Sorry, Anti-Zionism Still Doesn’t Equal Antisemitism
The struggle against Israeli apartheid has nothing to do with antisemitism — and everything to do with winning liberation for colonized Palestinians.
The conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is a blatant attempt to intimidate, persecute, and ultimately silence the Palestinian rights movement in the United States and around the world. (Flickr)
Facebook is on the brink of deciding whether to formally classify criticism of Israel and Zionism as hate speech. This comes a year after Donald Trump signed an executive order endorsing the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in all investigations conducted by US federal agencies into Title VI claims. The executive order, like the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, is part of an attempt to enshrine the IHRA definition into law. The definition cites eleven examples of antisemitism, seven of which refer explicitly to criticizing Israel.
As leading figures of the Palestine movement have pointed out, this conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is a blatant attempt to intimidate, persecute, and ultimately silence the Palestinian rights movement in the United States and around the world. It is built on the false assumption that Zionism is synonymous with Judaism, and that Israel’s seventy-three-year occupation of Palestine is a religious movement, not a settler-colonial project propped up by geopolitical conditions and imperial alliances.
A Brief History of Zionism
Zionism was born out of nineteenth-century European imperialism. Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, the founders of Zionism, sought to resolve the sharp rise of antisemitism and the increasingly impoverished state of Jews in Europe, not by confronting the reactionary and racist ideas gaining influence at the time, but by advocating a separate ethno-Jewish state. Their proposal relied on two assumptions: that antisemitism was a permanent fixture in society, and that the only way to gain respect and autonomy was to convince imperial powers of the utility of a Jewish colonial outpost in the Middle East.
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