often at prices well above what market value would have been at the time.
4) Jews in the Levant (and anywhere else in the Middle East) struggled under local Arab rule as “Dhimmis”—analogous to the Black experience under Jim Crow in the U.S. There were multiple pogroms and massacres of Jews across the years and region, recalling the original days of the Muslim conquest, and the violence only increased in ferocity and frequency up to and through the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, British colonial rule under the Mandate of Palestine, and through to the Israel War of Independence. It’s important to note: Israel declared independence from British colonialism. Not the Grand Mufti or other Arab rule. That fact needs restating, as it is commonly misrepresented among anti-Zionists today. And yet, that fact didn’t dissuade Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq from declaring war on Israel in 1948—which Israel won.
5) Palestinian cultural nationalism really didn’t exist yet. Through the early 20th Century, when the word “Palestine” was uttered, the people referenced were by and large the Jews living there—witness the Palestine Post, Palestine Symphony Orchestra, Anglo-Palestine Bank, Palestine Airways, etc.—all Jewish-owned institutions. The Arab populace referred to themselves as Southern Syrians, Levantine Arabs, or simply Arabs—sometimes as “Palestinian Arabs” while the region was under British rule. It wasn’t until 1964 that the Arab League under Egyptian President Nasser’s admonitions—pursuing its doctrine of Pan-Arab nationalism—created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the concept of Palestinian national identity was cemented. Then, in 1969, the KGB effectively installed Yasser Arafat as the leader of the PLO.
6) In the earliest days leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, it was a strictly an agrarian culture, built on the kibbutz model which adopted a niche form of socialism. The mission was to “make the desert bloom” —a phrase that has resonated as a source of pride for Israelis while being decried by Palestinian leadership in their propaganda efforts for decades. At that time, the USSR was delighted to see this happening, and even provided arms to assist Israel in its War for Independence in 1948. The USSR was the first country to officially recognize Israel. Josef Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the USSR, saw Israel as a potential ally in weakening British influence in the Middle East. However, as Israel’s government took shape in a decidedly Parliamentary Democracy, that relationship soured quickly. And the USSR now panicked as it became clearer that the West now had a prospering outpost in the Middle East.
7) Nikita Khrushchev took power in 1953 after Stalin’s death, and ratcheted up the undercurrent of antisemitism permeating Soviet culture since tsarist-era Russia. The USSR became more anti-religion than ever, and that disproportionately impacted Soviet Jews — the USSR’s propaganda machine had almost singular focus on antisemitism, far outpacing any literature they published against Christianity or Islam. The USSR was a critical progenitor of erasing any perceived difference between Judaism and Zionism. To Khrushchev, they were one and the same, and both represented traitorous and anti-State ideology inside the Soviet Union.
8) Khrushchev saw an opportunity for Soviet influence in the “3rd World,” establishing deep alliances with Egypt first, then other Arab states. And that brought him directly into involvement with the Arab League and the newly formed PLO in 1964. From there, the KGB was heavily involved in training, funding and arming the PLO, including the training and installation of Arafat in ’69.
This is all an admittedly abridged historical perspective on how Zionism became a cudgel with which to enact antisemitic policies and initiatives from the Arab/Soviet perspective. Fast-forward to today. The connection between Russia—now run by a former KGB agent himself—and Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s political party, now running the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas) and Hamas remains intact. And a very key—and successful tactic—has been the steady drumbeat of propaganda positioning “Zionism” as an evil. It is not. There are evil people who call themselves “Zionists,” sure. And there are plenty more who, like me, simply support the existence of the state of Israel, and would love to see a permanent, peaceful 2-state solution to the current Palestinian/Israel conflict.
Depending on the poll, anywhere from 75-95% of the world’s Jews support the existence of the State of Israel. Literally half of all the Jews in the world live in Israel. Detaching Zionism from what it is to be Jewish is not as clean a cut as Israel’s detractors like to preach. Israel represents the only current example of decolonization on Earth—an indigenous people reclaiming their ancestral homeland from colonial forces. And what we’ve seen in terms of how anti-Zionism has been practiced—especially after the terrorist massacre by Hamas of 10/7/2023—illustrates that there is no line of demarcation.
For example—Christian Zionists likely outnumber Jewish Zionists in the United States by a factor anywhere from 5–10:1. Yet nearly every “pro-Palestinian” protest, encampment, campaign and attack is focused solely against Jews. Jewish-owned businesses are vandalized. Synagogues, Jewish Community Centers, Jewish schools, and Jewish cemeteries are vandalized, swatted, threatened, shot up, and burned. Graffiti on our institutions is rife with antisemitic language, swastikas and anti-Israel verbiage all at the same time. Anti-Zionism has become a way to practice antisemitism under a guise that feels palatable to many who find it a means to exonerate themselves from the cognitive dissonance they wrestle with when they proclaim themselves to also be anti-racist, feminist, pro-LGTBQ, progressive-minded people who have “lots of Jewish friends.” And it’s further exacerbated by Jews who are all-too willing to tokenize themselves as “anti-Zionist” and then are trotted out by pro-Palestinian organizations as a “gotcha!” in their anti-Zionism campaigns. And while the numbers of these self-tokenizing Jews are a fraction of the world’s Jewish population, they are highly visible, distorting the perception of uneducated onlookers and making anti-Zionists feel as though their position must be valid because some Jews support it.
The argument that anti-Zionism functions as antisemitism in practice isn’t merely theoretical—it’s now being litigated and settled in federal court. Last week, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law announced a landmark settlement with the University of California, Berkeley, resolving a lawsuit over what can only be described as an institutionalized Jewish-free zone at Berkeley Law School. Nine law student organizations—eventually expanding to more than 20, including academic journals and clinical programs—had amended their bylaws to permanently exclude any speaker who supports Israel or Zionism, regardless of the topic of their speech. A speaker invited to discuss real estate law or reproductive rights could be barred simply for being a Zionist—which, as Berkeley Law’s own dean acknowledged, would exclude roughly 90% of Jewish law students.
The settlement, reached under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires Berkeley to rescind those bylaws, adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, mandate antisemitism training across campus, and establish new protections for Jewish and Israeli students. It is, in every legal sense, a ruling that anti-Zionist exclusion of Jews constitutes unlawful discrimination — not protected political speech. As Brandeis Center Chairman Kenneth Marcus put it: “Universities, unions, corporations, and political parties cannot create an anti-Zionist exception to their conduct codes.” The courts, it turns out, agree.
So, is anti-Zionism, in fact, antisemitism?
The anti-Zionists have been wildly successful proving that to be the case.
