New Crop of Pols Wants In On Bashing Israel

Anti-Zionism manifests itself in many forms — and it isn’t any better than its older cousin, anti-Semitism.

By Benny Avni, NY SUN

Britain’s opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has elevated it to an art form, describing terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and causing Labour members to bolt. In France, persistent attacks on Jews and deadly rioting by self-declared anti-Zionists forced President Emmanuel Macron to ­denounce their cause as a “reinvented form of anti-Semitism.”

Now a new crop of American politicians want in, too. Oh, sure, our anti-Zionists claim to champion the right to criticize Israel. Or its policies. Or Likud. Or the occupation, apartheid, racism, whatever. It’s just an accident that the new anti-Zionists are obsessed with the world’s one Jewish state.

On Monday, New York Rep. ­Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who’s become Corbyn’s BFF) took to Twitter to defend the right of her colleague Ilhan Omar to hate — oops, “criticize” — Israel. So did Rep. Rashida Tlaib and, soon after, three leading Democratic presidential contenders.

Earlier Omar, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, criticized Israel for — well, she didn’t say what — while traveling in the Horn of Africa. “Proud to see peace prosper here,” she wrote from Eritrea.

Eritrea is ranked just behind North Korea as the world’s most oppressive country. But if you’re a young Muslim woman of color, smearing democratic Israel while praising much more abhorrent regimes can sound really, really cool.

On the left, “Zionism is racism” is back in vogue. Never mind that the far right’s racists are all-in, too: David Duke is now a full-fledged “anti-Zionist” and celebrates Omar.

What drives today’s anti-Zionists? Is it principled opposition to Theodore Herzl’s vision, born in the late 19th century, of Jews ­returning to their ancestral land?

Herzl famously said: “If you will it, it is no dream.” And just like Kevin Costner’s baseball diamond in a cornfield, the early Zionists built the dream, and the Jewish people came.

Today Israel is a global power with a rambunctious democratic culture, a free press and a booming, innovative economy.

The Zionists ended the image of Jews as perpetual victims. In an age when victimhood is fetishized, Israel’s triumph is frowned upon.

But anti-Zionism isn’t so new or hip. It was first perfected by Josef ­Stalin, who drew on Russian anti-Semitism by renaming it — with deadly results to any Soviet comrade suspected of Zionism.

The Soviet doctrine persisted after Stalin and was eventually embedded in a United Nations resolution that still echoes in Turtle Bay’s halls and beyond decades after its smear was rescinded: Zionism is racism. The Soviet Union collapsed; the Jewish state survived.

Do today’s anti-Zionists truly envision a better world if Israel ceased to exist? And what happens to the Israelis in that scenario?

“Go back to where you came from” is nonsense, as most Israeli Jews were born there. Instead, ­sophisticated anti-Zionists advocate a “one-state solution” that would turn the country into a multinational state with no established religion.

But that “religion” thing is nonsense too. True, Israel celebrates Jewish holidays, and things slow down on Saturdays. But Israel is a nation, not an open-air synagogue. Roughly half of Israelis are secularists, worshipping the art of living well rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And whether religious or secular, Israelis look around in their neighborhood, and they prefer an open, Jewish-majority society to the Mideast’s other oppressive ­regimes. A binational state would threaten their vibrant democracy — and likely exacerbate Arab-Jew enmity, rather than end it.

But sure, want to criticize Israel? Go for it. But if you appear obsessed with one state and one state only, while ignoring China’s oppression of Muslims, cheering on the thuggish Venezuelan regime or praising Eritrea, your critique will be idiotic — and also bigoted.

By the way: Israel’s election campaign is in full gear, and everything — policy, politics, personal life, police investigations — is out in the open. Just listen to vicious but fact-based attacks that are made by, well, true Blue and White Zionists against each other. They’re better at it than Omar & Co.