By Nathan K & Dan C
In the wake of October 7th, another round of Israel’s genocidal actions towards the Palestinians in Gaza has begun, pushing Zionism and antisemitism to the top of American public consciousness. While Israel has been engaged in brutal repression towards the Palestinians for decades, what has made this moment so different from previous ones has been the sharp outcry against Israel’s actions from a wide swath of western capitalist society. In an effort to suppress these newly dissenting voices, Zionist affiliated organizations have turned to a tried-and-true method in their playbook: conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism. Criticism and even awareness of Israel’s actions are positioned as antisemitic smears by the left, juxtaposed against a rational and palatable “Liberal Zionism”. The waters are only muddied further with the arrival of far-right groups inadvertently bolstering this effort, attempting to hijack the narrative to insert actual anti-semitic rhetoric into criticism of the Israeli state.
So what is antisemitism, why and how is it being conflated with Zionism, and how do we push back against the narrative of “Liberal Zionism”?
Antisemitism is rooted historically in Europe’s conversion to Christianity, though there were certainly discriminatory actions levelled at Jews in the classical era, such as expulsions and slavery in the wake of conquest or revolt, the prejudices we are familiar with grew out of the perception that Jews were “killers of christ”. Restrictions on where Jews could live, bans from certain occupations, and everyday racism were all part of a systematic campaign of persecution with the goal of forcing conversion. These pressures led Jews to practice in secret, flee their homes, or take up socially inferior jobs such as moneylending, peddling wares, or tax/rent collecting. The latter resulted in representations of Jews as “greedy” or untrustworthy and made them scapegoats in times of crisis, despite Jews in these professions working on behalf of Christians who could not practice usury.
Starting in the Enlightenment, race as a “science” gained popularity as attempts to retroactively justify the religiously motivated prejudices of the past. The rising nationalist movements of the day viewed Jewish identity as inherently oppositional to national identity and Jews as conspirators against national rejuvenation. To fight their oppression, Jews in turn began flocking to revolutionary movements, leading to further tension. Jewish and gentile intellectuals alike debated whether Jews could assimilate or would always face discrimination. In the pro-assimilation camp, various movements to secularize Jews and fight for their rights within society were founded. Among Jews from the anti-assimilationist camp, a new political ideology emerged: Zionism.
Political Zionism began with Theodore Herzl and his manifesto Der Judenstaat written in 1896, though its existence as an aspirational religious goal predates that. Unlike assimilationists, Zionists did not necessarily reject scientific racism and accepted the formulation that Jews were a distinct and separate race from their European counterparts, requiring a homeland of their own. The British Empire saw Zionism as an opportunity to expand influence in the Middle East and offered patronage through the The Balfour Declaration, and Zionists in turn encouraged activity in Mandatory Palestine due to its religious and historical significance in Judaism.
Following the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews, assimilationist positions seemed absurd. How could Jews possibly turn around and attempt reintegration in a society that had just planned their mass extermination? The Zionist position seemed like the obvious way forward: to settle in a new land, far from Europe,and establish a Jewish nation-state with complete political control. The words never again etched their way into Zionist lexicon as their strongest argument. This is the common refrain of the Liberal Zionist, that the Holocaust uniquely proves the necessity of a Jewish Nation-State — that it is a given fact that without a Jewish Nation, a genocide will occur again.
According to this mindset, the "excesses” of the Israeli state boil down to bad policy or bad actors. Following this line of thought, Liberal Zionists, argue that the right politicians or the right policy can create a Zionism that is palatable and free of such “excesses”. The problem is this outlook refuses to see the settler-colonialism at the heart of the Israeli project, which will cause those “excesses” to occur again and again. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Nationalist Likud Party, the ones currently conducting the campaign of slaughter in Gaza, wasn’t always the ruling party of Israel; the first governing coalition was composed of Liberal and Labor zionists. That didn’t stop Jewish settlers and soldiers who had just fled persecution and suffering turn around and inflict that same violence against the Palestinians. As negotiations broke down into war in 1948, the Israeli paramilitaries that would eventually become the core of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba. Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from the land they called home, 16,000 Palestinains were killed,and land and property were expropriated by the nascent Israeli state.
No matter how much liberal or socialist window dressing takes place, Zionism is an ideology of settler-colonialism, and nothing can change that. Its rallying cry, “A land without a people for a people without a land” erases the personhood of Palestinians, leading to its atrocities being buried or ignored. Zionists believe, implicitly or otherwise, they are on a “civilizing mission” for the Levant. When media outlets and politicians push rhetoric like “Israel is the only stable democracy in the Middle East,” the implication is clear: Israel is a western democracy, it has European founders, it is stable like us.
That also doesn’t change the fact that many Jews support Israel out of fear of antisemitism, with a true conviction that Israel serves as a bulwark against it. Zionism itself proudly claims this to be true, but history paints a different picture. Israel, through its material actions, has no issues with antisemitism aimed at the Diaspora. It materially supports evangelical “Christian Zionists” who support the Israeli State out of perceived fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a prophecy that ends in genocide: with all Jews either dying in the apocalypse or converting to Christianity. Christian Zionism and American backing leads to widespread acceptance of Israel on the ideological Right, even among groups who perpetrate antisemitism against Jews in their home countries. That’s how a party like the AfD in Germany can advocate for tearing down Holocaust Memorials and laws outlawing Kosher slaughter but be a vocal proponent for Israel in the German legislature.
Israel does nothing to protect those who are victimized by these groups and their supporters. There is no material support, and no amount of “soft power” actually helps the people trying to live their day-to-day lives. At most, Israel’s claim of being a shield against antisemitism amounts to cynical invocations of the Holocaust to justify its own existence through methods like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which notably includes:
“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
These alliances between Zionists and antisemites are a feature, not a bug. Theodore Herzl once noted in his diary that “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies.” This remains the strategy of Israel to this day, and why not? It’s of material interest to the Israeli project. Antisemitism against the Jewish diaspora means more Jews emigrating to become Israeli citizens. There is still the implicit understanding of Herzl’s internalized antisemitism in policy: that the “weak” diaspora must be transformed into a “proper” Zionist nation. This is to say nothing of the destruction of traditional Jewish culture within Israel, the eradication of local practices in the name of stamping out the “ghetto culture” of the diaspora (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, etc) for the homogenized monolith of the Hebrew-speaking Israeli.
This brings us back to the question of antisemitism. Is anti-Zionism antisemitism, like so many politicians would have us believe? No. Just from the Nakba alone, there are clear political reasons to oppose the Zionist project that have nothing to do with the hatred of Jews. Definitions like the one used by the IHRA obscure this, framing the discussion of Israel around Jewish self-determination as opposed to the suffering and dispossession of the Palestinians.
That doesn’t mean critiques of Israel can’t still cross the line into antisemitism, such as when those critiques cross the line into targeting Jews who have no connection to the Israeli state. Other offensive tropes include invoking claims of sinister conspiracies headed by the Rothschilds or George Soros, implicating Jewish individuals and institutions as part of some secret cabal for Israeli power, and implying a dual loyalty across an entire people. Baseless accusations like these are just the old tropes of antisemitism given a new coat of paint for the world Jews find themselves living in today.
DSA is against all imperialist and colonial ideologies, including Zionism and anti-Muslim racism. We reaffirm that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism! We stand with the oppressed peoples of Palestine and work with them in solidarity and support through actions like our No Appetite for Apartheid campaign and by working on the ground with Palestinian organizations. We do this while fighting antisemitism in our communities at the same time. Freedom for the Palestinian People and safety for the Jewish diaspora are not in any way mutually exclusive. Recent events have made people more conscious of this, but it is only through action and education that we can make sure it is a reality.