Anti-Zionism is usually not antisemitism

Lots of people want Jews to have the same right to self-determination I have.

(Originally published with a prefatory note, now moved to this footnote)¹

Antisemitism is a real and growing problem. Truly, it is. Violent antisemitic incidents happen every year in this country, and early indications are that the attack on Governor Shapiro’s residence this weekend was one of them.²

But antisemitism is not nearly as rampant a problem as Congress pretends for political gain. An exasperating byproduct of the war in Gaza has been watching both parties crank their bad-faith rage-bait up to 11 on this issue, to discredit well-meaning protests of far graver problems in which they are complicit.

For example, when the United States broke its own laws to rush Israel $12 billion worth of bombs to drop on apartment buildings crowded with many more civilians than combatants, Congress was outraged! Specifically, it was outraged that some universities did not punish the students protesting this policy strictly enough. Ivy League presidents were summoned to testify, then lost their jobs because Republicans performatively lost their minds over their mealy-mouthed answers (then dug up unrelated dirt on them to finish the job).

By April 2024, the student protests had only grown—so Congress³ responded by reintroducing the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The Act would codify the controversial IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which includes such broad examples as “drawing comparisons between current Israeli policy and Nazi policy.” Mainstream Israeli journalists make such comparisons too, and for everyone else, it’s just Godwin’s Law—but the House of Representatives decided that was grounds to mandate censorship by a vote of 320-91.

Sadly, none of this is new. Accusations of antisemitism are routinely used to confuse, deflect, or distract from overwhelmingly fair and needed criticism of Israeli atrocities—and by extension, American atrocities. In truth, a primary obstacle to addressing the antisemitism that does exist is that pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League have stretched the definition of antisemitism beyond all morally relevant meaning.

The crux of what makes these new definitions nonsense is the idea that anti-Zionism is innately antisemitic.⁴ This isn’t true in theory or in practice.

Anti-Zionism in Theory

Zionism is the movement and ideology supporting a state for the Jewish people in Historic Palestine. This makes it a form of ethno-nationalism: the idea is that a certain group of people has a right to a certain plot of land on account of their race. Typically, the idea is also that this race has a right to kick out and keep out other races by force, at least insofar as necessary to ensure that their race forever remains the majority in that land.

Anti-Zionists are just people who don’t believe that.

There are several bad reasons to oppose Zionism. Some of these are believing that Jews are subhuman creatures who secretly control the whole world, or that Jews need to be exterminated to protect and purify other races. Those ideas are absolutely antisemitic! And because some people who hold those ideas use “Zionist” as a code word for Jews, we should be vigilant enough to spot those wolves in sheep’s clothing, and to call out and disassociate from people flirting with those ideas.⁵ To any leftists reading this, “we” means you.

But there are also perfectly defensible reasons to oppose the idea that any race—even a race as historically persecuted as Jews—has a right to wield as much violence as Israel does to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel. Some of these reasons may be that race is made up and so are borders; that people with power should value all lives equally; that 2,600 years is too many to reclaim your ancestors’ land, whereas 75 years may not be;⁶ that Western superpowers arming white settlers to illegally seize land from Arabs bears some resemblance to colonialism and apartheid; or belief that a one-state solution with minority protections in a secular democracy could be the fastest path to peace and justice for all the region’s inhabitants, and if that means the state cannot be expressly Jewish by charter, so be it.⁷

Among progressive American anti-Zionists, this second set of ideas is vastly more popular than the first. I know this because I hang out with these people often; yet it should also be apparent to anyone paying objective, fair-minded attention to what these people say and believe in every other context.

In every other context, educated young progressives have egalitarian, universalist ideals. In every other context, they are the most aggressively anti-racist people in politics. They consistently define racism as prejudice + power, which is fully consistent with their critique of Zionism.

With nuclear bombs, lavish support from the United States, and a prewar GDP 13 times that of the Palestinian territories, Israel clearly has the power in this conflict. It clearly uses that power in ways that value some lives more than others. That’s why there are 1,700 dead on one side and 50,000 dead on the other. There is a big guy, and a little guy, and progressives sticking up for the little guy is not evidence of hatred—it is exactly what you’d expect from their broader worldview.

Self-Determination Arguments

The commonest counterargument is that anti-Zionism “den[ies] the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” as the IHRA puts it, “by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” This simply begs the question of what a right to self-determination includes. Tellingly, it begs it in the opposite direction of the typical American answer to that question.

Traditionally, Americans are more inclined to an ideological rival of ethno-nationalism called civic nationalism. This idea is that nations gain legitimacy not by racial identity, but by the consent of the governed and adherence to liberal values. Many nations lean on a combination of both, and I won’t wade too deep into the political philosophy here. But of the two, it seems very odd to accuse civic nationalism of being the more racist.

To illustrate the difference, I do not have a right to a predominantly white or Christian society in America. My right to self-determination is limited to a right to vote and speak in the pluralistic society in which I was born. My race or religion is not guaranteed to remain the majority of that society forever; soon enough, it likely won’t be. When people of my race or religion try to use the force of government to ensure my society remains predominantly white and Christian forever, I join other progressives in stridently opposing this.

Most American anti-Zionists want Jews to have the same rights I have, wherever in the world they happen to be born. That’s not antisemitism: it’s equality and anti-racism.

Historical Connection Arguments

A related argument is that anti-Zionism “denies the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.” This is not the case. Rather, it denies the relevance of that connection to how the land’s inhabitants should be governed today.

Yes, Jews have a connection to the land stretching back thousands of years. But so do two other major religions, and for most of that time, Jews were not the majority of the population. To (necessarily) oversimplify, some 45% of global Jews reside in Israel today because Britain helped their ancestors take that land from Muslims—who took it from Christians, who took it from other Muslims, who took it from other Christians, who took it from Romans, who took it from other Jews, who took it from someone else, for as far back as the history goes. We don’t know what race got there first, and it doesn’t matter. Rejecting ethno-nationalism means you don’t think ethnic ancestry should be relevant to who gets to live in a place.⁸

Selective Application Arguments

A third argument is that anti-Zionists only oppose ethno-nationalism selectively in the case of Israel, as an excuse to bash Jews. This is usually not true either. Many racial groups are denied states for practical reasons, and this is usually not blamed on bigotry. These include the Kurds, Catalans, Kashmiris, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Tamils, and Québécois.

Besides, leftists also criticize ethno-nationalism in many other contexts, including the white nationalist movement that marched on Charlottesville or the Christian nationalist movement that wants public schools to show the Ten Commandments. The wave of anti-immigrant ethno-nationalism in Europe and the US is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon criticized by the left. When racial minorities in Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Tibet demand rights or a state of their own, and China brutally represses and re-educates them in the name of preserving its Han majority, reasonable left-leaning liberals (read: not tankies) oppose this too.

Israel is also unique among other ethno-states in ways that warrant particular criticism. First, its creation was especially recent and artificial. There was not a Jewish majority in Israel for millennia before Zionists constructed one through mass migration and violence, which is not the case for most other ethno-states. Second, Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, so the violence it wields to maintain its ethno-state is wielded in Americans’ name, on Americans’ dime. For as long as that’s true, it is entirely reasonable for Americans to give its conduct special attention.

Of course, not all anti-Zionists are perfectly consistent. If someone only opposes violent ethno-nationalism in the Israeli case, they may have antisemitic bias. Alternatively, they may just be impressionable undergrad with limited information. The meaning of language depends on context and intent, which is why this post’s title says “usually.”

My point is, there’s nothing inherently prejudiced about the principle. If you don’t think violence is justified to maintain a preferred demographic balance, it is reasonable to conclude that Israel’s founding and/or current policies are morally illegitimate and should be discontinued.

Anti-Zionism in Practice

Sound theory must survive contact with reality. Like it or not, Israel exists now, and seven million Jews live there. Most of them were born there, and they have a right to exist where they were born. What does anti-Zionism mean in practice?

The truth is that not all anti-Zionists agree. Sometimes, they do not even know what they personally want, as I suspect is true of many undergraduates. It’s possible to be anti-Zionist in principle but support Israel’s continued existence for the foreseeable future as a matter of pragmatism. It is also possible to want terrible things to happen to Jews because you’re an antisemite. I’m not naïve about what’s out there.

But more commonly, progressive American anti-Zionists want a democratic one-state solution with no racial preferences and equal rights for all the region’s inhabitants. There are many possible models for this, not all of which would require dismantling the current Israeli state.⁹ Crucially, even those that would do away with an expressly Jewish state would not require, and are usually not intended as, a call for violence against Israeli Jews, as Zionists and Republicans so often pretend.¹⁰

It is reasonable to argue that a democratic one-state solution is not viable. Perhaps you think Palestinians are too conservative, fundamentalist, illiberal, antisemitic, or revenge-seeking to peacefully coexist with Israeli Jews any time soon. It is also reasonable to disagree with this argument, citing historical counterexamples like South Africa. But even if the first argument is true, that does not mean most anti-Zionists know or agree that it’s true! Just like the self-determination debate, A only implies B if you beg a question that many smart and informed people disagree about.

Can we please stop talking past each other?

Zionism is an understandable position. I take flak on the left for admitting that, but it’s true. Every method of defining a nation is somewhat arbitrary, one common method is ethnic ancestry, and Jews share religious, cultural, and historical bonds that create feelings of shared destiny. For millennia as a stateless people, Jews were subject to every manner of brutal persecution, culminating in the worst genocide in human history. It was defensible (though debatable) to argue that the only way to prevent that from happening again was to give them a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. It is even more reasonable to argue that, whatever the merits of its founding, some form of this state must survive moving forward to avoid bad outcomes.

Too much leftist thinking on this issue is crammed into ill-fitting models of evil capitalist exploitation. Too many leftists plug their ears to much of relevance, then pretend anyone acknowledging that nuance is racist beyond the pale of decency or conversation. That’s childish. Many of the kids at these protests had an immature and oversimplified view of the problem.

But Zionists, too, should resist the temptation to oversimplify the other side. And while both sides may argue in bad faith, only one of those bad-faith arguments is repeatedly made by the U.S. government.¹¹ Breaking the cycle of violence will require admitting that good people can disagree on this issue for non-racist reasons. It will require distinguishing between impact and intent, especially where impact depends on contestable assumptions.

Israel’s right to exist has always been controversial in the great majority of the world, and this is not primarily because most of the world is racist. It is because Israel’s founding was violent and recent, and continues to cause great suffering for a whole other nation with valid claims to the same land and holy city. It's because Israel is backed by Western military muscle in a region where that muscle has done terrible harm. It’s because Netanyahu’s Israel is much likelier to be on the giving end of genocide, apartheid, and humanitarian catastrophe than the receiving end.

In this context, pretending anti-Zionism is antisemitism cheapens the weight of that accusation. It miscasts well-meaning champions of egalitarian, cosmopolitan ideals—including a great many Jews and even Israelis—as hateful extremists. In so doing, it makes it harder to call out the hateful extremism that really exists. People will only take the charge of antisemitism seriously if the term describes views and behaviors that offend the conscience, as opposed to those that strike most of the world as sticking up for the vulnerable.

1. This one has been in my drafts folder for a while. I admit I was wary of kicking this particular hornet’s nest. Might it offend my Jewish followers? Scare away prospective employers? Preclude a political appointment one day, etc?

Last weekend, I saw these posts on my doomscroll and decided that hesitation was cowardly bullshit.

At this moment, the Trump administration is using overbroad definitions of antisemitism as a trial balloon for the concept of speech that can get you deported, and maybe even thrown in a gulag. The concept of “illegal ideas” that the government can flag as a “public safety risk” to ignore the rights of legal residents today and U.S. citizens tomorrow.

That concept is a hundred times graver a threat to free speech than anything the woke left ever tried. The chilling effect is the point. And as with most authoritarian power grabs, they’re testing it on the marginalized first, who face harsher social stigma with thinner legal shelter than I have. MAGA depicts these ideas as unworthy of protection by portraying their proponents as scary, violent, foreign terrorist brown people who hate America.

As a patriotic white boy Army veteran, I feel obliged to frustrate that portrayal—and to say the illegal ideas louder. I don’t expect to convince everyone who disagrees with me about Zionism. But as you read the case below, ask yourself more than “do I agree?”. Ask yourself whether the views I describe are so innately hateful—so violence-loving, as opposed to violence-hating—that people who hold them should be censored, kicked out of college, or forcefully evicted from a country that once prided itself on the freedoms of speech and conscience.

2. I decided to write this post before I heard anything about the Shapiro case, and I have no doubt that commenters will cite it as evidence against my thesis. It’s not. The perpetrator was an unstable, unemployed 38-year-old who lived with his parents and had a history of crime and mental health issues. This tracks exactly with my mental image of real and dangerous antisemites! And it is obviously not representative of the elite college students demonstrating at Columbia University, who are not accused of arson or bomb threats or anything like that. It is one thing to protest the policies of Israel and the United States, and another to blame those policies on a random governor (whose views on the issue are well within the Democratic mainstream) just because he happens to be Jewish. It’s a third thing to resort to violence. See how easy those distinctions are? Most anti-Zionists make them easily.

3. Specifically, my former boss…

4. This claim is linked with the idea of “delegitimization” as one of the “three D’s” of antisemitism.

5. Likewise, blaming or distrusting random Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic. The two groups of people most prone to conflating the distinction between Jews and Israel are antisemites and Zionists: antisemites, so that they can blame Jews for the actions of Israel, and Zionists, so that they can portray criticism of Israel as hatred of Jews.

6. For anyone needing a wildly oversimplified crash course on the history here…A Jewish state existed thousands of years ago as the Biblical Israel, but was destroyed about 720 years before Christ, after which most of the Jewish people were gradually dispersed to Europe and other areas. Over the next 2600 years, Historic Palestine changed hands between many empires. A minority of the region remained Jewish, but the majority of its inhabitants became Muslim soon after the creation of Islam and remained so for over 1,000 years.

Modern Zionism was founded in the late 1800s by a guy named Theodor Herzl. Herzl encouraged Jews, then heavily persecuted as racial and religious minorities in Europe and the Middle East, to move back to their ancient homeland to re-found a state of their own. At first, only a few Jews did this, in part because moving was hard and Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. That empire collapsed after WWI, however, transferring control of Palestine to Britain. Britain sympathized with the Zionist cause and provided funding and weapons to assist Jewish settlement on its new colony, which helped millions of Jews move to the territory in the ensuing decades.

Initially, many of the newcomers purchased their land from Arabs or settled on unused land in the area, allowing for a mostly peaceful coexistence with the locals. But before long, the locals perceived a threat to their way of life and rebelled against their British colonizers, killing innocent Jews in the process. The Palestinian rebellion was brutally repressed. After the Holocaust, millions more Jews flocked to Israel, and reciprocal violence between the groups accelerated, leading to the Nakba and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. From then on, Zionism has been devoted to protecting, strengthening, and at times expanding this state while preserving its Jewish character, often in ways that violate human rights or international law and work to deny Palestinians a state of their own.

7. My own views on Zionism are irrelevant to my case here, which is about the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They are also irrelevant to the much harder question of what to do now that a state of Israel already exists; and my views on that second question are more pragmatic than those of many anti-Zionists. But for what it’s worth, neither race, religion, culture, nor ancient history are relevant to any conception of human rights or democratic legitimacy I recognize—so personally, I oppose ethno-nationalism in all its forms. Frankly, I even oppose regular nationalism, but I find the racial aspect particularly noxious.

8. That said, it’s worth noting that some Palestinians alive today truly were “there first.” From a framework of purely individual (rather than collective/racial) rights, their land was stolen and they have a right to return and claim recompense. By contrast, there is zero moral reason to draw the Statute of Limitations line somewhere between 1200 BC and 700 AD, just so it's conveniently after Jews got there but before Muslims did. At least, not without appeal to religious convictions nobody else shares. The Jewish people’s historical connection to the land of Israel is real, it’s just not relevant to whether the land should be governed by a brutal ethnostate.

9. Even if Israel gave the right to vote to all Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, the number of Jewish and Arab voters would be roughly equal. And Jews would still have much more wealth and power (ex: in the courts and media) to influence democratic outcomes for the foreseeable future. I think the destruction of Israel would be a bad idea that results in more bloodshed in the short term, but there’s no permanent reason a one-state solution could not eventually work.

10. In fact, not all forms of deconstructing a Jewish state are innately anti-Zionist. Peter Beinart, an Orthodox Jew, long supported a secular one-state solution but still called himself a Zionist because he thought that was compatible with a “Jewish home” in Israel. (He’s since updated his views to abandon the Zionist label).

11. In December, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring in part that “Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism” by a vote of 311-14.