“Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism,” on Campus
Of course it is, and here is exactly why
[This article was previously published in several installments on this substack, but here it is all in one piece and one place. Meanwhile please check out my new two-volume work, “Israel Breathes, World Condemns,” a collection of my writings over the past decade documenting and analyzing the transformation of academia into an antizionist, antisemitic hatefest: Vol I, “The Trajectory,” and Vol. II, “The Aftermath.” All proceeds will go to support Israel.]
The expression, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” is obviously coarse. Both terms can mean many things, both ideologies can manifest themselves many ways, and the people subscribing to them, the anti-Zionists and the antisemites, are all unique individuals with idiosyncratic histories, motivations, etc., all of which makes evaluating the coarse expression itself very challenging. Taken literally, the expression asserts either that the ideologies are identical or that the former is a species of the latter. They are not identical: their basic definitions differ at least superficially and much antisemitism does not manifest itself as anti-Zionism. Thus I take the expression to assert that anti-Zionism is a species of antisemitism. But even here that doesn’t mean that every manifestation of anti-Zionism or every anti-Zionist is antisemitic; in fact one can be an anti-Zionist without being an antisemite, and some individuals may fall into that category. Strictly speaking, then, one should not generalize absolutely in the way that the coarse expression invites.
Note that that point goes both ways. Those who categorically deny that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” would seem to be denying that anti-Zionism can ever be a manifestation of or motivated by antisemitism, which I will argue is clearly false. So perhaps both those inclined to affirm and those inclined to deny the coarse proposition should agree that “sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t,” so that the more nuanced question becomes that of determining just when it is and when it isn’t. The essay below is, ultimately, trying to do just that.
Nevertheless, since the slogan is widely debated in just that coarse way, and both for the ease of speaking and for the sake of theorizing, I too will incline toward the general. I will argue that—despite their differences in definitions and sometimes in details—the typical foundations, motivations, methods, and consequences of anti-Zionism (both as an ideology and as reflected in practice and activism), in the actual context in which the movement primarily exists and operates, generally justify even that coarse expression. Or more informally: in its actual manifestations anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitic, rather through and through, the occasional exception notwithstanding. My emphasis will be on the manifestations of these issues on North American campuses.
1. Introductory Matters
Answering the question whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism obviously requires definitions of each.
“Zionism” is the easier one: “Zionism” shall mean roughly the belief that Jews have the right to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, along with nearby permutations of the idea. “Anti-Zionism” would be the negation of that, which could amount to an “in principle” or an “in practice” opposition, or both. A proponent of the latter might support Zionism “in principle” but hold that, “in practice” it was or is unfeasible, or inconsistent with other “rights,” etc.[1] The stronger “in principle” anti-Zionism can take various forms, such as denying Jewish history or claiming that “Zionism is racism.”[2]
So understood, it isn’t “anti-Zionism” (nor antisemitism) to criticize this or that particular policy or behavior of Israel, though it may amount to anti-Zionism (and antisemitism) to do so dishonestly or to relentlessly, obsessively criticize every policy or behavior of Israel and find nothing redeemable about the state. Nor is it “anti-Zionism” (nor antisemitism) to advocate for a Palestinian state in the context of a two-state solution, nor to advocate for Palestinian rights more generally (except where these exclude Zionism). Zionism itself is perfectly consistent in principle with a Palestinian state and various Palestinian rights. Prior to 1948 “anti-Zionism” refers to the opposition to establishing the Jewish state; post-1948 it now invariably includes the practical aim of dismantling the Jewish state to which it objects, which involves far more than merely “criticizing” this or that policy or policies.
As for defining “antisemitism,” there are plenty of definitions from which to choose: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, the “Jerusalem Declaration,” “Nexus Document,” Natan Sharansky’s “3D test,” the anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon’s (here and here), journalist Bret Stephens’s, and so on. As definitions go, I’m partial to Elder of Ziyon’s (below), which is succinct yet comprehensive, and also allows a taxonomy of different manifestations of antisemitism; unfortunately it is not well known. The IHRA definition is the most influential, important less for the definition itself (which is vague) than for including among its examples of possibly antisemitic claims several related to Israel and Zionism.[3] For that reason it is also controversial, motivating anti-Zionists to oppose it, generally by alleging that it amounts to a weapon to silence “legitimate criticism of Israel” for being “antisemitic.”[4] That controversy has been enough to spawn the Jerusalem and Nexus definitions, whose proponents by all appearances aim to defend anti-Zionism from the antisemitic verdict.[5] In this paper I’ll largely avoid the scholarly debates over the competing definitions, not least because I think most people decide what is antisemitic first then choose their definitions accordingly—rather than start with the definitions.[6]
I’ll suggest we provisionally work with Elder of Ziyon’s definition, summarized in this graphic:
Along the way we’ll add some nuance to this definition,[7] but for now just one caveat: It would obviously beg the question simply to include hostility etc. toward Jews “as a nation” (i.e. anti-Zionism) in our definition, so treat this paper as an argument in support of including that phrase in the definition. The rest of the definition shall afford a working handle on the antisemitism that is not particularly contested, namely that which doesn’t involve Israel or Zionism. Indeed Elder of Ziyon’s writings make a strong case that his definition captures all the classical forms of antisemitism coming into and throughout the twentieth century, including Christian, Muslim, racial, right-wing, etc. The question now is whether, in what circumstances, and to what degree anti-Zionism in its various manifestations fits that definition.[8]
A final caveat. Even with a definition in hand, determining what or who is “antisemitic” can be challenging because it requires many distinctions, for example between antisemitic motivations, beliefs, statements, expressions, policies, actions, and people. The very same statement might be antisemitic uttered in some contexts but not in others; the very same belief or action might be antisemitic when held or done by one person but not by another; people can say or do antisemitic things without themselves being antisemitic; some particular behavior may not be antisemitic but the overall cumulative pattern of behavior might be; the antisemitism might be revealed not in what the person says or does but in what they do not say or do. The reason IHRA qualifies its examples by noting that they “could” or “may” be antisemitic is precisely because context plays an indispensable role in evaluating any particular incidents (or patterns thereof) that precludes absolute and universal determinations. That means (again) we must proceed in a general way, reaching general conclusions that may well admit of individual exceptions. “X is antisemitic” may be as coarse as “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” again, but may well be true “in general” even where it admits of individual exceptions.
2. Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism “On the Face of It”
To echo the Jerusalem language (but reverse their determination), I begin by arguing that anti-Zionism is antisemitic “on the face of it,” or prima facie; that our default should be that it is unless in some particular instance it can be demonstrated otherwise.
Start with two essential points.
(1) The first is well-known, though often contested by anti-Zionists. As I’ll explain in section (7a) below, it’s that, for most Jews, Zionism is deeply entwined with and/or based on their Judaism and Jewish identity. Most, but by no means all: it is indeed possible to disentangle them, as some individuals do, and embrace some version of “Judaism” divorced from Zionism. That was what 19th century Reform Judaism did, and is what contemporary groups such as “Jewish Voice for Peace” do. There are also Orthodox sects whose version of Judaism supports a practical anti-Zionism (rejecting not the principle of Jewish sovereignty but its achievement by non-messianic means). We’ll return to all these groups later, but for now note that none of that is relevant for those Jews (still the large majority) committed to the 3000-year-old tradition of a Judaism permeated by Zionism, including in its scripture, rabbinic literature, liturgy, rituals, history, and more. Anti-Zionist Jews may believe anything they want without negating the fact that Zionism, for most Jews, is deeply rooted in their shared Jewish ancestry and religion.
(2) The second point, though obvious, is largely overlooked. Although not all Israelis are Jews and not all Jews are Israeli, and not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists, nevertheless Israel is a, or the, Jewish project, and not for nothing is it widely referred to as the “Jewish state”: the population is 75% Jewish, half the world’s Jews live there, most who don’t live there support it, consider it part of their Jewish identity, many having family and friends there (so most Jews are Zionists), the state itself has a Jewish character (language, culture, calendar, etc.), it’s home to millenia of Jewish history and archeology, the Orthodox Jewish religion can only be truly fully practiced there, etc. As I’ve argued in detail elsewhere: although one can do otherwise, what we talk about in general, when we talk about Israel, is the Jews. Of course it’s possible to talk about Israel without talking about the Jews; but most of the time, what most people in fact are talking about when they talk about Israel, is ultimately the Jews.[9]
These two points alone make “hating Israel” (as an anti-Zionist) while not “hating Jews” (as an antisemite) exceptionally challenging. If Zionism is rooted in Judaism, as it is for many, then hating Zionism requires hating Judaism; demanding “Zionism off campus!”, as many campus anti-Zionists do, requires demanding “Judaism off campus!”; and hating “Zionists,” targeting “Zionists” with violence, and wanting “Zionists off campus” requires hating and targeting many Jews and wanting Jews off campus.[10] And though not all Israelis are Jews etc., nevertheless the allegations anti-Zionists make against Israel are, ultimately, allegations against Jews; when they accuse Israel of dastardly deeds, they are ultimately accusing Jews of dastardly deeds. If antisemitism per Elder of Ziyon’s definition involves hostility etc. toward Jews, then the bar for being anti-Zionist without being antisemitic will indeed be very high.
Journalist Bret Stephens makes this point when he notes that
“Zionist” has become just another word for Jew. Anti-Zionists deny this strenuously … [because] they’d like to believe—or at least tell others—that their objection is to a political ideology rather than to a people or a religion.
Well known anti-Zionist Steven Salaita (who lost an academic position for his anti-Zionist social media activity) also makes the point in this controversial tweet:
Zionists: transforming “antisemitism” from something horrible into something honorable since 1948
We’ll return to the scare quotes there, and anti-Zionist denials, below; for now, problematic as this tweet may be to some, it has the virtue of recognizing that hostility toward Israel is ultimately hostility toward the Jews.
(3) The “anti” in “anti-Zionism” is a red flag: the movement is not for something but against something, namely something that most Jews seek and believe is in their self-interest. So anti-Zionism is opposed to most Jews and their interests, which surely sounds antisemitic prima facie. “Pro-Palestinian” has no such immediate connotations, and of course many anti-Zionists also describe themselves as such, claiming that their pro-Palestinianism requires their anti-Zionism.[11] There is a substantive debate to be had there, not least because we noted that Zionism itself is consistent with various Palestinian rights, interests, and even a Palestinian state in the context of a “two state solution.” But the fact that it is possible (and quite easy) to be “pro-Palestinian” without being anti-Zionist (or antisemitic), as we’ll observe below, suggests that adopting “anti-Zionism” is a choice an activist makes, a choice against the Jews—a therefore prima facie antisemitic one.[12]
(4) Indeed, the definitional anti-Zionist claim that there should be no Jewish state is itself prima facie antisemitic. It denies the Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, a right widely granted to other peoples (including, by most anti-Zionists, to the Palestinians). Indeed, those who advocate against Jewish self-determination typically express no objection to the 20-plus Arab states, 50-plus Muslim states, 150+ Christian states/territories, and many other ethno-national states in the world, but only to the Jewish state. Worse, anti-Zionism seeks to revoke a right Jews already have been exercising for three quarters of a century. Revoking that right would remove the Jews’ ability to defend themselves from their actively hostile, even genocidal, neighbors and enemies. Anti-Zionists thus deny Jews basic rights and protections while actively supporting those rights and protections for all other peoples (including Palestinians). Another word for that is discrimination, antisemitic by our definition.
(5) Every classic antisemite (such as the right-wing white supremacist) is also an anti-Zionist. Such antisemites typically see Israel as the mechanism by which the dastardly Jews commit their world-controlling evils, so, hating the latter, they also hate the former.[13],[14] Nor is this point restricted to extremists: anyone who dislikes Jews will likely also oppose Zionism.[15] Antisemitism strongly motivates anti-Zionism, in other words, and one will surely find antisemites among anti-Zionists. Indeed, that anti-Zionism appeals to antisemites suggests it is antisemitic “in itself”; no antisemite would be attracted to it if they believed it were good for the Jews. At bare minimum, this point confirms that antisemitism can express itself in anti-Zionism, thus refuting any who categorically reject our starting proposition. This point also raises an obvious relevant concern. If hating the Jews naturally leads one to hating Israel, wouldn’t hating Israel also naturally lead one to hating the Jews, especially given points (1) and (2) above?[16]
(6) Overt expressions of classic, right-wing antisemitism are often found even within the progressive anti-Zionist movement dominating campuses. Anti-Israel rallies over the past year, on campuses and elsewhere, frequently included overt expressions of Holocaust denial, Holocaust inversion, and Holocaust promotion including Nazi salutes (here and here), the praise of Hitler, and calls for the “Final Solution,” with not a single “progressive” condemning them. One can no longer count the instances of graffiti’d swastikas appearing all over campuses including on Jewish students’ dorm doors over the past few years and especially since the October 7 Hamas massacre. Nor do any progressives object when leading anti-Zionists, such as University of Pennsylvania Prof. Anne Norris, like social media posts proclaiming that “Playing the victim is what Jews are best at.” Progressives themselves, such as those belonging to the many “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” chapters established in the past year, post Instagrams claiming that the “Jews own Hollywood.” When a neo-Nazi supports the Final Solution, sprays swastikas, and accuses Jews of dastardly deeds, there is no hesitation in declaring it antisemitic; it is no different when an “anti-Zionist” progressive does it.
(7) Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the above, anti-Zionism generally leads to or increases traditionally antisemitic beliefs and activities targeting Jews, per our definition.[17] Graffiti, vandalism, and physical assaults against Jews, Jewish institutions, and Jewish events on campuses and elsewhere have exploded since the October 7 massacre: campus Hillels and Chabad houses repeatedly vandalized, Jewish schools receiving bomb and death threats and being shot at, mobs protesting and vandalizing synagogues, swastikas drawn wherever Jews are, mezuzot torn from dorm doors, Jews harassed, name-called, ostracized, spat on, physically assaulted, shot and shot at, several murdered. Sometimes these are perpetrated in the name of “anti-Zionism,” but Jews on the receiving end of the violence might be excused for not distinguishing between the anti-Zionist pogrom and the anti-Jewish pogrom—nor does our definition distinguish them. Indeed, even when advertised as “anti-Zionist,” the violence nearly exclusively targets Jews, per points (1) and (2) above. Not all Zionists are Jews, but there are nearly zero reports of attacks against Zionist non-Jews; and most Jews are Zionists, so those attacking Zionists will be ready to attack most Jews.
(8) Many of the traditional antisemitic tropes falsely levied against Jews simply get transferred onto Israel; and as Jews were always seen as guilty of the worst evils of their day (Christ-killing, capitalism, racial inferiority, etc.), so, too, now Israel (with “apartheid,” “colonialism,” etc.) The preeminent Rabbi Naftali Z.Y. Berlin noted already back in the 19th century the two core superstitions of the antisemite (later codified in the antisemitic Protocols): that all Jewish property is stolen by fraud and deceit, and that Jews, thinking themselves superior, seek to control and harm all others. Today of course the major anti-Zionist charges are precisely that the Jews (in Israel) are living on “stolen land,” and exercise, in their “colonialism” and “apartheid,” a system of “Jewish supremacy.” As Stephens continues the quote above, when “the charges [anti-Zionists] make against Zionists invariably echo the hoariest antisemitic stereotypes—greed, deceit, limitless bloodlust— then the distinctions between anti-Zionist and antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.”[18],[19]
Antisemites have always cited their “reasons” to oppose the Jews: Jews are Christ-killers, murderers of children, plague spreaders, responsible for capitalism, responsible for communism, conspiring for global domination, underminer of morality, etc. Today decent people look back on these and see them as the defamatory slanders they are, yet often fail to recognize them as such when they are updated to apply to modern-day Israel.[20]
(9) The open support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their patron Iran that permeates the campus anti-Zionist movement cannot be construed any other way than as antisemitic. These are not “human rights” organizations aiming to bring freedom and equality to the poor oppressed Palestinians; they do not even believe in human rights, neither for their own people nor anyone else, but are instead homophobic, misogynist, intolerant, anti-diversity Islamist jihadi supremacist hate groups seeking for Islam to conquer the world, who oppress their own subjects mercilessly and endorse the murder of all Jews on earth as longstanding enemies of their extremist theocracy, literally since the 7th century CE. These groups are fighting not for rights or liberation but to exterminate the Jews in the name of Islam, and say so openly, and repeatedly, and all their behavior demonstrates it. Hamas’s foundational charter, never revoked, states that Islam is at war with the Jews, declares that Islam will obliterate Israel, and quotes Islamic holy writ endorsing the murder of all Jews. Now deceased Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (i) refers to Jews (via Islamic scripture) as the “sons of apes and pigs,” (ii) said “If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew—and I am not saying the Israeli,” and (iii) said that God created Israel so the Jews would be gathered in one place, to save Hezbollah “from having to go to the ends of the world" to kill them. The Houthis’ official motto, emblazoned on the flags that some campus anti-Zionists enthusiastically wave, is “Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Hamas and Hezbollah have spent decades acting on their genocidal aspirations, culminating in the October 7 massacre and the year of Hamas warfare, terrorist attacks, and Hezbollah bombardment since. To support these movements, as the campus anti-Zionist movement openly does today, is to support their Jewish genocidal aspirations. Needless to say, calls for, and active attempts toward, the mass murder of Jews appear to be antisemitic. More than mere “hostility” toward Jews, per our definition, if supporting much less committing mass violence against Jews is not antisemitic, then it’s hard to imagine what is.
(10) Given the current context—Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran pursuing religious jihad attempting to murder Jews on a massive scale—then almost any even mild criticism of Israel now, no matter how true or otherwise legitimate, de facto amounts to supporting that jihadist endeavor. Maybe some or even many progressive anti-Zionists do not really want to mass murder the Jews, but their anti-Zionism, in this current context, amounts to supporting that very program. If the mass murder of Jews is at least prima facie antisemitic, then progressive anti-Zionism supporting that outcome is prima facie antisemitic, no matter what theoretical contortions activists may make to deny it. Indeed actions that in other contexts might not be antisemitic at all—including activism for Palestinian rights, efforts to obtain a ceasefire, supporting a Palestinian state, etc.—in this context amount to supporting the antisemitic jihadist agenda. And full-throated anti-Zionism, such as calling to dismantle the Jewish state when efforts to violently dismantle it in the name of genocidal jihad are actively under way, cannot be seen otherwise than as supporting that jihad.
Taken together, these points illustrate the many points of contact, the multi-level entanglement, between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They thus provide a preponderance of evidence that anti-Zionism simply is antisemitism or antisemitic. “On the face of it,” then, one’s default assumption should be that it is, barring compelling evidence otherwise in some particular case or another.
But there’s more, as we turn to analysis.
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.[21]
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.[22] 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.[23]
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,[24] 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.[25]
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.[26] 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[27]—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.[28] 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.[29]
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.[30]
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?”[31] 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.[32] 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.[33] 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.[34]
“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.[35] 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.
6. Mehdi Hasan Arguments Against “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism”
In June 2024, Munk Debates sponsored a debate on the resolution, “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism,” featuring Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff for and Gideon Levy and Mehdi Hasan against. In his opening statement Hasan offered three arguments against the motion.
The first is this:
Number one, if you vote for this motion tonight, you are throwing logic, history and the English language under the bus because anti-Semitism is hating Jews, the people, and Judaism the religion. Anti-Zionism is opposing Israel, the state and Zionism, the ethno-nationalist ideology that underpins that state. Zionism is not Judaism … Zionism is not Judaism, right? It's a very modern secular political ideology movement that was founded less than 150 years ago by an atheist named Theodore Herzl…
Hasan here attempts to assert the wedge between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: the latter is hating Jews, the former is hating the state and the ideology. Since Zionism is not identical to Judaism, the two anti-movements are not identical.
Second:
Number two, if you vote for this motion, you're throwing Palestinians as a people under the bus. You're telling an occupied people, a dispossessed people to accept their own occupation, their own dispossession, meekly in silence. Otherwise they're racists.
Identifying anti-Zionism with antisemitism condemns Palestinians, with their allegedly legitimate reasons for rejecting Zionism, as antisemitic bigots or racists.
Third:
And number three, last but not least, if you vote for this motion, you're throwing a lot of Jews under the bus as well. Not just Jews like Edwin Samuel Montague, but Jews today. If you vote for this motion tonight, you're saying my debate partner, Gideon Levy, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust who served for Shimon Peres, who's written for Haaretz for over 40 years, just won Israel's top journalism prize three years ago. He's an anti-Semite. You're saying the Satmar, the world's biggest Hasidic Jewish sect, which says it is fighting God's war against Zionism, is anti-Semitic. You're saying Jewish college students on campus, maybe some of them are your kids, members of If Not Now, and Jewish Voices of Peace, they're anti-Semites. You're saying some of the most respected Jewish voices in the world like Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Parliament, Miriam Margolis, the actress from Harry Bloody Potter, they're all anti-Semites…
Identifying anti-Zionism with antisemitism throws a lot of Jews under the bus, as well.
7. Responses to Hasan’s Arguments
7a. Let’s begin with his first argument.
The most general response is to note that we conceded, at the top, that anti-Zionism is not “identical” to antisemitism. The question is whether the former is a species of the latter, and nothing Hasan says here suggests that it is not. The main reply is the positive argument sketched in section (2) above detailing exactly why anti-Zionism is a species of antisemitism, to which we add a bit more here.
(a) The reference to Herzl is entirely irrelevant. Whatever Zionism was at its founding as a modern political movement, and whoever founded it, and for whatever reasons, what matters is that anti-Zionism today is calling for the dismantling of a Jewish state built to protect Jews, so in principle and in practice it is antisemitic as we have argued above. That Herzl was allegedly an atheist seems to be Hasan’s way of distinguishing Zionism from Judaism, by suggesting that Herzl’s personal motives were not religious. But that is only relevant on the assumption that Jewish identity is only religious, as opposed to also ethnic or national, a point that Herzl—with his famous slogan, “we are one people”—openly rejected, as do many millions of Jews. Herzl’s precise relationship to the Jewish religion notwithstanding, he founded the modern political movement for and on behalf of the Jewish people, i.e. the Jews, making even his modern political Zionism very much a Jewish movement.
(b) More importantly, what Herzl started in 1896 was simply the continuation and modern codification of a movement that is at least 3000 years old, as old as the Jewish people and the Jewish religion themselves. That’s no coincidence, because the three are intertwined. “Zionism is not identical to Judaism”: true enough, technically, but that doesn’t mean that Judaism and Jewish identity are not, for the large majority of Jews, Zionist through and through.
What Hasan is doing here is actually quite offensive. He is trying to insert a wedge between Zionism and Jewish identity by denying that Zionism, in the words of some anti-Zionist faculty at Connecticut College recently trying to do the same thing, “is part of Jewish shared ancestry and religion.” While that phrase at least acknowledges that Jewishness is also an ethnicity in addition to a religion, it still amounts to an objectionable gaslighting revealing disturbing historical ignorance. Are they really presuming to tell people who are Zionists what the nature and source of their Zionism is? Would they do that to any other identity group, i.e. override their self-conception of the nature and source of their identity? Sure, there are Jews who are anti-Zionist, and these days anybody can pick and choose what they want from any religion, and anybody can form their personal identity any way they like. But while those Jews who decide to disaffiliate from the Zionism built into Judaism, built into ancient Judaism and medieval Judaism and 3000 years of Judaism to this very day, have every right to do so, they have no place dictating to the other Jews—still the significant majority—that their Zionism is not so rooted. And, frankly, non-Jews really ought to stay out of that conversation altogether.
It’s simple. Per the Krauthammer quote above—“you dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times”—the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. The Jewish people had sovereignty or autonomy there for some 1400 years, dating back nearly two millenia before the advent of Islam, and have maintained a continuous presence there for 3000 years. The Hebrew Bible, the Mishna, and one of the Talmuds were composed there. The Hebrew Bible drips with Zionism, and significant parts of the Talmud (and many of the laws constituting the religion) are devoted to Jewish obligations that hold only in the Land of Israel. Those in exile continuously prayed to return, and Jews have continuously returned, in small numbers and large, for the past 2000 years. They were already a majority in parts of the Land, including Jerusalem, from the early 19th century, before modern political Zionism.
That is precisely “Jewish shared ancestry and religion,” and is the source for most Jewish Zionists’ Zionism. It isn’t merely incorrect but in fact offensive to suggest otherwise. As British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis summarized it, explaining “Why the State of Israel is Central to Jewish Identity”:
I am a Zionist because I have inherited a language, culture and faith from the indigenous people of Judea. I am a Zionist because over thousands of years, my ancestors recommitted daily to holding Israel at the heart of their faith. I am a Zionist because I am a Jew.
Judaism is “more than” just Zionism so they are not identical, but Zionism is baked into three millenia of Judaism. To be anti-Zionist is therefore to be anti-Judaism and anti-Jew.
(c) We should also briefly note the double standard implied here: Hasan is clearly opposed to Jewish “ethno-nationalism,” but his advocacy is entirely to promote Palestinian “ethno-nationalism.” So he isn’t actually against “ethno-nationalism” itself, he is only against it when the Jews do it.[36]
7b. Let’s turn next to Hasan’s third argument, coming back to the second one after. Here Hasan argues that identifying anti-Zionism with antisemitism will (in his view, wrongly) entail that many Jews are antisemites.
(a) The reference to Montague is also irrelevant, as would be any reference to pre-state anti-Zionists. The difference between advocating against a Jewish state prior to 1948 and advocating against it today is roughly analogous to advocating against having a baby before conception and advocating against having the baby once the baby is already born: however good the reasons against may have been simply do not and cannot merit the murder of the baby once it has arrived. Maybe one believes the Jewish state was a bad idea, or could not have been implemented without bad consequences or serious injustices; but now, three-quarters of a century later, dismantling it itself could not happen without at least equal and likely far greater injustices than whatever was involved in 1948.[37] Many Jews had all sorts of reasons to be anti-Zionists when Herzl founded the modern movement, but it doesn’t matter: many even of those Jews had actually become Zionists by 1948, and most Jews in the world count as Zionists today. Perhaps it would not be appropriate to label Montague or most pre-state anti-Zionist Jews as antisemites, given the entirely different context—their resisting the founding of a Jewish state did not entail immediate injustices and harms to actual living Jews the way dismantling it today would—but that simply entails nothing about contemporary Jewish anti-Zionists.
(b) Hasan’s incredulousness apparently relies on the assumption that Jews cannot be or should never be considered antisemites. But that assumption is manifestly false. There have always been Jews who turn against their people, from ancient times through today, sometimes in order to be liked or not harmed by antisemites or sometimes because they become convinced by antisemitic ideology. In November 2024, a Hamas operative was arrested in Pittsburgh for vandalizing Jewish buildings including a synagogue; arrested with him was “his Jewish accomplice,” a woman who after attending an anti-Israel college came “to see Jews as my enemies,” then teamed up with that Hamas operative to vandalize synagogues. But that is merely a recent example of a very long tradition. Consider the famous speech by Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler to Nazi SS officers, complaining that their lethal efficiency was being compromised because every SS guy had his favorite “A-1 Jew”:
… the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about, “the Jewish race is being exterminated,” says one party member, “that’s quite clear, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.” And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew …[38]
Even the most dedicated antisemites, Nazi SS officers, can find A-1 Jews they like, the “good Jews.” If some Jews could appeal even to Nazis then all the more so today, when there is massive social pressure against the Jews, particularly in progressive campus environments, to get Jews to “turn” and become the “good Jew” for the Jew-hater. Favor Israel, on many campuses, and you are ostracized; hate Israel, and you’re the most popular Jewish kid around.
There was also the Association of German National Jews during the Weimar and early Nazi years. Fiercely anti-Zionist, its members wanted nothing more than to fully assimilate into German society, and remained in operation all the way until 1935—when the Nazis had enough and destroyed them. Though pre-Israel, these Jews were straightforwardly antisemitic: they wanted Jews to disappear in Germany, and were particularly racist against East European Jews for, reflecting the ideology of the era, lacking racial purity. They were, in short, the perfect “good” Jews for a while, until the Gestapo came knocking.
Nor were they apparently the only group of that sort. American Robert Gessner visited Germany in the mid-1930s and wrote a book about it, about which a Time Magazine reviewer said the following:
But after [Gessner] visited a famed rabbi in Munich, wandered through the ghetto in Berlin, talked with Zionists, Jewish workers, capitalists, he found himself appalled at the conduct of the Association of German National Jews. This organization supports Hitler, fights the Jewish boycott of German goods. Another group, the Nazi Jews, advocates complete loyalty to the Nazi program, and Gessner was told they leave their meetings giving the Nazi salute shouting, "Down With Us!"[39]
Indeed, there have always been Jews willing to salute, “Down With Us!” “Down with the Jews!” comes across as rather antisemitic, no matter who says it.
The existence of “A-1 Jews,” “good Jews,” or anti-Zionist Jews in no way undermines the possibility of the antisemitic label. The “Jew-washing” service these Jews allege to provide as cover for antisemitism is simply not successful. For these good, A-1, anti-Zionist Jews, the ones embraced by the anti-Zionist movement, are precisely the Jews who do not stand up for Jewish rights, Jewish freedoms, and Jewish security, who reject all those things. These Jews, in supporting movements such as the Nazis then or Islamist jihadis now, support movements working toward the mass murder of Jews. Whatever their intentions they are de facto working to disenfranchise the Jews, return them to powerlessness, return them to second-class status (or “dhimmitude”), and, ultimately, subject them to ethnic cleansing or even mass murder. That is at least effective antisemitism, their “Jewish” identity notwithstanding.
(c) The Satmar example fails quite spectacularly, in a different way.
One wonders, first, why Hasan did not invoke the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect instead, who though far smaller than the Satmars cooperate directly with anti-Zionists and appear regularly at anti-Israel events worldwide. Perhaps their fringe nature makes them too “tokenized” for Hasan, who presumably wants to invoke the specter of labeling a large group of clearly committed Jews as antisemites. But also, perhaps, that very point is telling, for though the Satmars are “anti-Zionist,” they are not known for actively participating in anti-Israel demonstrations. In fact they condemn Neturei Karta for so participating, with the current Satmar leader saying as recently as November 2023:
Unfortunately, we see how far they have strayed from the path. They are walking around the world together with the Arabs, with those who shout without any shame and support the [Hamas] murders, they walk with them in broad daylight with the Shtreimel and the gown and shout together with the haters of Israel and murderers of souls. This is a terrible desecration of the name of heaven, to strengthen murderers in the name of the Holy Torah and in the name of heaven.
So Hasan has chosen as his example a group that, despite its “anti-Zionism,” is actually opposed to the particular form of Hasan’s anti-Zionist movement!
We’ll return to that opposition in a moment. First we must acknowledge how ideal the Satmars and Neturei Karta should be for Jew-washing purposes, since, with their ultra-orthodox appearance, they are quite visibly Jews—and what could better exonerate an Israel-hater from charges of antisemitism than when such clear Jews are standing beside him screaming “Death to Israel”? And how could anti-Zionism be antisemitic when these groups derive their anti-Zionism directly from their Judaism? The Hebrew Bible, as they read it, teaches that Jews should re-form their political collective in the Land of Israel only by divine means, upon the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The contemporary State of Israel, then, is a religious abomination. That the state and its overall culture are largely secular—only worse. No wonder these Jews have extreme hatred toward Israel—hatred apparently indistinguishable from that of the other anti-Zionists.[40]
So why then are the Satmars, though sharing the anti-Zionism, opposed to Neturei Karta? Consider the following anecdote about the previous Satmar Rebbe. After meeting in 1968 with Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, the Rebbe’s aides told him they had warned Humphrey against raising the issue of Israel. The Rebbe laughed and said,
Had Humphrey spoken to me in support of the Zionist state, it wouldn't have bothered me in the least. We Jews have a Torah which forbids us to have a state during the exile, and therefore we may not ask the Americans to support the state. But a non-Jew has no Torah, and by supporting the state he feels he is helping Jews. So, on the contrary, if an American non-Jew is against the Zionist state, it shows he is an anti-Semite.
The earlier distinction between antisemitism “in intent” and “in effect” now illuminates the difference between the sects. Neither should count as “antisemitic in intent,” because they derive their anti-Zionism from their bona fide Jewish principles. But Neturei Karta’s actual behavior is effectively antisemitic, for it works to deny the Jewish people (pre-Messiah) the right to political self-determination in their ancestral homeland that presumably all other peoples enjoy in theirs, not to mention directly endangers the Jewish people with the threat of genocidal elimination. The Satmars object to the practice, refusing to participate in these effectively antisemitic behaviors.[41]
And more importantly, now, while the Satmars’ (and Neturei Karta’s) anti-Zionism can be exonerated from antisemitism, the same is simply not true for the non-Jewish anti-Zionists who Jew-wash with them (as the Rebbe points out). These activists pursue the effectively antisemitic behaviors (of dismantling the state, etc.) but do so while—in not being Jewish, in not deriving their activism from bona fide Jewish principles—not sharing precisely those intentions that would exonerate the antisemitism.
In a final small but important fail, Hasan overlooks an important fact. Though the Satmars are anti-Zionist in a particular Jewish sense, they do believe that ultimately the Jews should return to the Land of Israel which is their rightful home. If “anti-Zionism” is the denial of that idea, then, strictly speaking, the Satmars are not anti-Zionists after all. That makes them poorly suited as a counterexample to the proposition that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They provide only an illusory cover for anti-Zionists’ antisemitism, but they do not remove it.
(d) But now: if the anti-Zionist Satmars are exempt from the antisemitism (in intent) label because their anti-Zionism is grounded in their Jewish beliefs, how does that apply to other groups on Hasan’s list, such as the members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—who make the same claim? In their case it takes some form similar to this: “Judaism teaches me tikkun olam, repairing the world, a call to social justice, which in turn requires Palestinian liberation …” But if Judaism teaches them to advocate for the Palestinians and against Israel, then how could they be “antisemitic” in intent?[42]
In fact there are many similar groups (including If Not Now which Hasan mentions, and British groups such as Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JFJFP)). It’s worth noting, that IJV was formed in 2007 by British Jewish anti-Zionist professors Brian Klug and Jacqueline Rose, among others; Klug has been described as having made it “his mission to immunize anti-Zionists from the charge of antisemitism,”[43] i.e. serve the needs of Jew-washers. Although any of them will do, we shall focus on JVP.
Describing itself as the “Jewish wing” of the Palestinian solidarity movement, JVP actively promotes boycotts against Israel, constantly condemns Israel in a manner indistinguishable from that of the most ardent non-Jewish anti-Zionists, was as supportive as those groups of the October 7 massacre and has been of the ongoing Islamist “resistance” during the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war in the year since, and counts among its major goals mitigating Islamophobia and supporting Muslim refugees. One might wonder why it does not just name itself “Jewish Voice for Palestine,” as that appears to be its primary mission.
Given the word “Jewish” in its name, the apparent Jewish ethnicity of many of its staff and members, and its appeal to at least some Jewish students across U.S. campuses, it is no wonder that JVP appeals to non-Jewish Israel-haters in need of Jew-washing services.[44] This is particularly true on campuses, where Neturei Kartei members to do the same work are generally not to be found.
Indeed, JVP goes to great lengths to stress its Jewishness. Its website states that its members “are inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice, equality, human rights, respect for international law, and a U.S. foreign policy based on these ideals.” It boasts of its “Rabbinical Council,” and it provides numerous resources for Jewish ritual and cultural life, including materials for Shabbat, Passover, Chanukah, the High Holidays, and Tisha B’av. In October 2024 their chapters built “liberation sukkahs” on many campuses, in support of Gaza and Lebanon.
So is JVP a successful Jew-washing resource?
To see why not, consider the famous Hillel quote that begins: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” (Pirkei Avot 1.14)
In my view, Hillel’s dictum provides a rough criterion for counting as speaking from the perspective of a certain group: one must be “for” that group and its interests at least to some minimal degree. Now while JVP may pay lip service to the needs and interests of (non-Israeli) Jews, its actual policies, resources, and behavior are overwhelmingly one-sided in support not merely of the “rights” of Palestinians but their entire narrative and tactical goals. It speaks so minimally “for the Jews,” and so maximally for the interests and rights of the enemies of the Jewish state—including those who aim to replace that state with an Arab Muslim state, and those who openly preach genocidal antisemitism[45]—that it is hard to treat it as a genuinely Jewish voice, consistent with Hillel’s dictum. Could one count as being “for the Jews” if most of what one does is empower the genocidal enemies of the Jews over the Jews themselves?[46]
This point is only amplified by closer examination of the “Jewish” resources JVP offers on its website. Its “Rosh Hashana” guide converts the traditional shehecheyanu blessing into one praising the successful Israel-boycott achievements of the preceding year. Its Chanukah guide praises not the Jewish recapture of sovereignty in their homeland but the sumoud (“steadfastness”) of Palestinians, interprets olive oil as a symbol of Palestinian sumoud, and asks, “This night of Chanukah, how will you honor the steadfastness of the Palestinian people?” Its Passover guide opens not with celebration of the Exodus from Egypt and the Jewish establishment of sovereignty in its God-promised homeland but with sentences about
arriving at the Passover table with the salty taste of authoritarian racism on our tongues … devastated, lead in our water or no access to water. Ferguson, Flint, Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem …scared, aware of the rise in Islamophobia and anti-immigrant discourse.
The “authoritarian racism” that JVP deplores is only that alleged of Israel, not that of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas; and while the group is concerned here about Islamophobia it offers not a word of concern about the ever-rising violence toward Jews around the world. The Passover message of liberation from slavery conveyed by this document is not that of Jews from Pharaoh, or of Jews from the slavery of their loss of sovereignty, but that of the Palestinians, from the Jews.[47] What does Tisha B’av become, for JVP? Not a day for remembering and mourning the destruction of the great Jewish Temples, the two great symbols of ancient Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. Rather, JVP offers, “The Tisha B’av Gaza Mourning Ritual Guide.” And Sukkot? No longer building huts to commemorate the Israelites’ journey to the Land of Israel, but, again, to remember Gazans living in tents due to the war that Hamas started on October 7.
By converting Jewish religious symbols and ceremonies into those with a pro-Palestinian significance, JVP seriously calls the “Jewish” part of its name into question. To Jew-wash with JVP, then, is roughly akin to medieval Church officials denying their antisemitism by referring to their warmth for those Jewish converts to Christianity who reject Judaism.
Or worse—for JVP is doing something more sinister than converting out of Judaism in the way that individual medieval Jews did. It is converting Judaism itself, claiming that its new, pro-Palestinian religion simply is an authentic form of Judaism. In a perhaps analogous way, Christianity historically saw itself as the completion of Judaism, the true Judaism. To Jew-wash with JVP is then akin to the medieval Church rejecting traditional Judaism but denying it is antisemitic by pointing to itself as the true Judaism!
And of course JVP must convert Judaism itself, because, as noted above, truly authentic Judaism, traditional Judaism dating back 3000 years, is permeated with Zionism. Every one of the holidays and rituals JVP “converts” is one that expresses Zionism in one form or the other, and so must be expunged. JVP goes so far as to remind the reader, in its Passover Haggadah, that the word “Israel” there refers to Jacob, who “wrestled” with God, and perhaps thus symbolizes those who admirably struggle against authority. “Israel,” their text insists, does not refer to the modern state, Israel—lest someone read anything in the long-established history of the Jews as providing grounds for Jewish sovereignty in that land. JVP ignores the fact that the actual name of the modern state of Israel is the “State of Israel,” i.e. of the people of Israel, i.e. of the descendants of that very same Israel.
In that one move in its Haggadah JVP denies to Jews the very foundation for their rights in the Land of Israel—and it does so as a “Jewish” voice. Add to this the fact that most of its financing apparently comes from non-Jewish sources,[48] and it becomes hard not to see JVP as literally in the business of providing professional (if unsuccessful) Jew-washing services, its members’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
One last point. For JVP, and their kindred “Social Justice” Jews, their claim to Jewish authenticity is primarily based on their understanding of “tikkun olam” as a call for social justice. But while that famous phrase may translate as “repair the world,” in the history of Judaism it simply does not have the “social justice” meaning they claim, as Jonathan Neumann has demonstrated conclusively. In fact they take a concept that affirms halachic Judaism, along with the Zionism that permeates it, and simply project their modern progressive conception of social justice onto it. That isn’t Judaism—it is their progressivism dressed up as Judaism. In a similar way they frequently quote Deuteronomy 16:20, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” thus proclaiming that their conception of social justice is a Jewish concept. But they conveniently leave out the second half of that same sentence, which in its entirety reads, “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that your God is giving you” (emphasis added). In other words they convert one of innumerable Biblical verses expressing Zionism into something that cancels Zionism. Whatever that is, that is not the Judaism of the Bible. One imagines their Satmar “allies” would be very outraged at such desecration of the Holy Bible.
In today’s western world anyone may believe anything they want. If Jewish people choose to form their “Jewish” identity by refashioning traditional Judaism into a pro-Palestinian religion, they are welcome to. But the fact that a small minority of Jews calls this religion “Judaism” does not outweigh the fact that the large majority of Jews—indeed the vast majority of Jews, if you include those in the millenia-long history of traditional Judaism—understand “Judaism” to refer to something quite different, that is, again, Zionist through and through. Members of JVP may sincerely feel that their anti-Zionism flows from their Judaism, as they understand “Judaism”—but the vast majority of Jews do, and would, disagree. Given their effectively antisemitic behavior, their intentions will only exonerate them from antisemitism in their own minds.
The response to Hasan’s third argument, then, is this: yes, even many Jews might count as antisemites. Exemption from antisemitic intent is possible where the anti-Zionism truly flows from legitimate Jewish principles, which is not the case for any non-Jewish anti-Zionists. As for JVP and similar groups, well they are free to call their anti-Zionist religion “Judaism,” but the vast majority of Jews, contemporary and historical, are equally free to disagree.
7c. We turn, finally, to Hasan’s second argument, that identifying anti-Zionism as antisemitism amounts to declaring that Palestinians are antisemitic unless they accept their own occupation and dispossession.
(a) This reply has emotional appeal, and Hasan frames it well: a Palestinian must accept Zionism or be considered a racist. Perhaps one should consider a “Palestine exception” here, i.e., grant Palestinians a much wider range of anti-Zionist and even anti-Jewish speech and behavior before being considered antisemitic. Both the Nexus and Jerusalem definitions seem to do that, and perhaps it is a decent thing to do: however we apportion justice and injustice throughout the IPJAMIC, it’s hard to deny that Palestinians have suffered extensively, including during the current Israel-Hamas war they call a “genocide.” One need not deny that suffering even if one denies it is a ”genocide”;[49] nor even as one emphasizes the suffering Jews too have experienced throughout. To empathize with that suffering may entail allowing their hostile feelings toward Israel and Jews without labeling them as bigots. None of this would excuse the antisemitism of non-Palestinian anti-Zionists, but precisely insofar as Palestinian anti-Zionism might be partly grounded in personal suffering through the encounter with Zionism, the “Palestine exception” might be considered here.
(b) Still, one cannot reject a definition of antisemitism just because of who receives the label from the definition. If you tailor the definition to protect your preferred people, that is obviously dishonest. If the shoe fits, alas, then wear it.
I’m reminded of this moment: In 2009, Hina Jilani, then the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights, stated with respect primarily to Palestinian allegations about Israeli misdeeds that “I think it’d be very cruel to not give credence to their voices.”[50] Of course her suggestion is absurd. It surely would be cruel not to listen to them, not to sincerely evaluate and investigate their claims, not to seek justice for them should the claims turn out to be true. But blanket credulity, particularly during a long, complicated conflict such as the IPJAMIC? Even where we grant that, collectively and individually, there has been much suffering, it doesn’t follow that their overall narrative is the true or best one, or that they have had no agency or accountability in the affair either. In fact there may well be epistemic antisemitism implicitly built into Hasan’s point here, as it simply assumes that Israel and the Jews have perpetrated the dastardly deeds detractors regularly allege and that Israel/Jews are alone morally culpable for the suffering of Palestinians. With these assumptions Palestinian hostility to Israel/Jews would be justified, not bigotry; but if neither is true, there wouldn’t be grounds for exempting Palestinians from the antisemitism label.
Put differently: Even where we grant their suffering, it does not follow that they are immune to bigotry just because they have suffered. This is a difficult point to make in today’s progressive climate, where the allegedly oppressed are granted a nearly sacred status, seen as entirely innocent, and where the alleged oppressor is entirely guilty; and where these ideas generalize to the point where it seems that no single member of the oppressed class can ever be guilty and no single member of the oppressor class can ever be anything other than guilty.[51] To suggest that Palestinians may be guilty of antisemitism, in this worldview, amounts almost to a contradiction (an oppressed person or class being guilty of something), or at least to an unacceptable “punching down.”
To adopt that worldview, on the other hand, is to subject Palestinians to a condescending “humanitarian racism”: to treat them as children, having no agency whatever, never responsible for their decisions or actions, thus holding them to far lower moral standards than others, to the point, even, that when they torture, rape, and murder unarmed civilians and children (as on October 7) it’s somehow “okay.” It may sound odd, and it’s surely against the tenor of the times, but it’s actually more respectful toward them to subject their decisions and actions to universal moral critique than simply to give them a pass—not least because doing the latter amounts to finding excuses for mass murder.
(c) There are many Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians, including those who have “suffered,” who are “okay” with Israel. Some may even refer to themselves as “Zionists.” Many reasons make this possible, ranging from genuine support for the Zionist project to simply being fed up with a century of violence and wanting to move forward, to make accommodation with Jewish sovereignty in the region.[52] What matters here is just that this position is possible, and occupied by some Palestinians. That means that anti-Zionism is a choice one makes, among other possible choices. Hasan frames his argument in an artificially forced way: it would be unjust to label Palestinians as antisemites because (he assumes) there is no other legitimate position available to them given their experience but anti-Zionism. But that is not true. One way to avoid being an antisemite is to recognize that, despite your own suffering, the Jews, too, have suffered, and also have some rights, a recognition that could temper or remove one’s anti-Zionism. Once we grant Palestinian Arabs agency and moral accountability, we could even go back to the beginning of the modern IPJAMIC and recognize that some anti-Zionist choices they made “back then” were partly motivated by antisemitism—thus contributing to the suffering they suffered as a result of their encounter with Zionism.
(d) In fact the Palestinian Arabs have a long history of antisemitism.
First, one cannot ignore the long history of Islamic antisemitism, preceding the modern Zionist movement by a good twelve centuries. Not can one overestimate its general impact on the psyche of Muslim Arabs, including those in Palestine as the Zionist movement got underway. Thus mixed in with whatever legitimate concerns they may have had about Jewish immigration and potential Jewish sovereignty were xenophobic, racist sentiments against Jews, both as illegitimate outsiders and inferior “dhimmis” who should know their place. Today if someone were to proclaim (for example) that Mexicans should not be permitted to immigrate into the U.S., that land sales to Mexicans should be forbidden, perhaps call them “filthy” or “animals,” and were to undertake violence against them, we would instantly label that person a xenophobic racist. Those who today are opposed to Muslim immigration to the United States are widely considered xenophobic and racist. But the Palestinian leader, the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, originally resisted testifying before the 1937 Peel Commission because the British, he claimed, were “Judaizing” what properly was a “purely Arab country,” then relented and testified both that there was no room for a Jewish state among an “Arab ocean” and that Jews should be excluded from their holy places, such as the Western Wall, because that was a “purely Muslim place.”[53] To be fair, the concept of “racial purity” was common in that era; but, to be fairer, we also have no trouble today identifying such sentiments as racist.[54] Early-twentieth-century Arabs in Palestine had no problem with mass immigration from all over the Muslim and Arab worlds, of a diverse mix of ethnicities, cultures, and languages, but only had a problem with the immigration of Jews.[55] This opposition to the Jews can’t be blamed on the alleged dastardly deeds of the Jews because it preceded the immigration of many and the establishment of the state, the alleged ethnic cleansing, the alleged occupation, the alleged apartheid, etc.
Today we call such “problems with Jews” antisemitism.
And of course, the Mufti himself. Responsible for so much violence against Jews, utterly unwilling to recognize any Jewish rights or legitimacy in their ancestral homeland, thus utterly unwilling to compromise, the Mufti directly collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis’ Final Solution, created a Muslim army division for the Nazis, and spread propaganda throughout the Muslim world to activate the antisemitism always present there, hoping, ultimately, to bring Hitler’s Final Solution to the Middle East. If there were ever a moment when anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism, it is the anti-Zionism that collaborates with and propagates the Nazis’ Final Solution.
There is then a straight line from the Mufti to today. The Mufti represented the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the same Muslim Brotherhood whose branch is today known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, whose foundational charter both openly quotes the same antisemitic forgery admired by and motivating the Nazis (Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and quotes Islamic scripture endorsing the Islamic Final Solution, and who have spent decades directly attempting to perpetrate their genocide against the Jews, culminating in the barbaric atrocities against the Jews on October 7—widely celebrated among the entire Palestinian population.
That line also includes Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, with important contributions from the virulent antisemitism of the Soviet Union. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Communist official to defect, explained how the PLO was “dreamed up” by the Soviet KGB. They hand-picked Arafat to lead the new narrative of the “indigenous Palestinians expelled by the imperialist Jews,” actively contributed to numerous PLO terrorist attacks on Jews and related targets, and worked to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world.” In support of this the KGB “showered the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Subsequent PLO leader, current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after earning his degree in Moscow for a Holocaust-denying thesis, worked as a KGB spy promoting the same Soviet agenda. Soviet antisemitism, in short, built and guided the PLO and its propagation of the “Palestinian narrative.”
If nothing else convinces, then consider the following. Audio was released shortly after October 7 of one of the Hamas men calling his parents on October 7 itself, in the home of a Jewish family he had just murdered, using the phone of the Jewish woman he had just murdered, to brag about his achievements. Imagine, just for a moment, that his conversation had gone something like this: “Mom, it was painful and difficult, but we have taken the first steps toward the liberation of Palestine and for freedom and justice.” That would not change the evil status of what he, and they, had just accomplished, but it would at least allow one to pretend the movement was for something, for human rights, for freedom, for justice. Instead the conversation went like this:
TERRORIST: Hello dad. Open your WhatsApp right now, and see all the killed. Look at how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews!
FATHER: Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar. May God protect you.
TERRORIST: I am talking to you from the phone of a Jew, I killed her and her husband, I killed ten with my own hands.
FATHER: Allahu Akhbar.
TERRORIST: I killed ten. Ten! Ten with my own bare hands. Their blood is on my hands! Let me talk to Mom.
MOTHER: Oh, my son, may God protect you.
TERRORIST: I killed ten all by myself, mother! Mother, your son is a hero. (Talking to terrorists on the scene: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill them!)
This young man was so, so proud of himself, sought (and received!) his parents’ praise—for killing Jews, with his own hands, ten of them, look and see! That is what Hamas is about: the glory and glee in mass murdering Jews, all the more delicious when you can do it “with your own hands.” This is bloodlust, pure and simple, a thirst for the blood of Jews. Jew-hatred never ran so deep.
One doesn’t have to deny Palestinian suffering, one can acknowledge that that suffering has contributed significantly to the feelings, and still understand that this thirst for Jewish blood, exulting in the deaths of unarmed women, men, and children, is indistinguishable from the bloodlusty antisemitism of the Nazis’ Final Solution. It doesn’t matter what reasons or “justifications” you invoke. The lust for the blood of Jews, the ecstatic joy in the spilling of that blood, of children, the boasting of it: if that isn’t antisemitism then nothing is.[56]
(e) Again one doesn’t have to deny their suffering to attribute some portion of it to their own decisions and actions over the decades of the modern conflict. From the beginning, generally speaking, they denied Jews any rights or considerations in Palestine. The famous Khalidi letter mentioned above acknowledged that “historically it really is your country!” even as it urged the early Zionists to “leave Palestine alone”—because the local people would not accept the Jews. But that is just the point. It was the Jews’ country, but not only historically: Jews had maintained a continuous presence there, had always immigrated there in numbers small and large, already had a majority in some parts of the country. To deny them the ability to immigrate, particularly given the persecution and violence they were facing across Europe and the Islamic countries, is to deny them any rights or considerations.
The Palestinian Arabs made decisions, and could have made other decisions; there were possibilities of compromise available along the way, where they chose to fight instead. Perhaps those compromises felt unjust, but compromise is what follows once you recognize the legitimacy of competing claims. Zionists generally were willing to compromise, not least because they, generally, recognized that Palestinian Arabs had legitimate claims as well. The most important such moment, of course, was the 1947 United Nations partition proposal. Had the Arabs accepted, there could have been two states living side by side celebrating their 77th birthdays this year. Perhaps partition felt unjust: they wanted the whole country and were losing something. But if you recognize the other side’s legitimacy, that the Jews too deserved some of the country, then you can compromise. The Jews also thought the partition was unjust to them, but they accepted it. The Arabs chose war.
That choice of war has and had consequences. As of the 1947 partition proposal there were zero Arab refugees. Repeat: zero Arab refugees. It was not Zionism, but the subsequent war the Arabs started, that produced the refugees. When you choose war you are gambling what you have in order to gain more. When you lose the war that you started you may lose what you originally had, per the nature of gambling. You don’t get to call “do over,” or “sorry, now give us back what we started with.” That is not how war works, nor does anyone ever suggest as much regarding the hundreds of other military conflicts in the twentieth century except, by double standards, for this one. The war was their “Nakba,” or catastrophe, both in its original sense (their failure to exterminate the Jews) and in the later sense (their defeat and “exile” into refugeehood). But those catastrophic consequences were the results of a choice they made, when they could have chosen otherwise—a choice made on the basis of denying Jews any legitimacy, rights, considerations.
Those who see the Palestinians never as agents responsible for their choices, never as aggressors but always victims, not only infantilize them but unfairly treat the Jews only as agents, only as aggressors. That is the antisemitism. To treat the Jews as ordinary human beings with the same needs and desires of most other human beings, but also with the same rights and considerations, is to appreciate the complexity of the IPJAMIC, to realize that Jewish actions were sometimes not aggressions but responses to Arab aggression, that Jews are not purely evil doers of dastardly deeds but simply trying to satisfy their own needs and interests as all parties do, and sometimes forced to defend themselves when attacked in what Arabs invariably promise will be “a war of extermination.” Winning a war of extermination directed against you is not evil. Nor is it an aggression, when the other side started it. It is a normal human response. Winning is sometimes what happens when one is forced to defend oneself. Nor does losing a war that you started mean that you are a victim.
Those who see the IPJAMIC as a long narrative in which the Jews are nothing but evil agents while the Palestinian Arabs are nothing but innocent victims are selling the Palestinians short and behaving antisemitically toward the Jews. That that description characterizes the narrative adopted by so many, including the Palestinians themselves, is evidence of the antisemitism throughout the anti-Zionist movement. None of this means the Jews are perfect angels, or that Zionism is not guilty of dastardly deeds along the way. But those incapable of apportioning any responsibility to the Palestinians and only responsibility to the Jews are, simply, antisemites—Palestinian or not.
(f) But even so, even despite points (b)-(e), suppose we grant the “Palestine exception”: we exempt their anti-Zionism from antisemitism insofar as they have directly suffered from Zionism. The key point now is that this will not do the work Hasan thinks it does in negating the proposition, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”—for it will do nothing to exempt the anti-Zionism of the many non-Palestinians who support the cause, including the perhaps millions of Arabs, Muslims, and western progressives around the globe, including on so many campuses. They have not themselves suffered from Zionism, so the question is what motivates them to adopt the cause, to take the side of the Palestinians.
These numbers would also include the many classic right-wing antisemites who are also anti-Zionists, but for them the answer is clear, as noted above: they hate Israel because they hate Jews, simpliciter. They certainly don’t hate Israel because they are fond of the Palestinians, because, as right-wing perhaps white supremacists, they hate the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims too.
But that extreme, and therefore clear, case does suggest similar motives among the other constituents of the anti-Zionist movement. One is reminded of the “horseshoe” idea, that the extreme left and the extreme right converge in their hatred of Israel and the Jews.[57] We’ll return specifically to the progressives in a moment.
But first, it may seem natural for other Arabs and Muslims to take the Palestinian side, via empathy or identification or even the “honor-shame” mentality some argue is dominant among that demographic.[58] Though this requires more detailed discussion, let me suggest here that that conclusion should be resisted. The Arab and Muslim worlds are not monoliths but deeply fractured, with many, often violent, conflicts within them, the Sunni-Shiite one the most well known and overall bloody (that may indeed be heating up again with recent events in Syria). There’s also an important division between Islamists and non-Islamists (though perhaps a matter of degree). Many Arab governments, for example, oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah, even banning them and repressing or persecuting their adherents. The Sunni states oppose the growing hegemony of Shiite Islamist Iran. Several Arab countries have peace or normalization treaties with Israel, including those in the Abraham Accords. Reports indicate that many Arab and Muslim countries are rather tired of the Palestinians and their century-long war against the Jews. It is more than conceivable that many Arabs and Muslims oppose the Hamas and Hezbollah war on Israel, either openly or behind the scenes, on the basis of their own national or political interests. It is more than conceivable—it is actual—that some Arabs and Muslims might not side with the Palestinians, on the basis of their own national or political interests or even their moral beliefs.[59] Again, anti-Zionism is not inevitable but a choice, where other choices are available. So when they do side with the Palestinians, either publicly (sincerely or in deference to honor-shame) or privately (in concrete financial or military support), one may ask why. Many Arab countries do not seem to really care about the Palestinians as a people, as evidenced by the universal refusal to accept any Palestinian refugees during the current war and the fact that many actively persecute the Palestinians in their own midst.[60] So might it be that they are motivated, after all, not by being “pro-Palestinian” but by being against the Jews, by their hatred of Jews—i.e. antisemitism?
That said, our focus will be on the progressive western campus communities, fervently anti-Zionist despite in no sense having directly “suffered” from Zionism. The first question (raised in section (5) above) is why, exactly, they take such disproportionate interest in this conflict at all, when the IPJAMIC is by all objective measures tinier and less violent than many other ongoing and recent conflicts (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria)? Further, why do they favor that side, advocating for this people, while utterly ignoring the many other stateless, repressed, occupied peoples in the world: Kurds (bombed relentlessly and ethnically cleansed by the Turks, including during the past year, including through December 2024), Tibetans (occupied and persecuted for decades by China), Uighurs (China), Rohingya, Yazidis, Native Americans, etc.? Why not devote their energies, even some of their energies, to the Christians badly persecuted and regularly slaughtered throughout the Muslim world?[61] Or to the oppressed women of Afghanistan and Iran? Or why not even care when Palestinians face a real apartheid in Lebanon, and literally underwent ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter in Syria?
Those last two examples, along with numerous others, suggest that progressive anti-Zionists are not ultimately “pro-Palestinian” as they claim, as demonstrated primarily by what they do not say or do: they express minimal or no interest in Palestinian welfare except when doing so can harm Israel. They will sometimes offer unpersuasive defenses of their selective interest in the IPJAMIC. “The United States gives Israel money”: yes but the U.S. gives money to many entities and groups, including Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon whose human rights violations are extensive and serious, the Palestinian Authority (which oppresses its own people and funds “pay-to-slay” incentivizing the murder of Israelis), and UNRWA (infiltrated by and directly supporting Hamas), and sells weapons to Turkey who uses them to bomb the Kurds, yet these activists have not a word to say against those entities. Most progressives supported the “Iran deal” that flooded Iran with the cash that funded its “Ring of Fire” around Israel and directly led to the October 7 massacre—Iran, whose extensive serious human rights violations include killing women for not covering their hair and publicly hanging gays from cranes. Even worse, progressives ignore the fact that money “given” to Israel is actually an investment in an ally that directly pays American dividends, both in that most of it must be spent on U.S. companies (thus being an investment in America) and in the benefits of military and intelligence sharing, among others. To ask what concrete benefits America gets from pumping money into Egypt, Jordan, the P.A., UNRWA, Turkey, and Iran is to expose the hypocrisy of the progressive position here.
Most importantly, progressives claim they are motivated by human rights and social justice concerns, so shouldn’t they invest most of their time, energy, and resources in places where those are most badly threatened and violated—namely the long list of other conflicts and situations around the globe listed above, including the enemies of Israel, and more? Instead, what we get on campuses and elsewhere, on most other matters beside Israel: silence.
Needless to say, even if all of the allegations they levy against Israel were true (which they are not), the single-minded focus these groups direct to alleged Israeli misdeeds surely suggests something sinister. They only really care when Jews are the alleged perpetrators; as the title of Tuvia Tenenboim’s recent book put it, they thirst to “Catch the Jew!” Imagine a group of twenty-three men, one Black, the others all white. Then imagine a website called “Black Crimes,” obsessively documenting and disseminating bad deeds done by the Black man while not only ignoring his many good deeds but ignoring the far greater number of, and worse, bad deeds done by the twenty-two white men; and, to boot, imagine the website also advocated for isolating, harming, or even killing the Black man on the basis of those bad deeds, while ignoring or even advocating for the benefit of the white men. Even if all its information were true—the Black man did those bad deeds—the website’s racist motives would be clear to all, given what it does not say about the good deeds and all other offenses. Throw in that most or all of the allegations are in fact lies and misrepresentations, and the racist conclusion seems inescapable. Now substitute “Jew” or “Israel” for “Black” and “Arab” for “white” and it seems equally inescapable: these progressive parties are motivated by their antisemitism to focus on the Jewish state, i.e. the Jews.
This point is only reinforced by the otherwise inexplicable alliances these parties make with the Islamists.[62] Many of the continuous campus rallies after October 7 have displayed open support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, waving their flags, celebrating their achievements, mourning their “martyrs,” calling on them to continue their “resistance,” holding signs saying “Long Live Al-Aqsa Flood,” and so on. Does one really need to point out that the progressive movement could not have less in common with the Islamists—who are homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, reject diversity, reject pluralism, reject tolerance, reject human rights, reject freedoms of speech, assembly, conscience etc. indeed, reject “progressivism” in every detail?[63] The only thing they share is “hatred of Israel,” but even that makes no sense for the progressives, since Israel is by far the party that better aligns with what progressives say they value. Anti-Zionists coined the phrase “Progressive Except for Palestine” to indicate their disappointment with the minority of progressives who support Israel, on the assumption that progressives should be anti-Zionist. But that is exactly backwards: that phrase should refer to the exceptions to their values that the majority of progressives make in support of Palestine. There is literally nothing progressive about “Palestine” or the Islamist groups leading the violence for “Palestine,” and there is much that is comparatively progressive about Israel—yet they work toward dismantling the Jewish state while establishing an anti-progressive Palestinian state.
It’s hard to imagine what could explain this other than a deep-seated hatred of the Jews that, while theoretically forbidden in their circles to express explicitly, can express itself as anti-Zionism. It’s not the “Jews” they hate but “Israel”—even though their hating Israel makes no sense, given their values, except insofar as it expresses a hatred for Jews.
Nor can you explain this by saying that progressive groups combat “Islamophobia,” and care about human rights for Muslims. As noted earlier, these Islamist groups don’t believe in “human rights” for anyone including Muslims, and have murdered far more Muslims in their quest for jihadi supremacy than have remotely been killed by Israel over the decades. And, again, there are many Muslims opposed to these Islamist groups. Progressives could—indeed should—side with those Muslims, rather than the Islamists.
The most they can say about their “progressive” support for anti-Zionism is something like this. (i) They are against white supremacy, (ii) They support the indigenous against settler-colonialists, and (iii) They support the oppressed against their oppressors. But their application of these positions to the IPJAMIC is truly ludicrous. Point (i) depends on complete ignorance of the “racial” reality, where both Israeli Jews and Palestinians span the spectrum of skin colors from light to dark; and anyway no group has been a larger victim of white supremacy than the Jews. Point (ii) depends on complete ignorance of the history of the region, in which Jews are indigenous to the Land and the establishment of Israel was a major decolonization process. Point (iii) depends on an absurdly narrow and historically ignorant framing of the IPJAMIC, where in fact the Jews were for a long time and still are the “oppressed” aggressively contested by most of the Arab and Muslim world (which outnumbers them in population and land mass by orders of magnitude), and are currently defending themselves in a seven-front existential war launched against them. And all of the above depends on (a) the humanitarian racism of completely denying Palestinians any agency (i.e. that they can be and have been aggressors), (b) the antisemitic denial that Israelis (i.e. Jews) are ever justified in defending themselves (in fact “resisting” Palestinian or Arab aggression), and (c) failure to appreciate that the IPJAMIC is a national and religious conflict (not “racial”), where one side is actually driven by Islamist jihadist genocidal aspirations entirely inconsistent with “progressivism.”
In light of all this, only one conclusion is possible: progressive anti-Zionism is driven primarily and deeply by antisemitism. In the best case this would be of the epistemic variety, the kind that isn’t particularly conscious; though one cannot but suspect, in light of the bloodthirsty enthusiasm so many displayed for the October 7 massacre, along with their open alliance with the Islamists waving the flags of the jihadist terror groups, that it is also of the more explicit variety.
The true “progressive,” in short, should be on the Zionist side of the conflict; the fact that so many aren’t can only be explained as the product of antisemitism. One might (though probably shouldn’t) give the Palestinians themselves a pass, but not anyone else—neither the right-wingers, nor the Arabs and Muslims collectively, nor the progressives, nor even the Jewish progressives who operate either by prioritizing their progressivism over the Judaism and/or contorting their Judaism into an expression of progressivism.
Mehdi’s arguments, then, fail, and fail thoroughly.
8. Campus Anti-Zionism
With the material above in hand, let’s briefly analyze some manifestations of anti-Zionism commonly found on campuses over the past decade, and especially over the past year.
8a. Slogans.
Campus anti-Zionism is fond of slogans—shouted, megaphoned, graffitied on buildings and sidewalks, etc.—that generate much debate over whether they are antisemitic. Too much of that debate, in my view, ignores the context and consequences of the slogans and the acts of disseminating them; both Nexus and Jerusalem are particularly guilty of that. Recall the epistemic antisemitism at the foundation of the anti-Zionist movement, that perhaps provides some motivation for disseminating these slogans. Moreover, whatever each slogan is alleged to mean, the mere fact that it is shouted by angry mobs waving banners of jihadi groups that have murdered thousands of Jews, mobs often intimidating and harassing campus Jews and vandalizing Jewish institutions on campus with these slogans, must inform their interpretation both in intent and effect.
Here are some quick hits.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
Out of context this could mean several things, the least objectionable of which is a call for a “binational state” with equality for all its citizens. The first question is why, if so, it must be called “Palestine” and not “Israel,” thus suggesting the destruction of the Jewish state rather than its renovation? But even so, what it demands is something problematic: to take away from the Jews not merely their own right to sovereignty (while Muslims have 50+ states and Arabs 20+) but also the ability to defend themselves from those Islamist groups openly committed to genociding them. Moreover, most people believe the “binational state” would actually be or soon become a Palestinian majority state, and thus truly just “Palestine,” making this proposal look far less copacetic toward the Jews.
But never mind, because that’s not what the slogan means in context, as illuminated by the Arabic version (itself often heard on campuses at the same rallies): “From water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” That is straightforwardly a call to dismantle the Jewish state and replace it with a Palestinian Arab state, which will likely require the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of millions of Jews, outcomes with which the sloganeers, supporters of October 7, are clearly comfortable. If they had in mind some non-violent conception of this, or even the deceptively acceptable binational state, they are of course welcome to clarify—which they never do, except when trying to deny their antisemitism. That effort of course is undermined when they broadcast this slogan in open support of the violent groups actively murdering Jews.
This slogan played out dramatically in the days after October 7, for example in how Harvard University administrators deliberated over what statement to make in response to the massacre. Here is an email released in October 2024 as part of a Congressional report on the campus antisemitism of the preceding year. The email is authored by Alan Garber, who would soon succeed Claudine Gay as President after her own disastrous Congressional testimony, in which she was unable to identify calls for the mass murder of Jews as antisemitic. In light of the message below she was perhaps not alone in being able to so identify:
Note the floundering around, even by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, about whether the slogan is antisemitic. Jews may “hear it as antisemitic,” or feel “beleaguered” by it, but while it “can be” antisemitic it may not be, etc., as if the Jews are at fault for their subjective response to a perfectly neutral slogan. Note too the cowardice in the letter: “The bottom line is that the phrase can be antisemitic, but if we don’t explain in a nuanced way many members of the Harvard community will contest the claim.” No, I counter above: in its context of utterance, when sloganed in support of the mass murder of Jews, the phrase is unambiguously and undeniably antisemitic, no matter how the sloganeers might protest otherwise.
To Harvard’s credit they consulted with Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar there at the time who became one of the most prominent members of their eventual Antisemitism Advisory Group. Wolpe clearly informed then President Gay that the slogan “asserts that Israeli Jews will be removed from the entire … land. It’s intended as a threat and implies that Jews don’t have any intrinsic right to be there … It is not a call for a two-state solution; it’s a call for a final solution… intended to frighten, marginalize, and spell out a Judenrein future. That’s why we believe it’s antisemitic.”
To Harvard’s far greater discredit, they ignored him and the Advisory Group to the point where he soon went on to prominently resign from it.
“Globalize the intifada!”
Again, “intifada” can be construed in a non-violent way, as any form of “resistance” to some alleged oppression, and sometimes some activists may mean it this way. But for most people, and certainly for most Jews, “intifada” immediately calls to mind the two Palestinian “intifadas,” the latter in particular characterized by suicide bombings and relentless terror attacks in which many thousands of Israelis were murdered or maimed, and hundreds of thousands others traumatized. In the context of angry mobs on campuses openly calling to dismantle the Jewish state, of student groups openly allying with the very terror groups that orchestrated the violent intifadas, even saying of themselves that they don’t merely support the resistance but are part of the resistance, it is not possible to construe this slogan any other way than as a call for mass violence against Jews, and against those who support the Jews, all around the world. Again, if the sloganeers had in mind some non-violent conception of this they could clarify—which they never do, except when trying to deny their antisemitism, even while openly supporting the October 7 massacre.
“By any means necessary!”
This one is a no-brainer. It is open support for unrestricted violence against Jewish civilians, open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, shouted and proclaimed repeatedly in the weeks and months after October 7 to this very day, and open support for the mass murder of Jews. In some cases it goes along with praise for and celebration of October 7 (as “awesome,” “exhilaration,” “Look Ma I killed ten Jews!”), in other cases perhaps with some regret over the violence, but either way it supports that violence.
Perhaps interesting are efforts sometimes made to defend the phrase as expressing some legal “right to resistance” to “occupation.” That, however, is simply false, as I explain elsewhere,[64] since international law explicitly proscribes ever targeting non-combatants and explicitly proscribes every single act Hamas perpetrated on October 7, including hostage-taking. Perhaps some who use the phrase this latter way are guilty more of ignorance than of antisemitism; but then again there is the epistemic antisemitism in play in (a) believing that whatever offenses Israel is allegedly guilty of could possibly justify the barbaric slaughter of October 7, and (b) adopting such extreme views on violence on the basis of being poorly informed. But when one does know the facts about international law and Gaza, one sees these efforts for what they are, deep down: invented justifications for taking glee in the mass torture and murder of Jews, which is hard to see as anything other than antisemitism.
8b. Allegations: “Genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “indiscriminate,” “child-killers,” etc.
As noted earlier, there is no shortage of allegations about Israel’s conduct historically and during the current war. As I discuss elsewhere these are, in general, a combination of fabrications with distortions, misrepresentations, and the removal of all context, thus instances of epistemic antisemitism at bare minimum.[65] Just to focus on “genocide” for a moment: when one explores the past patterns one sees that anti-Zionists apply the word “genocide” to almost anything Israel does in self-defense, taking any act of the Jew defending himself as an act of aggression amounting to a war crime.[66] As far as the actual facts go, Israel’s war with Hamas is about as far from genocide as any war ever has been, featuring unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian casualties, to support the civilian population, and largely successful executions of both. Remember, too, that Hamas started the war, continues to fight the war, and has rejected numerous ceasefires including after the death of its leader in October 2024; and that it embeds itself among the civilian population and built a massive military fortress of tunnels running underneath civilian infrastructure, much of which it booby-traps. Falsely calling it a “genocide” implies it’s a one-way act of Israeli aggression against a poor innocent civilian population, literally giving the word a new meaning that only applies to the Jews—a classic form of antisemitism. Not to mention, too, that allegations of “genocide” serve to mark the accused—Israelis, and their supporters, i.e. Jews—as the epitome of evil, and thus to mark them for violence and elimination. The phrase in fact, in context, serves as direct incitement to violence against Jews. Nearly everything about the allegation, in the actual contexts in which it occurs, is antisemitic.
8c. Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS).
Discussed earlier, but briefly: (i) BDS campaigners treat Israel differently from all other countries, (ii) express single-minded focus on Israel while ignoring far greater human rights violations by many other countries including most of Israel’s enemies, (iii) base their campaigns on outright fabrications etc., and general disinterest in truth, and (iv) aim to deny the Jews the ability to defend themselves, ultimately in service of dismantling Israel and ethnically cleansing or murdering millions of Jews. They claim they are only “anti-Zionist” but note, again, (i) the antisemitic double standards necessary to put Israel in the spotlight in the first place, and (ii) that the de facto victims of the campaign are Jews, whose lives will be threatened if it is successful. Again, in the actual context in which it regularly occurs, it is antisemitic through and through.
8d. Analysis of the “Drop Hillel” Movement
We see many of these issues in play in recent campus activism. For just one example, currently gaining momentum is a campaign to “Drop Hillel,” that is to divest from the large Jewish campus organization that sponsors “Hillel Houses” on hundreds of campuses to serve the religious and cultural needs of Jewish students: religious services, kosher dining, Sabbath dinners, holiday commemorations, Jewish-themed cultural events, Birthright trips, and more.[67] This campaign culminates many months of campus rallies that openly called for “Hillel off campus!”, part of the anti-normalization campaign that also regularly calls for “Zionists off campus!” Such campaigns are of course at least prima facie antisemitic, in calling to remove what for most schools is not merely the primary but the only center of Jewish life on their campuses.
On what basis, then, do anti-Zionist activists call for this?
As the University of North Carolina chapter of Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) put it, Hillel is “a fundamentally Zionist network masquerading as a Jewish campus organization.”[68] They continue, “Zionism is a racist supremacist ideology advocating for the creation and sustenance of an ethno-state through the expulsion and annihilation of native people. Therefore, any group that advocates for a supremacist ideology—be it the KKK, the Proud Boys, Hillel, or [UNC student group] Heels for Israel—should not be welcome on campus.”
Unsurprisingly, though they are propagating the campaign, SJP in its social media refers to it as “Jewish-led,” and JVP is right there with them promoting it and Jew-washing it. The campaign is not entirely new. It seems to be the latest iteration of the “Open Hillel” movement of the past decade, which sought to make Hillels either more “open” to anti-Zionism and/or to offer an alternative to campus Hillels.[69] That movement never really gained traction, but after October 7, with the open hostility to anything Jewish on campus, the time apparently seemed right not merely to critique Hillel but literally to remove it altogether from campus.
What we see here is the close connection between things Israel and things Jewish: in the anti-Zionist climate on campus, it becomes acceptable to target the primary Jewish organization on campus, in the name of anti-Zionism. We see here both the gaslighting of Jews by dictating to them what Zionism is and the epistemic antisemitism in the casual invocation of the standard lies—that Zionism is a “racist supremacist ideology” advocating “expulsion and annihilation”—and the anti-normalization calls to remove the Jewish group (i.e. the Jews) from campus, so they cannot answer those lies. We see the role of anti-Zionist Jews in Jew-washing, covering up the antisemitism, for, after all, the campaign allegedly is “Jewish-led.” We have already addressed epistemic antisemitism, anti-normalization, and Jew-washing above. But here we also see one additional thing, perhaps an own-goal.
SJP writes that Hillel is “a fundamentally Zionist network masquerading as a Jewish campus organization.” Of course anyone who knows better understands that there is a reason that Hillel on the national level has a Zionist bent, that its “Israel Policy” supports “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders as a member of the family of nations,” that it supports Jewish students who wish to build their relationship with Israel, that its “Standards of Partnership” preclude partnering, housing, or hosting antisemitic and anti-Zionist groups, and so on. It’s that Zionism is built into Jewish religion and identity, baked into a tradition going back three thousand years, at least to the moment when God, in the Bible, tells Abraham to “get up and go” the Land that God will give to him and his descendants.
In SJP’s twisted world, Hillel is a Zionist organization masquerading as a Jewish one; in reality Hillel is a Jewish organization which, naturally, fundamentally, reflects its Jewishness by being Zionist. Note SJP’s use of the traditional antisemitic trope there, of the “deceptive” Jew trying to fool the world in order to increase his own power. More importantly, though, SJP’s own position ultimately acknowledges that to be anti-Zionist, one must be anti-Judaism and anti-Jew. To avoid this direct consequence SJP effectively demands the right to define Judaism, to tell Jews in what their identity should consist, to insist that Jews adopt an anti-Zionist Judaism, in order to be welcome on the campuses that SJP apparently believes SJP owns. Their demand to remove Hillel from campus is different neither in effect nor in intent from the blatantly antisemitic medieval Christian and Muslim demands that Jews convert or leave. Worse, given SJP’s and anti-Zionists’ celebratory responses to the October 7 massacre, they’re also not so far from the third medieval option: convert, leave—or die. The fact, again, that some Jews are allied with SJP or even “lead the movement” is irrelevant to the antisemitism, as we saw—just as irrelevant as the fact that some Jews converted to Christianity in the medieval period and went on to persecute their former coreligionists.
9. When Does Otherwise “Legitimate Criticism” of Israel Cross the Line Into Illegitimate Antisemitism?
Evaluating individual incidents requires context. The antisemitism may be epistemic at the foundation and throughout, underneath, or behind the actions or criticisms themselves, motivating them, or in their consequences and methods. It may be in the intentions of the activist, which may be obscure to third parties. Antisemitism isn’t always on the surface, particularly where it manifests as anti-Zionism, and sometimes great efforts are made by its practitioners to keep it buried. But scratch and dig at the words and actions of campus anti-Zionists, and you’ll generally find it.
There’s also a natural barrier to overcome. We want to see our students, faculty, and administrators as good people, morally virtuous, and want to praise them for what they profess to be their noble, social justice and human rights motivations. Aren’t we all for justice, human rights, liberation, equality, etc.? It’s easier to take them at their word than to subject their words and deeds to the scrutiny, the digging, given the uneasy feeling about what we’ll find once we do.
But after October 7, after the outpouring of Jew-hatred consuming our campuses for over a year, as we observe in real time “The Vanishing” of Jews from American life and that “The Golden Age for American Jews is Ending”—it’s essential now that we dig.
Though context is essential for each individual incident, instance, and person, I offer some general indicators suggesting when digging is required, that your community’s anti-Zionists may well be engaging in, expressing, or promoting antisemitism.
(1) When the activism is (far) more anti-Israel than it is “pro-Palestinian”
In general it’s okay to advocate for people, especially people you believe to be oppressed. But it’s much less okay to advocate against people, even if you do it “in the name of” advocating for the others. And it’s really not okay when you are mostly or really only advocating against the Jewish people.
In fact there are many ways to be “pro-Palestinian” without being antisemitic, which I discuss elsewhere: support investment in Palestinian business, infrastructure, education, advocate for Palestinians oppressed in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, work to reform UNRWA to support resettlement for those who wish it, support democratic and anti-corruption reforms in the Palestinian Authority, support even the liberation of Gaza from the Islamist jihadi group Hamas that has ruled it with an iron fist, etc. In the current war you could advocate for Gazans to have a choice about whether to leave Gaza, to flee the violence, like all other refugees from war.[70] You have a choice about how to advocate; you can advocate that way. But when you are more interested in harming Israel than in helping Palestinians, in particular when you ignore most of the problems confronting Palestinians around the world and only care when the Jews can be blamed, you are probably antisemitic—because you aim more to harm Jews than to help Palestinians (even where you think harming Jews will help Palestinians).
(2) When the activism is obsessive
As noted earlier, even assuming every individual criticism is true and legitimate, the sheer focus on and accumulation of the “criticisms” may indicate the antisemitism of the activists. In the year after October 7 anti-Zionist faculty members at small liberal arts Connecticut College brought in at least eleven anti-Israel speakers, all ultimately justifying the October 7 slaughter. Eleven speakers—and counting, for they might not yet be done. There are over 100 other military conflicts going on in the world, many larger in scope and significance than the IPJAMIC, which collectively got precisely zero speakers while the campaign against the one tiny sliver of a Jewish country got eleven, who had not a single positive word to say about that country between them. Recall the earlier example of the “Black Crimes” website that tracks and publicizes only crimes committed by Black people, and advocates for harming them; imagine now bringing eleven speakers to a small campus to speak only about Black Crimes. Campus activists such as those Connecticut College faculty display this exact single-minded fixation on Israel. Their websites very nearly could be labeled simply “Jewish Crimes,” with no interest in compiling websites called “Palestinian Crimes” or “Islamist Crimes.” Typically they display (i) obsessive and disproportionate focus on Palestinian suffering when and only when it can be ascribed to the Jews, and ignore the far greater, and less self-inflicted, suffering of the many other stateless peoples in the world, (ii) disproportionate, double-standard focus on Palestinian “refugees” while there are millions more actual, current refugees in the world today in far greater need of assistance, and (iii) double standards in how they treat Palestinian refugees (refuse to resettle them v. resettling all other refugees etc.). Such activists seem driven more by their antipathy to Jews than by their concern for the Palestinians or even universal principles of social justice and human rights—and that’s on the assumption that their allegations against Israel are (largely) true. When, in fact, most or all of those allegations turn out to be false or misleading, per the next indicator, the conclusion is only stronger.
(3) When the activism disregards truth, fairness, and other academic norms
Slander, libel, defamation, demonizing, exaggerating, omitting pertinent details, being one-sided, denying Jewish history, finding no room for Jewish rights or considerations: in those cases not much digging is necessary. Antisemites have always told conspiratorial lies about the Jews, and once you discover the same pattern in anti-Zionist activism the conclusion is clear. Doing so requires doing your own homework: you must know the history, the facts, find the right contemporary sources, etc. On campuses it also requires having the courage to speak up, to be the lone dissenter, simply to state, “What they are saying is not true: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, etc.”
To be fair, not all campus activists are equally blameworthy here. A younger student may simply believe what the large vocal groups of people around her (including her professors) want her to believe, may not yet have had the opportunity, may not have the skills, perhaps it doesn’t even occur to her even to fact-check and do her own research. That is still an epistemic and moral failure, but we can be forgiving when they are young and new to the game.
But the leaders, the organizations providing materials, and most of all the faculty members: no excuses for their double standards, their lies of omission, their demonization and dehumanization of Israeli and often American Jews (“Zionists”), etc. There are examples too numerous to itemize, everything from (i) petitions signed by thousands of academics accusing Israel of all the standard sins including “Jewish supremacy,” to (ii) professors such as Ilan Pappé, whose 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, reads like an account of the 1948 war that entirely leaves out the actions of the multiple Arab armies that started the war (so it’s as if the Jews are just wandering around Palestine shooting at everything that moves), or (iii) Rashid Khalidi, whose 2023 book The Hundred Years War on Palestine turns the numerous genocidal wars the Arabs started (1948, 1967, 1973, etc.) into wars of aggression by the Jews, and even turns the Oslo Peace Accords negotiations (in which Israel made major concessions of territory and power to reach peace) into an act of war by Israel, or (iv) former Bristol University professor David Miller who called British Jewish students “agents of the Israeli government,” claimed their lobbying for Israel was a “threat to the safety of Arab and Muslim students,” drew up conspiratorial charts “exposing” the “secret network” of Zionist (i.e. Jewish) organizations working to undermine England, etc., in so doing utterly delegitimizing their perspective, making it impossible for them to simply believe in and advocate for their political position without being turned into “spies” (advocating for “Palestine” never gets the same treatment), and in accusing them of being a “threat” incited hatred and possible violence against them, exactly as the Nazis did by painting Jews as a threat to German society. If that isn’t antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionism then nothing is; and then hundreds of academics signed petitions supporting him when he was finally sacked for his behavior. Further, (v) every single one of the hundreds of BDS resolution introduced to (and generally passed by) student governments around the globe over the past few years were packed with the lies, heavily footnoted with references to books such as those by Pappé and Khalidi, as were the (vi) “Apartheid Walls” erected on hundreds of campuses around the globe in observance of “Israeli Apartheid Week,” and, finally, (vii) there were campaigns on several campuses called “The Deadly Exchange,” which through mental gymnastics that would be impressive if they weren’t so evil, somehow blamed Israel for the alleged epidemic of American police brutality against minorities. A blood libel for the 21st century, packed into a set of lies and distortions, in full view—and could one even imagine any other minority or identity group being subjected to week-long displays of lies about their many alleged crimes? Imagine, for a moment, a week-long “Black Crimes” wall on campus, or “Muslim Crimes,” or even just “Palestinian Crimes”—non-starters all, yet it is not merely tolerated but warmly received when the equivalent of a “Jewish Crimes” week comes along.
When campus anti-Zionism consists of lies, lies, more lies, relentless obsessive lies, always, and only, about the Jews, it’s very likely crossing that line.
(4) When the activism can’t see a single positive thing about Israel, and turns positives into negatives
There is so much that is good about Israel, and ought to be seen as good especially by the progressives dominating campuses: a vibrant democracy, start-up nation, first-class universities, global contributions to science, medicine, technology, sharing technology with Africa and other underprivileged areas, providing international medical and disaster aid, multicultural and diverse, reflects fundamentally liberal values while maximizing freedom of religion, believes in human rights and follows the laws of war, a positive status for women, and for gays, commitment to and advances in environmentalism, an actual ally to the United States, etc. It has also made multiple, sincere, extensive efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, offering them on many occasions the possibility of establishing their own state and obtaining almost all of their many demands. When activists ignore all that, they reveal their true motivation: to display Israel only in the worst possible light.
Or even worse, they turn these positives into negatives, inventing such new “crimes” as “pinkwashing” (alleging to be friendly to gay concerns only to cover up their crimes against the Palestinians), “greenwashing” (alleging to be pro-environment, ditto), “sportswashing” (producing athletes for local and global competitions for the same reason), “vaccine-washing” (doing things such as helping the Palestinians with COVID or polio vaccines in order to cover up their own crimes), international-aid washing (providing international aid), etc. Think how sinister this is: the Jew is so evil that literally nothing, not one single thing, the Jew does can possibly be good, so something that looks good—like providing free medical care to Palestinians—must be a cover for their sinister deeds. Such behavior is indistinguishable from that of the most deluded, conspiracy-minded, Elders of Zion antisemite.
(5) When the activism rejects civility, academic freedom, and the rights of others
In general, it’s okay to advocate for your opinion with a measure of civility and respect for others. But it’s much less okay when you take over your campus, or components thereof, and inflict your opinion on others, as occurred regularly on many campuses in the year after October 7, culminating in the encampments erected on well over 100 campuses. Some justified these behaviors by claiming that activists were protesting an active “genocide,” thus requiring emergency measures. But that (i) requires accepting the demonstrable lie that the Israel-Hamas war involved Israel perpetrating genocide, and (ii) was belied by the fact that the mass rallies taking over campuses began immediately after October 7, before Israel had even initiated its response. Even so, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the campus simply does not belong to any of its constituents alone, no matter what emergency they believe they are protesting. There are no conditions under which it is acceptable to take over campus, destroy property, occupy buildings, etc.
Nor is it ever okay to deny your opponents the same privileges and freedom you enjoy to advocate for their opinions. You may not intimidate or harass, nor may you prevent or disrupt their events, nor are you ever justified in ostracizing people for their personal opinions or calling for academic boycotts.[71] You may advocate for Palestinian rights, but you are not allowed to suppress advocacy for Jewish or Israeli rights, or prevent people from learning more about Israel, refuting the allegations, studying there, etc.
Again, it’s okay to be “for” something, or for a certain people. But when you choose the path of being anti- —anti-normalization, anti-free-speech-for-others, anti-the-presence-of-opponents (“Zionists off campus!”)—then you are crossing the line to attacking and harming Jews.
(6) When the activism moves beyond speech into concrete discriminatory or harassing actions
As just noted, when you move from words to actions (disruptions, anti-normalization, ostracizing, etc) you are likely entering the realm of antisemitism. Not all actions, obviously: if you want to have a bake sale for Palestine, have at it (though a bake sale specifically for Hamas might be another matter). But actions targeting Jews, whose consequences harm Jews, or violate their rights, then that’s a warning sign. Activists do not own the university: every right and privilege they have, their Jewish peers also have. That includes the right to serve in student government, to work on and publish in the student newspaper, to participate in any of the hundreds of student clubs. Imposing a litmus test for inclusion, as has happened increasingly in recent years—Jewish students forbidden from joining or even kicked out of student governments, the student newspaper, or various student clubs for being Zionists—is straightforward antisemitic discrimination. There are countless examples of this over the past few years.[72] They may as well have put up “No Jews allowed” signs. That universities have largely ignored this behavior, even through the months after October 7, is nothing short of a scandal—one that perhaps only the numerous campus lawsuits filed since October 7 will help rectify.
It doesn’t matter if your motives are noble. You may believe that by ostracizing Jewish students you will somehow improve the situation for Palestinians. It remains nevertheless antisemitic to ostracize Jewish students. Calling them “Zionists” doesn’t obscure the fact that Jews are the primary target of your behavior.
Professors may never deprive Jewish students of any of the rights and privileges enjoyed by all other students. When a University of Michigan professor was rightly sanctioned for refusing to write a letter of recommendation for a Jewish student interested in studying in Israel, however, hundreds of faculty across academia signed petitions supporting him. And who knows what kinds of stealth boycotts like these are going on, with professors declining to write such letters without explaining why.
The entire BDS program fits this description. It moves beyond speech, demanding that academic institutions themselves not only take a political position on a complex conflict across the world, but then act on that position by openly discriminating based on national origin—targeting only Israeli Jews, ultimately.[73] Academic boycotts literally contradict the mission of the university, not to mention advance the epistemic antisemitism described earlier by preventing people from hearing alternative viewpoints. BDS is nothing but formal discrimination against Jews, with the sinister aim, ultimately, of removing the Jews’ ability to defend themselves and thus dismantling the Jewish state, along with the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that will entail. To be sure, campus BDS groups (such as SJP, JVP, and their various coalitions) were not only deeply joyous about October 7 but kicked into high gear afterward to amplify BDS motions and divestment campaigns in the months that followed. October 7 gave them the taste for Jewish blood, and they responded by going for more.
Because these are actions, not mere speech, these are situations where legal mechanisms can come into play; it’s no surprise we have seen so many lawsuits and federal complaints filed since October 7. Discrimination, generally, is illegal—not to mention immoral and inconsistent with university norms.
Activism that involves discrimination against Jews is very likely antisemitism.
(7) When the activism incites hate and incites, or even commits, violence—or openly supports, celebrates, calls for more (mass) violence against Jews
As Ben Kerstein put it earlier: “There is, in fact, a fairly simple litmus test for antisemitism. One need only ask of a critic: Are they OK with killing Jews?” Needless to say, what many activists have shown since October 7 is perfect contentment with the mass murder of Jews.
But the problem has been going on for years. Vandalism, graffiti, destruction of Jewish property. Swastikas graffiti’d everywhere, including on Jewish fraternities, dorm room doors of Jewish students, mezuzahs torn off, Hillel houses defaced with “Free Palestine!”, sukkot or public menorahs vandalized or torn down, several campus Chabad houses subjected to arson, Israeli flags burned at several campuses, New York University’s Hillel House shut down after death threats against Jewish students, Cornell University’s Jewish center the same, the University of Southern California Hillel House glass door being smashed. Open calls for and threats of physical violence against Jews, before October 7: “This beautiful knife makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier” (San Francisco State University student), “Slap a Zionist today” (McGill University student government member), “I will physically fight Zionists” (Stanford RA); “I want to beat the shit out of x” (a specific pro-Israel student, DePaul); note left at Brown Hillel threatening to kill all the Jews. Actual physical assaults at multiple places, again before October 7: at New York University, York University, Towson State University, University of Illinois rocks thrown at Jewish students; and a University of Arizona Muslim-Arab graduate student murdered a professor he mistakenly thought was Jewish.
And after October 7? Open celebration of, glorifying of, promoting of, mass murder of Jews, vigorously waving the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, chanting for “Intifada!” “From the river to the sea!” and “By any means necessary!”
Open support for the destruction of the one Jewish state in the world, “by any means necessary,” and not merely willing to tolerate but openly enthusiastic about the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of 7 million Jews.
This is not an environment where Jews can feel safe; where Jews can be safe.
They may call it “anti-Zionism,” but if it’s in support of the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of half the world’s Jews, in support of Islamist jihadi groups interested in murdering literally all the world’s Jews, then it is antisemitism.
Welcome to today’s university campuses.
[1] Consider the famous 1899 correspondence between Theodor Herzl and Yousef al-Khalidi, where the latter acknowledged that “Who can contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God! Historically, it is your country!” but concluded, given the foreseeable violent local opposition, “In the name of God, leave Palestine alone!”
[2] The line between “principle” and “practice” here can be blurry. Some anti-Zionists argue that if realizing Zionism as narrowly defined required (for example, per their allegations) “ethnic cleansing,” then “ethnic cleansing” becomes part of the definition of Zionism. There are many things wrong with this argument, but we can leave it aside and allow the “principle/practice” distinction to remain blurry.
[3] It also offers no explanation or analysis of just how or why its Israel-related examples fit its vague definition, thus offers no defense for including those examples.
[4] In my opinion this allegation is ludicrous: IHRA itself explicitly exempts legitimate criticism of Israel from being antisemitic, doesn’t call for silencing anybody, and the question whether it accurately captures antisemitism is entirely separate from subsequent decisions, for example by university administrators, whether they want to censure antisemitic activism.
[5] For analysis see Cary Nelson here and here, and Elder of Ziyon here.
[6] That point is actually a vote in favor of IHRA, which was formulated without any political intentions, in contrast to (say) Nexus and Jerusalem which clearly had the political motive to protect anti-Zionism from IHRA.
[7] We’ll note the necessity that the hostility etc. are ultimately unjustified, suggest explicitly including “violence,” emphasize the antisemitic application of “double standards” to the Jews, and note that sometimes antisemitism can reveal itself in what antisemites do not do or say.
[8] A historical note, for the articulation of which I’m much indebted to Fred Baumann. The term “antisemitism” was originally coined as a way for Jew-haters who were no longer Christians to justify hating Jews for a secular reason, based on racial pseudo-science. Jews were no longer to be hated for their religion, but as "semites," for their race. Thus Proudhon wrote in his private notes that the Jews should be sent back to Asia (with the other semites) or, if they stayed in Europe, be exterminated with fire and steel. So construed, anti-Zionism is another, different, and almost opposite way of hating Jews. Now, after European Jews were exterminated by fire and steel (as Proudhon wished), Jews are hated because they have gone back to Asia (as Proudhon also wished.) Since they still have to be hated, another excuse has to be found. Anti-Zionism thus objects to exactly what historical antisemitism claimed to want. So, historically speaking, antisemitism and anti-Zionism are opposites and quite distinct. What they share, of course, is that they are both forms of Jew-hate. But today “antisemitism” no longer has that narrow meaning for most people, and really just is a sanitized word for “Jew-hate”—and per Elder of Ziyon’s definition, both the racial way and the anti-Zionist way of hating Jews can (and do) fall under it.
[9] Put differently: speaking of “Israel” need not denote Jews (since not all Israelis are Jews, etc.), but in most contexts, most of the time, it connotes Jews.
[10] See the discussion of the recent “Drop Hillel” movement below.
[11] As we’ll explore below, in fact it is clear that many anti-Zionists are not actually “pro-Palestinian,” as can be seen in their general disinterest in Palestinian welfare except when Jews are involved. Anti-Zionists similarly claim their motivations are “pro-human rights,” equally easy to disprove by their general disinterest in human rights issues except when Jews are involved. Here it is what they do not do that reveals the antisemitism: not advocating for Palestinians or human rights elsewhere suggests their motivation is really to harm the Jews.
[12] Contrast advocating for a “two-state solution” with advocating to replace Israel with a single state of Palestine. The former is not “anti-Zionist” by our definition, and is also much harder to identify as antisemitic than the latter.
[13] Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote, for example, that Zionism was nothing but “a means for ambitious speculators to create a new deployment zone to practice usury all over world.” Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf that a “Zionist state” could only be “a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states.” Both quotes cited in Thomas Haury, “Anti‑Zionism and the Controversy About the Definition of Antisemitism” (Society, December 20, 2024).
[14] Though less widely acknowledged, a similar point applies to Islamic antisemites as well: the long and deep history of Islamic antisemitism arguably contributed significantly to the Palestinian Arabs’ early resistance to modern political Zionism. See section (7c), point (d) below.
[15] An illustrative example occurred at Stanford in 2016. During a student government Israel-debate, one anti-Israel senator suggested that “Jews controlling the media, economy, government and other societal institutions” was “a very valid discussion.” Though presumably no white supremacist, this antisemite was unsurprisingly an anti-Zionist.
[16] See also point (7) below.
[17] AMCHA Initiative has done several studies supporting this claim, for example here, here, here, and most recently here. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 study found a similar result.
[18] And indeed they do, as Elder of Ziyon summarizes in a chart. Echoing R. Berlin, Stephens also observes elsewhere: “The fundamental political argument of the European antisemite is that Jews are imposters and swindlers — imposters for claiming to be fully German, Austrian, French, and so on when they are actually “Semitic” — swindlers for using all their cunning and power to deprive authentic Europeans of their wealth, power, and patrimony. Anti-Zionists make the same claim about Jewish Israelis: that they are imposters for claiming an indigenous connection to the Land of Israel when really, they are latter-day European colonialists, and swindlers for trying to take from Palestinians what, supposedly, is rightfully theirs. This is why anti-Zionism … is a modern-day version of antisemitism: It is an attempt to organize politically and ideologically against Jews by employing the same false charges. The only difference is that, to the European antisemites of the 19th or early 20th century, the Jew is from the Holy Land; to the anti-Zionists of the late 20th and early 21st century, the Jew is from Europe.”
[19] Abba Eban also summarizes well: “There is no difference whatever between antisemitism and the denial of Israel’s statehood. Classical anti-semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.”
[20] Perhaps in later generations some will look back and see today’s “anti-Zionist” allegations (Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc.) as just the latest iterations of this long antisemitic tradition of defaming Jews. We’ll return to this issue below.
[21] This is why the Elder of Ziyon definition of antisemitism above should explicitly include that the anti-Jewish behaviors are unjustified.
[22] 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.
[23] 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.
[24] 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 …”
[25] 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).
[26] 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.
[27] See Andrew Pessin, Setting the Record Straight: Refuting the Common Lies Told about Israel (ISGAP Publications, forthcoming).
[28] 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).
[29] 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.
[30] 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.
[31] 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.”
[32] 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.
[33] Andrew Pessin, Setting the Record Straight: Refuting the Common Campus Lies Told about Israel (ISGAP Publications, forthcoming).
[34] I return to this question in section 7c below.
[35] 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 19th century, etc.
[36] Hasan is clearly anti-Zionist “in principle,” but even reframing his position here as being merely “in practice” won’t change the conclusion. Per the discussion of epistemic antisemitism, it appears to be only the Jewish state’s practice that invokes his ire, and the founding of the Jewish state is the only historical event he seems interested in undoing, all of which seems premised on the idea that Jews have no rights in this region whatsoever. And even if it were merely the way that Zionists behaved “in practice” that he objects to, note that he never raises any objections to how the Palestinians have behaved “in practice,” over the decades, including in perpetrating and widely supporting the October 7 massacre. In principle or in practice, Hasan’s anti-Zionism operates by means of antisemitic double standards.
[37] I defend this point in detail in “Even if (Most of) What Detractors Say About Israel Were True …”
[38] Trials of War Criminals Before the Nurenberg Military Tribunals: Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. XIII, p. 323, and Himmler, Reichsfuehrer-SS – P. Padfield, Henry Holt and Co, NY, 1990, p. 469. Much of the material to follow I discuss in more detail in “The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failed Practice of Jew-Washing.”
[39] Review of Gessner’s Some of My Best Friends Are Jews (Farrar & Rinehart), in Time Magazine, December 21, 1936.
[40] In the early decades of the modern Zionist movement, from the 19th century to the Holocaust, anti-Zionism was perhaps normative among the Orthodox for precisely the reasons mentioned. To be sure there were prominent rabbinic figures who strongly supported and promoted Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel—such as Yehudah ben Shlomo Alkalai (1798-1878), Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874), Samuel Mohliver (1824-1891), Jacob Reines (1839-1915), and most importantly Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)—but despite some of them enjoying great influence, by and large they faced stiff resistance from the religious community. Today, after the Holocaust and nearly 80 years after the founding of the State of Israel, Orthodox anti-Zionism is a minority opinion.
[41] In fact the Satmars ended up endorsing Trump in the 2024 election because they feared the impact of a Harris presidency on Israel and the Jewish people. They also provided support for IDF soldiers defending the country during the wars with Hamas and Hezbollah.
[42] Elsewhere I treat the closely related category of “Social Justice Jews.”
[43] The occasion for the remark was the protest over Klug’s invitation to be a keynote speaker at an international conference on antisemitism sponsored by the Berlin Jewish Museum in November, 2013. A twenty-five page dossier of statements by prominent thinkers criticizing this invitation was produced. The remark in question is from Ben Cohen’s statement in the dossier. In the same dossier, Sam Weston notes that Klug argued during a 2006 debate that “subverting Zionism” is the “Jewish thing” to do.
[44] Interestingly JVP does not require a Jewish identity to be a member, and various staff and members are known not to be Jewish, but we’ll overlook that fact. JVP’s response to the charge that they provide services to Jew-washers may be found in “We’re Nobody’s Jew-Washing Pawns.”
[45] For a summary of JVP’s embrace of the Palestinian narrative and alliances with extreme anti-Israel groups, including those that call for Israel’s destruction, see here. For examples of JVP’s support for Hamas prior to October 7, see here. As for the activism after October 7, suffice to say that they have been full participants in all the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activities since then.
[46] JVP doesn’t even really try here. If they at least advertised themselves as advocating for “what’s best for the Jews” then that perhaps would exempt them from intentional antisemitism, even if there is serious disagreement over just what is “best for the Jews” (advocating for Palestinian rights, etc.). But while they claim to ground their advocacy on Jewish principles (such as “tikkun olam” (as they understand it), etc.), they openly advocate not for the Jews but for the Palestinians.
[47] Miriam Elman dissects JVP’s manipulation of Passover in “Anti-Israel Activists Hijack Passover, Turn it into Palestinian Liberation Event.”
[48] In fact JVP is secretive about its financing. But according to an investigation by NGO Monitor, JVP receives “funding from a broad range of foundations and charitable trusts, many of which, unsurprisingly, also contribute to other anti-Israel organizations.” According to that same investigation, very few (if any) of the organizations funding JVP are Jewish in nature or focus. See also “BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Funding Network.”
[49] See my “Setting the Record Straight.”
[50] This quote is discussed in Richard Landes, “Can the Whole World be Wrong?” Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022), p. 300.
[51] One is reminded of Bertrand Russell’s essay, “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” in Unpopular Essays (1950).
[52] I explore this point in more detail in “Even if (Most of) What Detractors Say About Israel Were True…” That doesn’t mean one has to like the past, but it does encourage one to adapt and look forward.
[53] Either he, or someone else, also testified explicitly that Jews should be excluded from Palestine because of the “Arab purity” of the entire Middle East, but I’m unable to locate the specific reference.
[54] Just insert “white” for Arab and Muslim and “Black” for Jew and see how it reads.
[55] An interesting thought experiment would be to imagine what would have happened if, say, Egyptians or Jordanians had immigrated in large numbers and established Egyptian or Jordanian sovereignty. Actually that’s not a thought experiment, given that Egypt and Jordan invaded in 1948 and conquered Gaza and Judea-Samaria, in the latter case officially annexing it. What happened? No opposition at all from the Palestinian Arabs; indeed when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964 its charter stated that it made no claims on those regions. Apparently it was only Jewish immigration and potential sovereignty that was a problem. Another word for that discriminatory response is antisemitism.
[56] In “The One Simple Question That Determines Everything” I argue that literally nothing Israel allegedly does or has done, none of the alleged grievances, come close to justifying the massacre of October 7.
[57] A particularly poignant illustration of this occurred in 2021, when a San Antonio JVP group found themselves protesting a Zionist church alongside a neo-Nazi group. According to the report: “I’m horrified,” said Judith Norman, a member of the Jewish Voice For Peace San Antonio chapter. “This is a time that is really fertile for a lot of far right extremist hate organizations. And it's appalling to see them in the open.” Somehow the irony that they were protesting right alongside JVP was lost on her. Since then, the emboldened white supremacists have often showed up at the same anti-Israel demonstrations as the leftist progressives.
[58] See in particular Richard Landes, “Can the Whole World Be Wrong?”: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022).
[59] There are numerous individuals fitting this description active on social media. And for an example, think about Yemen, a poverty-stricken war-torn country where millions have died or become refugees, dedicating its limited resources to attack Israel. Mightn’t some there object to that self-harming decision?
[60] Iran has provided copious funding for Hamas, for example, without providing any funds for schools or hospitals in the Gaza strip. That suggests their concern is not for the welfare of Palestinians so much as for the destruction of Israel.
[61] Over 50,000 in the past 14 years in Nigeria, for example, or over 60,000 in the last 24 years! Prior to the Israel-Hamas war triggered by October 7, these numbers dwarf the casualties in the same period in the IPJAMIC.
[62] We first broached this topic in section (2), point (9) above.
[63] Abe Greenwald puts the point sharply: “Gaza is precisely what the Western left says it hates: a racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, anti-Democratic, kleptocratic, dogmatically religious police state of science fictional inequity and oppression. And they love it more than anything in the world.”
[64] Setting the Record Straight.
[65] Setting the Record Straight.
[66] In December 2024 Amnesty International released a report condemning Israel for “genocide” in Gaza, in which (i) they changed the definition of “genocide” (because otherwise it wouldn't apply), (ii) they essentially claim that any civilian casualties constitute genocide (false), and then (iii) also claim that Israel's efforts to move civilians out of the way also constitute genocide! In other words, Israel cannot respond to Hamas without automatically, in every action, committing genocide. They also invert reality by casting Israel as the aggressor, starting with the report's opening sentence, which suggests that the war started when Israel commenced its military offensive against “occupied” Gaza on Oct 7, 2023—when in fact (i) the war was started by Hamas, not Israel, (ii) Gaza was not occupied in any legal or normal sense of that word, and (iii) Israel's war is against Hamas, not “Gaza.”
[67] Even apart from the official “Drop Hillel” movement, protesters have targeted campus Hillels frequently since October 7. The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 100 such incidents, including vandalism of Hillel buildings, protests at Hillel events, threats aimed at students and Hillel employees and calls to expel Hillel from campus.
[68] Stunningly, even faculty groups, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s “Faculty for Justice in Palestine,” are openly promoting the same campaign.
[69] I discuss the Open Hillel movement here.
[70] In fact no campus activists advocate for that, calling it “ethnic cleansing,” preferring to condemn Gazans to remaining in a war zone because that makes things harder for Israel.
[71] In response to the campus conflict over the Israel-Hamas war, the American Association of University Professors shamefully overturned a decades-long policy against academic boycotts. This is not the place to demonstrate just how antithetical to academic and moral norms that decision is.
[72] Some examples: SUNY, University of Vermont: Jewish students expelled from sexual assault survivors groups; University of Connecticut: Jewish student kicked out of a capella group; CUNY Law Faculty, Berkeley Law students banning all Zionists; New York University: 53 student clubs signing pledge to boycott the two pro-Israel groups on campus; University of Illinois: graduate student union barring Zionists from participating in racial justice walk; CUNY: “Zionists out of CUNY!”; George Washington University: “Zionists GTFO”; McGill University: student newspaper officially no-platforming Zionist opinions; Oberlin: requiring a student to endorse anti-Zionism in order to join the Black Lives Matter club, etc.
[73] There are nuances here, such as utterly implausible claims that they target only institutions, not individuals; and they sometimes work overtime to include Israeli Arabs in their boycotts, while generally recognizing them as collateral damage—because they are really targeting only Jews.
Hi! I’m a 28 year old journalist who covers news on my substack (average 5-6k views) and also posts them on my bew websiteb(about 309 views per article there. Your essay was so good I’m wondering if you’re interested in having a guest post on my blog? I would credit you as much as I can….