Why anti-zionism is used a a cover for anti-semitism

You often hear people claim they are not anti-semitic, just anti-zionist. On campuses they demand zionists be banned etc. So in this post I explore what a Zionist is and is not.

I’m first going to start with what a Zionist is not.

• You can be a Zionist and think Bibi Netanyahu is a bad person
• You can be a Zionist and think there should be an independent State of Palestine
• You can be a Zionist and oppose the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories
• You can be a Zionist and think the boundaries of Israel should be as per the Balfour Declaration in 1917, or the UN resolution in 1947, or the 1949 armistice agreement, or the aftermath of the 1967 war, or the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, or the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty etc
• You can be a Zionist and think the Israeli counterattacks in Gaze and Rafah are disproportionate and should stop.
• You can be a Zionist and think Israel should provide more aid and employment etc to Palestinians
• You can be a Zionist and think Likud is a terrible political party
• You can be a Zionist and think the current Israeli Government is horrific
• You can be a Zionist and support parts of Jerusalem being under Palestinian control
• You can be a Zionist and agree that the most holy site in Judaism (The Temple Mount) by under the custody or Jordan

None of the above are features of Zionism. Anti-semites use the term Zionist instead of using more specific terms.

So what is Zionism? Well the UK Chief Rabbi states:

For religious Jews, the Biblical Covenant established between God and the Jewish People is the central tenet of our faith. A critical component of this is the promise made to the Jewish People of a homeland, the journey to it and the experience of living within it. The Torah (Five Books of Moses) is, in effect, a 3,000-year-old constitutional document for the establishment of a nation state in the territory known previously as Canaan and later as the Kingdom of Judah or Judea. Jews know it simply as the Land of Israel.

The Kingdom of Judea is as central to Judaism as the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection is to Catholics.

For nearly 2,000 years, the Jewish People, scattered amongst the nations of the world, continued to live according to the values and principles prescribed by their constitution, the Torah, but without their ancestral homeland. They embraced numerous societies. “Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed,” God promised Abraham. And so, Jews laid down roots and committed themselves to contribute to the success of their newly found homes.

However, the Land of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular, always remained at the heart of their everyday worship. The eventual return to their homeland was central to their Jewish psyche. In multiple prayers every day for thousands of years, we have faced towards Jerusalem, known as “Zion”, which appears no less than 152 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is the very heart of our Jewish faith and identity.

So Zionism is simply support for a Jewish homeland centred on Jerusalem (Zion).

Anyone who supports a two state solution, is effectively a Zionist.

It is essential to understand that Zionism does not entail an endorsement of the policies of a particular Israeli government, nor is it mutually exclusive with advocating for the welfare or rights of Palestinians. 

Absolutely not.

So a Zionist is simply someone who supports the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. So someone who says they are against Zionism, is actually saying they want Israel destroyed.

Now it is true not every Jew is a Zionist (but the vast vast majority are, as it is central to the religion), but opponents use it exclusively against Jews.

While technically you don’t need to be Jewish to be a Zionist, it is almost exclusively used as shorthand for Jews who support Israel’s right to exist. You don’t hear Buddhists who support the right of Israel to exist described as Zionists. You don’t hear Arabs who are citizens of Israel described as Zionists.

So anti-semites use Zionist as short-hand for Jews. Not all Jews are Zionists, but all Zionists are Jews in their rhetoric.

So a Zionist is simply someone who thinks Jews should have a country in which they are the majority. Considering 2,500 years of exile, persecution, hundreds of discriminatory laws, the Holocaust etc this is not a surprising view to hold.

Now you may consider there should be no countries which are religious countries. The Chief Rabbi notes:

I am a Zionist because I believe that alongside the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries and 49 Muslim-majority countries, there is a vital need for a single Jewish country. 

49 Muslim-majority countries, but one Jewish-majority country is too much?

There are also three Hindu-majority countries and seven Buddhist-majority countries.

Now one can have an academic argument about whether the UN should have agreed to a Muslin and Jewish partition in 1947, just as you can have a view on whether the UK should have divided its then territory into Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947.

But Israel has been a sovereign state for over 70 years with the vast majority who live there having been born there, and without citizenship elsewhere.

So anti-zionists are calling for either one of three things:

1. Israel is destroyed, and everyone living there is killed
2. Israel is destroyed, and most people living there are made stateless
3. Israel is turned into Palestine with a majority Muslim population, and Jews as the minority

So again a Zionist is simply someone who doesn’t want one of those three scenarios occurring.

In terms of the last scenario, where Jews are the only major religion in the world where they have no country which is a homeland, consider the 2,500 years of history of persecution and discrimination that is still very much alive today. That is why so many Jews are still immigrating to Israel.

But also consider specifically the notion that they could live peacefully in a Palestinian state ruled by Hamas or Fatah. That they very same people who phoned home to proudly tell their parents they had managed to kill ten Jews in one morning, would just settle down as good neighbours.

And also consider the history of Jews in the last century, managing to live peacefully in Muslim majority countries. These are the population changes from 1900 to 2020:

• Algeria 51,000 to 0
• Egypt 31,000 to 9
• Libya 19,000 to 0
• Morocco 110,000 to 2,100
• Tunisia 63,000 to 1,000
• Yemen 30,000 to 6

So a Zionist is basically someone who want Jews to be able to live in a majority Jewish state, centred on Jerusalem, and doesn’t want seven million Jews living in Israel to be killed, made stateless or to be a persecuted minority in a Muslim majority state.

Yet anti-semites use it as a term to generate hatred, knowing that many see it as simply meaning a Jew.

If people want to criticise actions taken in the Middle East that they consider terrible, here are some ways you can do so, without being racist.

• I condemn the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu
• I condemn the current Israeli Government
• I condemn the policy to expand settlements
• I condemn the response to October 7
• I condemn the refusal to surrender more territory in exchange for peace
• I condemn the Likud Party
• I condemn the actions of the IDF

But if you start condemning Zionism, then you are saying that you support seven million Jews having no homeland where they are the majority and potentially being killed or made stateless.

If you condemn Zionism, it means you do not support a two-state solution. It means you support a one-state solution where Israel does not exist.

So yes almost everyone who say they are an anti-zionist is in reality an anti-semite.