"Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism," On Campus, Second Installment

The exhaustive, definitive account of why the expression, though coarse, is absolutely correct

[This is the next installment of the longer piece examining the expression “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The first installment may be found here. That first installment offered some preliminary considerations then presented a ten-part case that anti-Zionism is prima facie a species of antisemitism. Further analysis begins with this installment.]

3. “Epistemic Antisemitism”

Antisemitism in fact is at the very foundation of anti-Zionism.

We start by recalling the first two points above:

(1) For most Jews, Zionism is deeply entwined with or based on their Judaism and Jewish identity.

(2) Although not all Israelis are Jews etc., Israel is a, or the, Jewish project.

These two points made “hating Israel” while not “hating Jews” very challenging. As Salaita put it, Zionists make “antisemitism” honorable, recognizing that hostility toward Israel is ultimately hostility toward the Jews.

But that recognition now helps us locate the “antisemitism” in the right place. Once we realize that hostility toward Israel is hostility toward Jews and that the allegations against Israel are allegations against the Jews, the conversation shifts. It’s no longer about the anti-Zionist’s (failed) attempt to distinguish between opposing Zionism-Israel and opposing the Jews but about the deeper epistemic question of whether those allegations against the Jews are justified or not, true or not, or fair, or reasonable. It wouldn’t be bigotry, after all, to be against people who perpetrate dastardly deeds; no one said or says it was “anti-German” bigotry to condemn the Nazis and dismantle their evil empire. So if Israel—i.e. the Jews—really do all the terrible things anti-Zionists say they do, if the Jews really were guilty of genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, etc., then hostility etc. toward them would be justified, and not a form of bigotry.[1]

Once we recognize that speaking of Israel amounts to speaking of the Jews, this moves into the open: it’s easier to hide behind abstract allegations that a “country” is doing dastardly things than to assert quite concretely that the particular people are doing them. But once it is the people you are accusing, then the epistemic question becomes central to determining if the views are antisemitic or not.

This point is precisely why anti-Zionists believe that calling anti-Zionism “antisemitic” amounts to “weaponing antisemitism” to protect Israel, and thus object to IHRA. They truly believe that Jews are guilty of dastardly things, so it’s not bigotry to oppose them. From that perspective, calling anti-Zionists “bigots” could only be a bad faith move to silence them.[2] That’s also why Salaita put “antisemitism” in scare quotes above, because he believes that activism against the Jews and their state is not bigoted antisemitism but justified opposition to dastardly Jewish deeds.

This point is also why the antisemitism question is not directly located in whether (for example) the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is “inherently” or “per se” antisemitic, or even whether “calls to dismantle Israel” are “inherently” or “per se” antisemitic; the Nexus and Jerusalem proponents have a technical but (temporarily) legitimate point when they say that BDS and even Israel-elimination are not antisemitic “on their face” or “per se.” If the Jews were truly guilty of dastardly deeds, it would not be bigotry to take even extreme measures such as those against them.[3]

The antisemitism here, then, is deeper: not necessarily in the measures “per se” one takes against the Jews, given one’s belief in their dastardly deeds, but in that which motivates those measures, i.e. in the (falsely) believing that Jews are guilty of those dastardly deeds in the first place,[4] in being all too prone to falsely believing this. I have elsewhere called this kind of antisemitism “epistemic antisemitism,” analyzing it as a kind of malicious cognitive bias of which the agent is often unaware, to which we’ll return in section (5) below.[5]

And this is also precisely why Zionists do sincerely see those anti-Zionist measures as antisemitic.

There are two main ways beliefs about Jewish dastardly deeds may be false: the Jews may not have done those deeds at all or, if they did, they are falsely being interpreted as dastardly.[6] From the Zionist perspective, anti-Zionism is founded on (i) a set of lies, distortions, half-truths, omissions, etc. about the illegitimacy of Israel, about Israel’s behavior over the decades, and most recently about Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas et al., (ii) the continuous application of absurd epistemic double standards to Israel from 1948 onwards, and (iii) the extreme credulousness of too many people (i.e. antisemites) regarding (i) and (ii), thus leading to the all-too-readiness to consistently interpret Jewish behavior in only the worst possible light. Once one has worked through the epistemic antisemitism here—for example by exposing the many lies and double standards composing the standard anti-Israel narrative, as I do elsewhere[7]—it becomes apparent that when it comes to Jews, many people dramatically lower their ordinary epistemic standards, leaving them prone to believing the worst things about Jews, no matter how poor the evidence or how strong the counterevidence. Put differently, it becomes apparent that the epistemic antisemite doesn’t hate Jews because of their dastardly deeds, but rather he believes they do dastardly deeds, he is able and willing to believe they do dastardly deeds, because he already hates Jews.[8] Antisemites (we noted) have always had their “reasons” to oppose the Jews—which invariably turn out to be defamatory lies they are only too eager and willing to believe. The suggestion here is that the same applies to many or most of today’s anti-Zionists.[9]

This realization in turn exposes the most fundamental failure of both the Nexus and Jerusalem definitions: despite rightly noting that context is essential, they pretend that today’s anti-Zionism occurs devoid of any context, in particular context about the belief systems motivating anti-Zionists. So, no, BDS is not antisemitic “per se” (because it’s an appropriate response to evil-doers and because boycotts can be a legitimate tool of political protest), but it is antisemitic when motivated by lies and misrepresentations about the Jews, or by mere epistemic indifference to the truth of the allegations about the Jews. Nor even is “dismantling Israel” antisemitic “per se,” particularly when it is expressed in that abstract language of “dismantling a state,” and particularly when, in some versions, it is expressed as that rather utopian call for a “binational state of justice and equality” (who could be opposed to that, at least “per se”?); but it is antisemitic when it is motivated by lies, double standards, etc. To draw an extreme analogy, the Nazi death camps were not antisemitic “per se,” either, if you believe, as the Nazis did, that the Jews were dangerous menaces to the entire world so that eliminating them would be perfectly well justified. But once you recognize the basis for those camps in the delusional epistemic antisemitism of the perpetrators, those camps instantly represent the pinnacle of antisemitic activism in perhaps all history. They essentially inherit the antisemitic status of the delusional beliefs that are their foundation and motivation. The same may therefore be true of the BDS movement and calls to dismantle Israel.

4. Antisemitic Consequences and Methods

That extreme example now brings out the next point.

Whatever technical distinctions one makes to conclude that BDS, Israel-elimination, or even Jew-elimination are not antisemitic “per se,” we must also examine the consequences of the activism in question. To adopt BDS is to adopt a program that de facto discriminates against and causes economic and other harm to Jews; to call for the elimination of Israel is to call for removing the ability of Jews to defend themselves from the genocidal aspirations of their many hostile neighbors. Not for nothing is the Nazi extermination of six million Jews the pinnacle of antisemitic behavior: one sees clearly there what mental gymnastics, including utterly delusional belief systems, are required to find a way in which mass murder of Jews would not be classified as antisemitic. BDS may be different in scope, but then again may not be: it targets Jews for harm, and the actual BDS movement of today also aims for Israel elimination, which, in the actual context of a Jewish-state surrounded by genocidal neighbors, directly competes with the Final Solution in its consequences for millions of Jews. The Jerusalem Definition claims that BDS is not “in and of itself” antisemitic because there are conceivable circumstances in which boycotts etc. might be a legitimate mechanism. But that is not relevant when, in actual context, their consequences are great harm to large numbers of Jews including possible mass murder. In general, if some “anti-Israel” action or policy entails mass harm to Jews, then, per our working definition of antisemitism, the bar for distinguishing anti-Zionism from antisemitism will be extraordinarily high.

This point cannot be overemphasized. Sanitary and theoretical as “dismantling the state” may sound, even in the framework of the utopian-sounding “binational state of equality,” dismantling the Jewish state, in context, today, almost surely will involve the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of millions of Jews. The October 7 massacre was a glimpse of Jewish life in that region in the absence of a Jewish state. That anti-Zionists are comfortable with that possibility (if not actively enthusiastic about it) also seems clear, given the massive campus celebrations of the massacre both in its immediate aftermath and continuously for the following year, the relentless calls for more such violence (“Intifada! By any means necessary! More October 7’s!”), the waving of Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and in the nearly universal absence of any condemnation among those parties. Many praised it quite openly. Cornell Prof. Russell Rickford found Hamas’s October 7 bloodshed positively “exhilarating”; Columbia Prof. Joseph Massad was filled with “jubilation and awe,” finding the massacre “astounding.” And CUNY Prof. Marc Lamont Hill answered explicitly when he wrote, “So many university academics who insist upon doing performative, virtue signaling ‘land acknowledgements’ at every public event are eerily silent as real liberation struggles are happening. Guess decolonization really is a metaphor for some folk…” He clearly derides those who are all talk and no action, so for him, at least, mass murder of Jews is fine, at least for “decolonization.” “Dismantling Israel” may not be antisemitic “per se,” but if being comfortable with the ethnic cleansing and genocide of some 7 million Jews is not antisemitic, it’s hard to imagine what is.[10]

Former Harvard President Larry Summers distinguished between being antisemitic in intent and in effect. Effective antisemitism will roughly be any position, policy, or behavior that de facto discriminates against or harms Jews in a significant way, whatever its actual content or intent. Intentional antisemitism is harder to define (per above), but doing so should not be necessary here. Suffice to note simply that these can diverge, such that non-antisemitic intentions produce effective antisemitism. The point now is that whether such measures as BDS and Israel-elimination are antisemitic “per se,” i.e. in intent, may well be outweighed by their being antisemitic in effect, in their consequences.

Columnist Ben Kerstein also puts the point succinctly: “There is, in fact, a fairly simple litmus test for antisemitism. One need only ask of a critic: Are they OK with killing Jews?”[11] Stephens too makes the point in the completion of the earlier quote:

But when the wished-for dire consequences of anti-Zionism fall directly on the heads of millions of Jews and when the people the anti-Zionists seek to silence, exclude and shame are almost all Jewish … then the distinctions between anti-Zionist and antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.

Note, here, that in addition to the transfer of antisemitic tropes, the foundational epistemic antisemitism I described above, and the antisemitic consequences, Stephens also raises what we might call antisemitic methods.[12] Here I have in mind such campus efforts to “anti-normalize,” to “get Zionists off campus,” to disrupt Zionist events, and especially (as part of BDS) to institute academic boycotts against Israel, Israeli scholars, and Zionists in general. All of these together (and more) amount to a campaign to silence the Zionist voice, literally remove the Zionist voice from campus, to bring it about that no one can develop a human relationship, much less a sympathetic one, with a “Zionist.” Given the earlier points, these amount to campaigns to anti-normalize, silence, and exclude primarily Jews from campus.

Perhaps (again) they aren’t antisemitic “per se” (if one believes that Jews are guilty of dastardly deeds); and perhaps (again) these actions are guilty of antisemitic consequences anyway. But there’s also something more here: it’s that these methods support and advance the epistemic antisemitism above. Motivated by the belief that the Jews are guilty, anti-Zionists seek to prevent the Jews from defending themselves and refuting the beliefs. They accuse the Jews of treachery but do not allow them to answer the accusations; they put the Jews on trial for crimes against humanity but do not allow them due process, an attorney, to examine the evidence, or even to speak. One is reminded of Stalin’s show trials; or the medieval disputations, where Jews were required to defend their faith under ground rules that made it impossible (such as not criticizing Christianity on threat of death). In my view the anti-normalization, the silencing, the exclusion, the shaming, are all antisemitic in their own right for depriving the Jew of the ability even to deny much less refute the accusations against him—and thus to advocate for the truth. Such methods, in addition to being antisemitic, should also be condemned by every university as inimical to the entire academic enterprise. If anti-Zionists believe the Jews are guilty they have the right to make that case, even if it is antisemitic to believe so; but then Jews must have the equal right to refute that case, if not also to make the case about the antisemitism of the charges and these methods.

In summary, then, we can grant all the following:

· It’s technically possible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic

· Not all Israelis are Jews, not all Jews are Israelis; not all Zionists are Jews, not all Jews are Zionists

· Fair, truthful criticism of Israeli policies or behaviors is generally not antisemitic (though when obsessive the person may be …)

It is under cover of these facts that anti-Zionists try to distinguish their hostility to Israel from hostility toward Jews. Nevertheless, Zionism is rooted in Judaism and Jewish identity, “what we talk about when we talk about Israel” is the Jews, and in general, most of the time, with actual people in actual contexts, anti-Zionism is antisemitic: even if not identical to antisemitism it is based on it, it produces and promotes it, it makes use of antisemitic tropes and methods, and it is comfortable with antisemitic consequences such as the mass murder of Jews. Though it’s possible to be anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, in actual context and operation, antisemitism permeates the anti-Zionist movement.

Let’s push a little deeper.

5. Epistemic Antisemitism at the Foundation of Anti-Zionism

As mentioned, the clearest way to demonstrate the epistemic antisemitism at the foundation of anti-Zionism would be to expose the many false allegations made against Israel and the Jews, which I undertake elsewhere.[13] Here I’ll merely use perhaps the simplest indicator of epistemic antisemitism—the readiness to apply unfavorable “double standards” to Israel/Jews—to illustrate its foundational role in campus anti-Zionism. We see such double standards when practices that are acceptable when most people do them are unacceptable when Jews do them, or when favorable considerations are given to most people but not to Jews, or more generally when the Jews and matters they are involved in are simply treated differently from most others. “No Jews, no news,” some complain, for one example, when alleged Israeli misdeeds receive enormous media coverage while greater actual misdeeds of others (including Israel’s enemies) are simply ignored.

We’ll need some work to set this up.

As campus responses to October 7 revealed, much of today’s campus anti-Zionism, though occurring in 2023-24, in fact is about 1948. Many campuses celebrated the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes” (in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” etc.) and the legitimacy of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.” But this shocking campus response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view the now twenty-year-long campus BDS campaign of lies against Israel combined with the more recent domination of progressivism (Critical Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism, etc.) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not only Israeli Jews and all Jews; and the success of that campaign explains why so many today were unable to see the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly as a straightforward moral atrocity and mass terror attack. If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, in that worldview, then their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim.

So what does this have to do with 1948?

The dehumanization campaign itself rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: if that establishment were perfectly just, then the efforts to prevent it then and the 76 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military, terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust. In turn, many of the measures that Israel has taken that detractors cite as “root causes”—as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving its “occupation” and “apartheid,” etc.—would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive colonial domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense. Take just two examples: the security barrier along western Judea-Samaria and the blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there in 2007 by an illegal violent coup. Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of Israel as just, these are legitimate defensive measures justified by the unremittent violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.

If Jewish sovereignty is legitimate, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades as need be. But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are dastardly evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of colonial occupation. On this latter view every Jew is guilty and therefore deserving of the atrocious harms of October 7, including the babies, and Hamas is not a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for “decolonization.”

In short: If 1948 is just, then October 7 is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then October 7 is political liberation.

So today’s anti-Zionism really still is about 1948.

The first “double standard” is in the fact that anyone, other than Palestinians, even cares about 1948.

Even if what anti-Zionists claim about the unjust founding of Israel were true (which it isn’t), it would be just one of uncountably many mass injustices of the twentieth century. Hundreds of millions of people were killed, maimed, displaced, lost everything, and more, in the first half of the century alone, featuring two world wars and other major conflicts including the Korean War, the India-Pakistan partition, and the processes of colonizing and decolonizing Africa and Asia. Along the way six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, millions more Jews were displaced from their homes, and nearly a million were ethnically cleansed from the Muslim Arab countries. Yet today’s anti-Zionists pursue a decades-long campaign to redress only the one alleged injustice of the establishment of Israel, treating it as the only case in history that demands a “do over” of the sort that would replace Israel with the state of “Palestine.” By all objective measures—the amount of land in dispute, the number of casualties in the wars, even the number of refugees produced—the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs and Muslims, which I prefer to call the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict (IPJAMIC), is actually tiny, yet there is an entire global BDS campaign against only the Jewish state, calling to dismantle only the Jewish state, calling to remove all the Jews who live there, themselves as much victims of mass injustice as anyone else. Meanwhile actual ongoing atrocities in the world that dwarf this conflict by every measure (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, the ongoing genocide of Christians by Islamists in Africa, etc.) are simply ignored. The fact that any third party, such as the western progressive movement, takes an interest in the IPJAMIC at all is itself indicative of a peculiar double standard.[14]

“No Jews, no news,” indeed. And all that is on the assumption that the allegations against Israel are true; just imagine how antisemitic it all looks when they turn out to be false.

Consider, briefly, the question of whether the founding of Israel in 1948 was “legitimate.” Those who see it as illegitimate often do so by denying Jewish history in this land.[15] They condemn Jewish immigration to Palestine while being perfectly okay with significant Arab immigration. Their account of the 1948 war reverses aggressor and victim; indeed the term “Nakba” (or “catastrophe”) was originally coined to denote the Arabs’ failure to exterminate the Jews, a picture on which the Arabs are the aggressors and the Jews are defending themselves, but only later came to denote “what the Jews inflicted on us” (in which the Jews are now the aggressors). Note that as of November of 1947 there were exactly zero Palestinian refugees; Zionism itself forcibly displaced no one, but the subsequent war did, that the Arabs started. The anti-Zionist typically fails ever to treat the Arabs as actual agents, responsible and accountable for their choices and actions, and simply blames everything on the Jews.

Double standards permeate all that. That narrative denies Jews living in their ancestral homeland any rights or considerations while granting rights and considerations only to the Arabs. It condemns Jewish immigration while accepting Arab, a double standard particularly worsened by the fact that most Jewish immigrants were true refugees escaping persecution and pogroms while most Arab immigrants had economic motivations. Today’s progressives endorse global immigration and immigrant rights, including the large-scale immigration of Muslims into western countries, while denying that endorsement to the Jews immigrating to Palestine. The refugee issue reeks of double standards: (i) the hyperfocus on the Palestinian Arab refugees created by the 1948 war while utterly ignoring the approximately equal number of Jewish refugees produced by ethnic cleansing; (ii) the establishment of a special agency devoted only to Palestinian Arab refugees, UNRWA, which operates by entirely different standards and rules and with an enormously greater per capita budget than the agency devoted to the far larger number of all other global refugees, UNHCR, with no international assistance at all for the equal number of Jewish refugees; (iii) the general progressive demand that all world refugees should be resettled while both (a) refusing to resettle Palestinian Arab refugees and (b) condemning Jewish refugees for being resettled by and in Israel. In actuality the establishment of Israel in 1948 was an act of “decolonization” par excellence, literally an indigenous people reclaiming its ancestral homeland. As Charles Krauthammer put it,

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.

You cannot find a clearer case of indigenous decolonization—yet today’s progressives, praising indigeneity and decolonization everywhere else, see in Israel nothing but grounds for the October 7 mass slaughter, and even invoke decolonization to justify that slaughter!

Then there are the relentless lies ever since, also riddled with double standards. Here is but one small recent example, an example multiplied a dozen times a day, daily. On October 12, 2024, The New York Times published an article proclaiming that Israel’s then-recent invasion of Lebanon was a violation of international law. Arab scholar Hussain Abdul-Hussain commented:

Russian troops have been occupying Crimea, parts of Georgia, and operating in Ukraine for years, against the will of two sovereign governments. Turkish troops have been occupying northern Cyprus since 1974, operating in northern Iraq and northern Syria against the will of all three sovereign governments. Iran has just attacked Israel with 200 missiles, supplies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen with arms against UN resolutions. Lebanon is a sovereign government that is in violation of a dozen UN resolutions … Yet of all the armed conflicts in the world, which government does the New York Times single out to scrutinize under international law and vilify? Israel!

Those other examples are far more egregious and aggressive violations of international law, not least because Israel’s invasion was a clearly justified act of self-defense. But everyone else gets a pass while nearly everything Israel does, even when clearly in self-defense, is condemned.

Once you see the double standards infecting nearly every aspect of the anti-Zionist narrative you cannot unsee it. Epistemic antisemitism both permeates the movement and rests at its very foundation. Combine that again with the other points above, that anti-Zionism operates by means of antisemitic methods, invokes antisemitic tropes, and produces antisemitic consequences, and the case for generally equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is very strong indeed.

We next turn to examine some objections raised by leading anti-Zionist Mehdi Hassan but often raised, in various permutations, by others as well.

[To Be Continued.]

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[1] This is why the Elder of Ziyon definition of antisemitism above should explicitly include that the anti-Jewish behaviors are unjustified.

[2] David Hirsh refers to the accusation that Jews invoke “antisemitism” to protect Israel from criticism as the “Livingstone Formulation,” in honor of the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s penchant for invoking it.

[3] Note again how the rather abstract aim of “eliminating Israel” seems far more sanitary, morally palatable, than the more concrete aim of “eliminating Jews.” That is a key way that framing one’s hostility as against Israel rather than against Jews obscures the fact that the hostility is, in the end, aimed toward the Jews.

[4] Stephens again captures the idea: “Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory that holds that Jews are uniquely prone to using devious methods to achieve their malevolent ends, and that they must therefore be opposed by any means necessary … a conspiracy theory that, by its nature, cannot be answered with appeals to facts and reason … that specifically singles out Jews, by their very essence, as uniquely prone to evil behavior … [who] must therefore be opposed by any means necessary …”

[5] Andrew Pessin, “Epistemic Antisemitism, or ‘Good People Gone Wild’: How Decent People Can Be Antisemites and Not Even Know It,” in eds. Blackmer and Pessin, Poisoning the Wells: Contemporary Antisemitism in the United States (ISGAP Publications, 2021; Academic Studies Press, 2023).

[6] For recent examples, claims about Israel bombing the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza or deliberately “starving” Gaza may fall into the former category; claims that Israel’s blowing up the pagers in Lebanon was a “war crime” may fall into the latter, by omitting the fact that the pagers were distributed only to senior Hezbollah operatives, thus making the operation highly discriminate against military targets.

[7] See Andrew Pessin, Setting the Record Straight: Refuting the Common Lies Told about Israel (ISGAP Publications, forthcoming).

[8] Sartre makes essentially the same point: “[Antisemitic passion] precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth; it seeks them out to nourish itself upon them; it must even interpret them in a special way so that they may become truly offensive” (Anti-Semite and Jew, transl. George Becker, Schocken Books 1976, p. 17).

[9] There are many distinctions to make here, requiring context to apply them to real individual cases. Some people may brazenly invent things and lie; others may be strongly disposed to believe those allegations, others less so, others may be innocents being duped. One hopes that most college students fall into the last category, but one fears that many fall into the former categories. The problem is only exacerbated in the age of the internet and fake photos and videos.

[10] It’s useful here, too, to highlight the epistemic antisemitism. Anti-Zionists believe Jews are guilty of dastardly deeds, but are they so dastardly to justify the mass slaughter of half the world’s Jews, including the burning of Jewish babies? Indeed the effect of years of lies about Israel (“apartheid,” “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” etc.) has been to dehumanize and demonize the Jews to the point where mass slaughter does seem justifiable to many. The Nazis had their own delusional “justifications” for their “Final Solution”; this case seems to me comparable.

[11] Similarly, Prof. David Bernstein writes: “There has been too much pointless debate over whether those who call for Israel’s destruction are necessarily antisemitic. The important point is that such people know that the end of Israel most likely means genocide for 7.5 million Israeli Jews, and they are okay with that. Whether they are motivated by Islamism, leftist bs “anticolonialism,” hostility to the West with Israel as their first target, or pure hatred of Jews is immaterial, it’s much worse than mere antisemitism. Most antisemites aren’t full-on Nazis, and as much as they dislike Jews would object to mass murder … The so-called antizionists do not, and therefore are much worse. I really don’t care if someone doesn’t like Jews. But someone who claims and may sincerely think that they have nothing against Jews, but is content to see my friends and relatives in Israel murdered in the name of some idiotic ideology, that’s a real problem … They are ok with genocide.”

[12] There isn’t a clear line between “consequences” and “methods”: perhaps by the former we might mean the “consequences” of enacting the particular policies or behaviors they call for, while the latter are the tactics they pursue in order to have their desired policies enacted.

[13] Andrew Pessin, Setting the Record Straight: Refuting the Common Campus Lies Told about Israel (ISGAP Publications, forthcoming).

[14] I return to this question in section 7c below.

[15] Jews enjoyed sovereignty or autonomy or a major presence in this land for 1400 years until the Roman conquest, and continuous presence ever since, there even being a majority in Jerusalem by the early 19^th century, etc.