ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?

Yale Zussman, PhD,  (MIT, Political Science)

The question of whether anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic has received much attention since the beginning of the current Gaza war, mainly from forces that seek to deny that their attitude toward Israel is basically racist.  The answer is more complicated than is generally acknowledged, reflecting the roles of “anti-Zionism” and “antisemitism” in the wider confrontation between cultures.

“Zionism” is both the belief that Jews have a right to govern themselves and the movement established to bring that about.  “Anti-Zionism” is the belief that Israel has no right to exist and should be destroyed, and thus that Jews should be denied a right accepted for all other peoples.  Definitions of antisemitism include having different standards for Jews and others, so, since there is no “ism” rejecting national claims for any other people, the belief that Jews alone should be denied the right to govern themselves is necessarily antisemitic.  The double-standard is blatant and undeniable.  That “anti-Zionist” activists offer this concept as justification for attacks on individual Jews indicates that even those who publicly deny the link accept it.  That this question is taken seriously is another example of the success Leftist sophistry has had in presenting their case for perpetual “revolution,” a.k.a. “globalizing the intifadah.”

A deeper answer begins by recognizing that antisemitism has been linked historically to anti-Judaism, a term for opposition to various Jewish collectives.  The first such collective was the Jewish religion and the closely-related Jewish People.  It was only in modern times that opposition to Judaism appeared in non-religious forms, focusing sequentially on the Jewish People as an ethnicity, then on Jews as a race, and finally Jews and their state.  It is this last version that acquired the name “anti-Zionism.”

RELIGIOUS ANTI-JUDAISM

Anti-Judaism emerged in the ancient world where monotheism put Jews at odds with their pagan neighbors.  Polytheists have little problem with a new god appearing in their midst, but the presence of a people who didn’t honor the rest of the pantheon was a problem: Polytheists could view monotheists as rejecting them by virtue of failing to honor the polytheistic culture.  There is a hint of this issue in the chapters of Exodus dealing with the plagues and the Biblical exodus, but it comes into focus with the Syro-Greek rulers, who demanded that they be worshiped as gods: Monotheists wouldn’t do that, and by refusing, implicitly rejected the legitimacy of the regime, guaranteeing that the regime would regard them as an enemy.

The logic changes slightly with the introduction of other monotheistic religions, which regarded Jewish refusal to convert as rejection of their supersessionary claims and thus of the new faith’s legitimacy.  Both Islam and Christianity have such doctrines — it is known as “Replacement Theology” in Christianity — leading those faiths to their anti-Judaism.  This dimension is not widely understood, so let me explain:

The Jews are the only people whose fate is part of the eschatology of all three revealed religions.  The return to Israel, the ancestral homeland, appears repeatedly in the Jewish Bible, which made the return to Zion part of normative Judaism, a doctrine that led groups of religious Jews to return over the centuries of exile.  The modern Zionist movement began in the Nineteenth Century and brought Jews for reasons other than piety, ultimately leading to the re-establishment of a Jewish-majority state in the Jews’ ancient homeland, where there had been a Jewish presence for some thirty-three centuries.  If the current State of Israel is fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, its mere existence refutes Christian and Islamic supersessionism, that those religions have replaced Judaism in G-d’s plan for the world.  The significance of this doctrine for anti-Zionism is derived from the dynamics of prophecy in revealed religion.

There are four distinct kinds of prophecies, two of which are safe while the others are dangerous:

a) Prophecies of events that have already occurred.  Because they have already happened, there is no possibility that they won’t.  Thus Christianity and Islam both accept, and claim, prophecies in the Jewish Bible of events that had already occurred, like the Exodus from Egypt.

b) Prophecies of events that will occur in the distant future, especially at “the end of time.”  These are safe because the only thing that can be inferred if they don’t take place is that we haven’t reached the necessary time.  If clocks are still working, we haven’t arrived at the end of time.

c) Prophecies of specific events that are to take place at specific times.  These are dangerous, generally for the prophet who offers them, because when the time arrives, and the event doesn’t happen, the prophet is discredited.  Readers may remember Harold Camping’s 1994 prophecies of the end of the world for September 6, then the 29th, and then October 2 of that year and recognize why such prophecies are a problem.  Believe it or not, he offered additional dates before his death.  Revealed religion generally avoids such prophecies.

d) Prophecies that certain events won’t happen.  These are inherently dangerous because if any of them happens, the prophecy, and the prophet who offered it, are both discredited.

Supersessionary religion turns second category prophecies of “superseded” religions into fourth category ones because it requires that unfulfilled prophecies of those earlier revealed religions must be null and void; if they remain valid, in what sense has that earlier religion been discredited?  Anti-Zionism, the claim that the current State of Israel is inherently illegitimate, is thus a way to finesse the evidence that a pre-Christian Biblical prophecy may have been fulfilled, thereby refuting supersessionary doctrines.

Because it emerged from Judaism, early Christianity developed hostility toward individual Jews in an effort to sever social links between people identifying as Christian and their neighbors who identified as Jews.  The series of libels advanced were intended to produce antisemitic reactions that enabled the desired separation; without the hostility, it is possible that the break between the two faiths might never have been achieved.  Once completed, these claims provided little further value and might well have been abandoned, but they weren’t, ultimately feeding into paleo-conservative and then Nazi antisemitism.

In the wake of the Holocaust, Christian theologians, especially in the Catholic Church, explored whether their theology had contributed to it, ultimately producing the major change in Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism contained in the 1965 Nostra aetate encyclical.  Today, the positions of Christian denominations on Israel reflect whether they put Biblical prophecy ahead of “Replacement Theology.”  Those who adhere to supersession remain anti-Zionist, while those who give priority to Biblical prophecy are pro-Zionist.  Curiously, the allegations made against Israel today by anti-Zionists aren’t based on any evidence either but on the desired response to be evoked, an exact parallel to the antisemitic libels offered by the early Church.

A Jewish state violates two additional Islamic doctrines that predate Zionism by more then twelve centuries:

1) Dhimma is Islam’s counterpart to apartheid.  It was instituted under the “Pact of Umar,” c. 638, so Muslim warriors could derive economic benefit from their imperialist activities.  Dhimmis, the people protected from Muslim violence by this “deal,” couldn’t have weapons or ride horses, had to step out of the way so a Muslim could pass in the street, and could neither repair old places of worship nor build new ones.  The “yellow star,” later adopted by the Nazis, comes directly from the dhimma; Christians wore pink.  Once a year, the head of each dhimmi household had to submit a tribute to the local Muslim ruler while that ruler held a sword to the back of his neck, making the nature of the transaction obvious.  The penalty for violating the dhimma was death, invariably a painful one involving bodily dismemberment.  For the details, consult what Hamas did on October 7, and what slave-taking raids continue to do across the Sahel.

Enforcement of the dhimma varied over time and from place to place, and even between subject peoples.  The Ottoman Empire enforced the dhimma stringently against Armenians, resulting in the Armenian genocide.  The Ottomans had accepted Jewish immigrants into their empire since the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and generally benefited from that, and thus didn’t enforce the dhimma strictly against Zionist pioneers.  The Sultan was also the Khalifah, so local Muslims acquiesced.

The Balfour Declaration put local Muslims on notice that the dhimma wouldn’t return, so anti-Jewish violence began almost immediately after Britain conquered the territory.  In the Declaration’s wake, the Muslim world created the “Palestinian People” to enforce the dhimma against the Jews.  That the “Palestinian People” has been a spectacular failure at their assignment may be what endears them to the “woke,” who deem failure virtuous.

2) Waqf is the belief that any territory conquered by the Muslim sword must remain permanently under Muslim rule.  It is among the most explicit statements of the right of imperialists to seize territories and control the peoples who live in them.  The Land of Israel was first conquered by Muslims c. 638 and then again during the Crusades.  Muslims have lost other territories ranging from Iberia to southern Italy to the Balkans and much of eastern Europe to most of India.  Islamists will demand these territories as well if they succeed in destroying Israel.

The significance of supersession, the dhimma, and waqf for Islam guarantees that Islamists will be anti-Zionist.  There are essentially no Jews left in the Muslim world — there were over a million in 1948, essentially all expelled after the establishment of Israel — so “traditional” Islamic inter-personal antisemitism has largely disappeared.

It isn’t in the interests of Islamists for the world to know any of this, or their dependence on violence to maintain their power, so they invented the notion of “Islamophobia.”  “Phobias” are irrational fears, but as Hamas demonstrated on October 7, there is a perfectly rational reason to fear what Islamists want to do.  Recognition of this truth might lead the intended victims to organize themselves to resist, so Islamism’s global campaign to vilify Israel is also a tool for undermining other peoples’ will to resist Islamist encroachment.  Right now, only Israel is fighting back.

If they can ignore the demands of their respective religions, individual Christians, Muslims, and Jews can get along quite well.  It’s the “If” that makes all the difference.

For completeness, it should be mentioned that opposition to the State of Israel exists within Judaism.  The tiny Nturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox sect, is anti-Zionist because Israel was established by human action rather than divine; they have been very publicly welcomed by the government of Iran.  Reform Judaism was originally anti-Zionist because they regarded Judaism as a religion only, but they have since changed their position.  Both of these are issues of Jewish theology that don’t touch on the legitimacy of a non-Jewish religion, and thus neither anti-Judaic or antisemitic.

There are also anti-Zionist groups whose members claim to be Jewish but who identify with “woke” and/or Marxism, indicating they have little understanding of Judaism or the true nature of those ideologies.  The personal behavior of their members often suggests they are motivated by contrarianism, antinomianism, and addiction to the thrill of “revolution.”  Even if their members actually have Jewish ancestry, their support for “woke” and Marxist anti-Zionism marks them as antisemitic.

NON-RELIGIOUS ANTI-JUDAISM

The Enlightenment initiated the transition from religious anti-Judaism to anti-Judaism based on other constructs.  Thus, Jews were welcome in the French Republic as citizens, but not as Jews, i.e., members of a collective.  Nazi antisemitism made Judaism a matter of race, leading to the Holocaust.  Paleo-conservative antisemitism is derived from traditional Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Jews’ generally liberal political attitudes, and their simply being “different” from the norms that paleo-conservatives espouse.

Apart from those who continue to believe the Holocaust was a good thing, in the wake of World War II, anti-Judaism required a new rationale, and found it in anti-Zionism. The main proponents of anti-Zionism as a metaphor for anti-Judaism are Marxists, and more recently, the “woke.”

MARXIST ANTI-ZIONISM

Anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union was a result of Marxism’s insistence that class was the only distinction among people that made a difference.  The USSR also acknowledged nationalities, basically as linguistic groups, giving rise to its various national republics and autonomous ethnic republics, including one for Jews in the Soviet Far East along the border with China.  The Communist Party believed that the socialist orientation of Israel’s founders made it a potential ally against the West, but turned against Israel when that expectation didn’t play out.  The KGB then organized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a proxy army to carry out subversion throughout the Middle East, in much the way Iran’s proxies have done during the last few decades.

All of this would probably be lost to history if Soviet Jews hadn’t sought to leave.  The movement to free Soviet Jewry followed the Six Day War, when Israel defeated several Soviet-equipped Arab armies in a matter of days.  Soviet Jewry’s desire to leave was inescapable, and embarrassing, evidence that the USSR wasn’t a “worker’s paradise,” as Marxists claimed, but a failing state; the effort to free them began the process resulting in the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That collapse led to release of archival records proving that the USSR had indeed been a corrupt and oppressive regime, as anti-Communists had long maintained.  That was seriously embarrassing for Marxists around the world.

The Six Day War also led to the “occupation,” during which Palestinian per capita income grew by more than 5% annually, producing a quadrupling by 1992, i.e., in one generation.  The separation that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords and the second intifadah, Arafat’s way of announcing that he had no intention of negotiating peace, returned the Palestinian economy to where it had been pre-“occupation,” impoverishing Palestinians.  The outcome of this de facto experiment demonstrated that Marxist economics, which insisted that “imperialism” impoverished colonial peoples, was simply wrong.  This is also seriously embarrassing for Marxists, but is less well-known; it’s one reason we continue to hear denunciations of an “occupation” that ended thirty years ago.

Marxist anti-Zionism is thus an expression of their embarrassment and resentment that Jews were involved in proving them wrong on essentially every aspect of their faith in the Soviet Union and its Communist ideology.  That their own ideology might be seriously flawed has never entered into consideration.  Destroying Israel would enable them to “get even” while also destroying the evidence that their ideology had failed.

“WOKE” ANTI-ZIONISM

In its essence, “Woke” is an attempt to reverse the moral standing of success and failure.  People who have failed in their lives, and groups where failure is widespread, realized they might achieve moral superiority by asserting that failure is noble while success necessarily reflects unearned and undeserved advantages; to this mindset, socialism is the way to achieve equity. The “Woke” have dealt with the reality that this belief is fundamentally irrational by denouncing rationality and other values emerging from the Enlightenment, which developed in Europe and led to European dominance of the world.  Like other conspiracy theories, “Woke” suffers from an obvious defect: there is no evidence supporting the belief and plenty of evidence that adopting Enlightenment values is conducive to success: The United States is the first nation founded on Enlightenment principles and became the dominant power on the globe in just over a century.

This is where the Jews and Israel come in.  Jewish religious tradition attaches much value to rationality, thinking, and debating about issues, predisposing Jews to be successful in countries where they are not subjected to explicit discrimination.  Jewish success in the United States and the West is obvious and has earned Jews the enmity of the “woke” because Jews were the victims of widespread discrimination and had few advantages other than their culture.  If culture matters, then “woke” groups might succeed by altering their cultures, but that would require rejecting their “woke” beliefs.

Israel has done the same thing at a national level.  Starting as an embattled nation with essentially no natural resources, it succeeded militarily, economically, and culturally by relying on Jewish values.  Its success is further evidence that the “woke” belief structure is simply wrong.  To add insult to injury, Israel’s economy blossomed when it abandoned socialism, thereby demonstrating that socialism leads to failure and poverty rather than prosperity.  Having a belief structure that has been disproved is one reason the “woke” are allied to the Marxists.

CONCLUSION

Anti-Zionism has become a tool around which forces hostile to Western Civilization can rally: Islamists, Marxists, and the “woke.”  Jews have benefited extensively from Western Civilization with its commitment to giving individuals opportunities to advance themselves, so Jews have become targets of those forces as well.  Apart from the anti-Zionist pretext, the targeting of Jews by these groups would be readily identifiable as antisemitic.

University pro-Hamas encampments should be recognized as part of the effort to undermine Western Civilization.  Rejection of anti-Zionism is thus a critical component in supporting a civilization that has brought more prosperity to more people than any other in history; it’s also the only one to reject slavery as a matter of principle.  Marxists don’t like that because they believe Soviet Communism deserved that status and are embarrassed by its failure.  The “woke” don’t like it because it requires acknowledging that behavior, and the values that lead to it, matters.  Religious groups hostile to Judaism, and generally to Jews, don’t like it because that civilization has served Jews and Judaism well.  Whether anti-Zionism derives from antisemitism, as with the Right, or from anti-Judaism as with some religious groups, or leads to it as with Marxists and the “woke,” the connection is clear:

Regardless of which Jewish collective is targeted, anti-Judaism is necessarily antisemitic.  Anti-Zionism is a result of antisemitism for some, while for others it is a cause.  Moral people shouldn’t let antisemites and anti-Zionists hide behind the semantics.