When Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitic
The most consequential form of anti-Zionism today is the one that deploys guns and rockets.
On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas perpetrated the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,400 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, overwhelmingly civilians, including babies and Holocaust survivors. Children were shot in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of their children. Families were incinerated in their homes.
Hamas, which filmed many of its atrocities and posted them on social media, has never been shy about its motivations. Its charter uses “Jews” and “Zionists” interchangeably; claims that Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, [and] broadcasting stations”; and promises “struggle against the Jews” and the destruction of Israel. Last week, a spokesperson for the group vowed that “we will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.” Not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, but the anti-Zionism of Hamas certainly is.
The same is true of Hamas’s far more powerful sponsor, Iran. Whether or not Tehran directly ordered the October massacre, no one disputes that the regime is the primary funder and supplier of Hamas, whose wanton violence it publicly celebrated. Iran’s theocratic rulers are similarly open about their genocidal ambitions. They have built a physical countdown clock to Israel’s destruction, have been accused of plotting terrorist attacks against Jews around the world, and even hosted cartoon contests for Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites. Iran’s military has displayed missiles emblazoned with Death to Israel in Hebrew.
Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has spent years denying the Holocaust while threatening another one. He has repeatedly referred to Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, in eliminationist terms, labeling it a “cancerous tumor” that must be “uprooted and destroyed.” And these anti-Zionist threats have been backed up by bullets. Not just from Hamas, but from Hezbollah—the much more capable terrorist group based in Lebanon.
Though it has received less attention, Hezbollah—which is not Palestinian and has no significant territorial dispute with Israel, unless one counts its very existence—has been firing rockets and anti-tank missiles at civilian areas in Israel’s north since the first day of the current war, killing several people and causing nearly 200,000 others to evacuate their homes. Hezbollah, too, is not coy about its endgame. In 2002, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, predicted in a speech, “The Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather … to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place … and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”
And then there are the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group that rules Yemen and has also been shooting ballistic missiles at Israeli towns. Helpfully for those trying to determine whether the group is after Jews or merely Israelis, its official motto is “Death to America, death to Israel, curse to the Jews, victory to Islam.”
Much recent media coverage and commentary has focused on the darker expressions of anti-Israel activism at American universities. And it’s true that the largest pro-Palestinian movement on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, came out in support of the Hamas massacre and abduction campaign, declaring in its national response that “today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” But whatever one thinks of these students, they mostly have placards; Iran and its militias have guns, and they are happy to use them.
Four years ago, I sat onstage at the annual conference of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil-rights organization, and listed all the ways a person could be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. This was not what the audience typically comes to hear, but I thought it was important to explain, because the legitimate Palestinian national cause should not be conflated with anti-Jewish prejudice. Among other points, I noted that it was absurd to expect Palestinians to embrace Zionism, which they experienced as the displacement of their people and the dispossession of their homeland. Likewise, principled secular anti-nationalists who oppose all sectarian and ethnic states, ultra-Orthodox Jews who reject a return to the Jewish homeland before the arrival of the Messiah, and Jewish progressives who focus on Israel’s sins because they are particularly upset by how the country appears to act in their name are also not anti-Semites.
I still believe everything I said that day. I do not think that criticizing Israel—something I’ve done repeatedly in these pages—its current far-right government, or even its existence as a Jewish state is necessarily anti-Semitic. But outside the realm of intellectual abstraction, it has become all too apparent that anti-Zionism has an anti-Semitism problem in practice. What’s more, the inability to separate good-faith criticism from bad-faith bigotry is corrupting the conversation about Israel-Palestine at precisely the moment when we most need to be having it.
The most consequential form of anti-Zionism today is the one that deploys guns and rockets, supported by an array of apologists who justify their use. Any discussion of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic needs to center that reality, instead of focusing on theories or edge cases that are less objectionable, but also far less prevalent in the real world.
The first step to solving this problem is admitting that we have one.
“Tomorrow evening, it will be my pleasure and my honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I have also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well. Unfortunately, the Israelis would not allow them to travel here, so it is going to be only friends from Hezbollah … The idea that an organization [Hamas] that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labeled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.”
This deranged declaration was made not by a 21-year-old activist at a university this past month, but in 2009 by Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of the British Labour Party from 2015 to 2020.
The growth of anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism on college campuses is troubling—as are draconian attempts to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech in response. But I am more concerned about the many powerful and influential people like Corbyn—politicians, activists, celebrities—who have spent years expressing or excusing anti-Jewish bigotry in an anti-Zionist guise, and building a global permission structure in which it is now acceptable to justify or even celebrate mass Jewish death.
The list of such people is long. There is the foreign minister of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 231 million people, who claimed on CNN in 2021 that Israel controls the media with its “deep pockets.” (Oddly, the Zionists invited him on the air in the first place.) There is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a NATO leader, whose inner circle produced a propaganda film in 2015 that detailed, in the words of the Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol, “how ‘the children of Israel’ want to dominate the world, subjugate other peoples and thus surround the world like a ‘giant octopus.’” To date, Erdoğan has refused to condemn Hamas, some of whose top officials reside in his country.
It’s not just anti-Zionist politicians who turn out to be anti-Semites. Greta Berlin, a co-founder of the Free Gaza activist group, wrote on Twitter in 2012 that “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” She and another Free Gaza co-founder, Mary Hughes-Thompson, later suggested that Israel’s Mossad was behind the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France. (An al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility.) The celebrated author Alice Walker joined one of Free Gaza’s missions to Gaza, and later refused to allow The Color Purple to be reissued in Hebrew. She also spent years posting baldly anti-Semitic material on her personal blog, and even promoted—in The New York Times—a wildly anti-Jewish book by the conspiracy theorist David Icke that claims that Jews bankrolled the Holocaust. When criticized for her conduct, she retorted that “the attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine.” And the less said about the anti-Jewish outlook of the Israel-boycott advocate and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who recently questioned whether Hamas committed atrocities, the better.
The far right is no exception to this trend. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, perhaps the most infamous white nationalist in America, is also a virulent anti-Zionist, regularly regurgitating classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and replacing the word Jew with Zionist. (A typical sample of the genre: “The Zionists occupy most of the American media and now control much of American government.”) And Duke’s successors have dominated the social-media discourse surrounding the current Gaza war. As Rolling Stone reported this month, “The online alt-right has been enormously successful at co-opting the Palestinian cause to line their pockets and advance separate agendas … Huge swaths of X users have accepted them as reliable authorities on a fast-developing crisis in the Middle East, and thereby introduced new strains of propaganda into their media diet without realizing it.”
One such influencer, Lucas Gage, wrote on October 7 that “it’s hard to have much sympathy for the Israeli regime when they helped perpetrate this attack on my country,” and illustrated his post with images from 9/11. Gage later added some Holocaust denial into the mix, writing, “Now that you’re seeing all these Jewish people getting caught making up atrocities, doesn’t that make you wonder if they lied about past ones?” Gage has since doubled his following, gaining nearly 100,000 followers. Another far-right influencer, Jackson Hinkle, told his 2 million followers on X that Israel greatly inflated its death toll and that most of the murdered Israelis were killed not by Hamas, but by tank shelling from the Israeli army. He falsely sourced these lies to Israel’s premier left-wing paper, Haaretz, which was then forced to repudiate them.
The scale of this influence campaign is new, but the substance isn’t. When the Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video on Facebook alleging that “Zionist supremacists” were “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” and later accused the Rothschild banking dynasty of causing forest fires with a space laser, she was drawing from this fever swamp. When the Trump supporter Kanye West (now known as Ye), during his 2022 anti-Semitic implosion, declared that “culture is controlled by the Zionist media,” he was simply reflecting ideas that had long circulated on the fringes of the American right, but have become steadily more mainstream. Trump himself has claimed that Israel “literally owned Congress” and told Republican Jews that “you want to control your own politician”—and that was before he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and the anti-Semitic influencer Nick Fuentes. Seen in this context, it should not be surprising that the website antizionism.org is run not by Palestinians, but by neo-Nazis.
That so many anti-Jewish bigots have found a home in anti-Israel groups or appropriated their language might seem surprising. But it’s actually quite predictable. If half of the world’s Muslims resided in one place, we would expect that place to draw the ire of Islamophobes. Israel is no different. As the address of so many Jews, it is an irresistible target for those who hate them. For this reason, any movement to critique or penalize Israel for its conduct will naturally attract not just principled advocates of human rights, but committed opponents of Jewish life, because criticism of Israel provides a respectable cover to launder their uglier aims. Unfortunately, they have been quite successful.
When Jewish institutions around the world are targeted for vandalism and violence, when Jews are hunted by a mob in a Russian airport, and when Jewish students are threatened and physically assaulted on college campuses, it is not some freak accident or aberration. It is the inevitable end result of a movement unwilling or unable to expel its extremists.