A Fraught Question for the Moment: Is
Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?
From the halls of Congress to America’s streets and
universities, a once largely academic issue has roiled national discourse,
inciting accusations of bigotry and countercharges of bullying.
Jonathan
Weisman
By Jonathan
Weisman
Published
Dec. 10, 2023
Updated
Dec. 11, 2023, 7:05 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/us/politics/anti-zionism-antisemitism.html
The brutal
shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military
assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of
surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship: Is anti-Zionism by
definition antisemitism?
The
question deeply divided congressional Democrats last week when Republican
leaders, seeking to drive a wedge between American Jews and the political party
that three-quarters of them call their own, put it to a vote in the House. It
has shaken the country’s campuses and reverberated in its city streets, where
pro-Palestinian protesters bellow chants calling for Palestine to be free from
the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
It surfaced
in Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, when Nikki Haley, the former
South Carolina governor, said, “If you don’t think Israel has a right to exist,
that is antisemitic.” The following night, lighting the national menorah behind
the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who is
Jewish, warned, “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity,
and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is
antisemitism.”
Zionism as
a concept was once clearly understood: the belief that Jews, who have endured
persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land
of their ancestors. The word still evokes joyful pride among many Jews in the
state of Israel, which was established 75 years ago and repeatedly defended
itself against attacks from Arab neighbors that aimed to annihilate it.
If
anti-Zionism a century ago meant opposing the international effort to set up a
Jewish state in what was then a British-controlled territory called Palestine,
it now suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the
Jews. That, many Jews in Israel and the diaspora say, is indistinguishable from
hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.
Yet some
critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of
expanding the Jewish state. That effort animates an Israeli government bent on
settling ever more parts of the West Bank that some Israelis, as well as the
United States and other Western powers, had proposed as a separate state for
the Palestinian people. Expanding those settlements, to Israel’s critics,
conjures images of “settler colonialists” and apartheid-style oppressors.
So for some
Jews, the answer to the question is obvious. Of course anti-Zionism is
antisemitism, they say: Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and
destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of
governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time
and again.
“There is
no debate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the
Anti-Defamation League, which has been defining and monitoring antisemitism
since 1913. “Anti-Zionism is predicated on one concept, the denial of rights to
one people.”
Many
Palestinians and their allies recoil just as fiercely: The equating of
opposition to a Jewish state on once-Arab land — or opposition to its expansion
— with bigotry is to silence their national aspirations, muffle political
dissent and denigrate 75 years of their suffering.
But perhaps
nowhere is the question more fraught than among Jews themselves. Younger,
left-leaning Jews, steeped in the cause of antiracism and terms like “settler
colonialism,” are increasingly searching for a Jewish identity centered more on
religious values like the pursuit of justice and repairing the world than on
collective nationalism tied to the land of Israel.
Many older
liberal Jews have also struggled with the Israeli government’s lurch to the far
right, but they see Israel as the centerpiece and guarantor of continued Jewish
existence in an ever more secular world.
“We’re
living in an increasingly post-religious age, and any Jewish community that
walks away from the Jewish people, and its most articulate expression of our
times — the Jewish state, the state of Israel — is walking away from their own
future,” said Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in
Manhattan and the founder of Amplify Israel, which seeks to emphasize the
Jewish state in Jewish worship.
For
Republicans, the issue is simple and convenient. The raising of anti-Zionism in
the debate over antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war pushes aside the
presence of white-nationalist bigots on the fringes of the Republican coalition
— like Nick Fuentes, the avowed neo-Nazi who dined with Kanye West and former
President Donald J. Trump last year — and instead forces Democrats to defend
the pro-Hamas demonstrators on their own coalition’s fringes.
So on
Tuesday, when G.O.P. leaders led by Representative David Kustoff of Tennessee,
one of the House’s two Jewish Republicans, put to a vote a resolution
condemning all forms of antisemitism and flatly stated “that anti-Zionism is
antisemitism,” the 216 Republicans who voted yes included two who have been
accused of antisemitism and white-nationalist flirtations, Representatives Paul
Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. (The one Republican who
voted no, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has now been labeled
antisemitic by the White House.)
For the
broader Democratic community, by contrast, the debate has been wrenching,
pitting allies against one another, splintering more conservative Jewish
Democrats who absolutely believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic from progressive
Democrats, especially Democrats of color, who argue just as strongly for the
latitude to criticize Israel, and leaving a huge middle unwilling to draw
bright lines.
Thirteen
Democrats voted no, including Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress, Ilhan Omar
of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New
York. Ninety-five voted yes, but 92 Democrats voted “present,” among them
prominent Jews like Jerrold Nadler of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and
Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.
“Folks,
this isn’t complicated: MOST antizionism — the type that calls for Israel’s
destruction, denying its right to exist — is antisemitic. This type is used to
cloak hatred of Jews,” Mr. Nadler wrote on social media after the vote. “Some
antizionism isn’t that. Thus, it’s simply inaccurate to call ALL antizionism
antisemitic.”
In fact, it
is complicated. Jonathan Jacoby, the director of the Nexus Task Force, a group
of academics and Jewish activists affiliated with the Bard Center for the Study
of Hate, said the group had wrestled with the issue for several years now,
seeking a definition of antisemitism that captures when anti-Zionism crosses
from political belief to bigotry. He warned that shouting down any political
action directed against Israel as antisemitic made it harder for Jews to call
out actual antisemitism, while stifling honest conversation about Israel’s
government and U.S. policy toward it.
The
definition of antisemitism as drafted by the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance and embraced by the Trump White House includes phrases
that critics say squelch political — not hate — speech:
Denying the
Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the
existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Applying
double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected or demanded of
any other democratic nation.
Comparing
contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
The Nexus
definition agrees that holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli
government actions, as pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an
Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia, is Jew hatred. It also holds that it is
antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people
and exercise self-determination, as some on the left do in arguing that Jews
are a religion, not a nation.
But Nexus
pushes back sharply on some aspects of the I.H.R.A. definition, stating,
“Paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently
than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism” and “Opposition
to Zionism and/or Israel does not necessarily reflect specific anti-Jewish
animus.”
Yehuda
Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish research
organization, said that Judaism had always contained elements of religion and
nationhood, and that Jewish identity had toggled between the two over the
millenniums. It is unsurprising that the two strains can seem baffling, he
said.
Since the
rise of violent white supremacy that accompanied the political movement of Mr.
Trump, Jewish intellectuals have viewed right-wing antisemitism “as dangerous
to Jewish bodies,” Mr. Kurtzer continued. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue
massacre that took 11 Jewish lives was perpetrated by an adherent to the “great
replacement” theory, a conspiratorial fiction designed to create race hatred by
holding that Jews are importing Black and brown people to supplant white
Americans.
Amid such
carnage, left-wing antisemitism, driven by opponents of the Jewish state, was
seen as more academic, a threat to Jewish identity, but not to Jewish safety,
he said.
But Mr.
Kurtzer said those distinctions disappeared with the massacre of some 1,200
Jewish Israelis in October — because Hamas’s actions were the end result of
denying Israel’s right to exist. “Oct. 7 should have the effect of saying
absolute hatred of Judaism for our national claims is violent and legitimizes
violence,” he said.
In other
words, virulent anti-Zionism and virulent antisemitism ultimately intersect, at
a very bad address for the Jews.
Still,
Democrats worry that the debate is blurring the line between political speech
and hate speech. Tibetans pressing for freedom from the Chinese are considered
unserious or even repugnant in Beijing, just as Native American activists
demanding to reclaim parts of the United States might be to the owners of that
land. But are they bigoted?
Ms. Omar
said the Republican resolution that she opposed “conflates criticism of the
Israeli government with antisemitism” and “paints critics of the Israeli
government as antisemites.”
To the
young Jewish activists of left-wing groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for
Peace, which have themselves been accused of antisemitism, the search for a
Jewish identity unrooted in the land has not been complicated. Jews, after all,
survived without a state for nearly 2,000 years after the Romans destroyed the
Second Temple in Jerusalem and scattered the inhabitants of the Holy Land to
the four corners of the earth.
Eva
Borgwardt, the 27-year-old political director of IfNotNow, said she graduated
high school wanting to be a rabbi. Now she speaks of a renaissance of Jewish
identity in the United States, a “diasporic” chicken farm, queer Talmudic
studies and a Judaism based on good works — including the securing of equal
rights and protections for Palestinians.
“For Jews
questioning Zionism, the issue is protecting the rights of a minority from a
state determined to eliminate them,” she said. “What could be more Jewish than
that?”
Mr.
Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League, reacted angrily to that argument.
“Please
don’t tell me my grandfather, whose entire family was incinerated in Auschwitz,
wanted to go back to the diaspora,” he said.
To which
younger, leftier Jews might respond by asking what it even means to suggest
that American politics should be focused on securing a safe haven for Jews
abroad when the First Amendment ensures that the United States is such a safe
haven.
In all of
this, a generational divide is palpable. Older Jews lived through the trials
and triumphs of the early Jewish state. Middle-aged Jews remember the hope of a
peace that recognized the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish and Palestinian
people, embodied in the Oslo accords of the 1990s, and a diplomatic process
that was pursued vigorously until the early years of the 21st century.
The young
Jews joining pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the last two months know only an
Israel they see as powerful, violent against Palestinians and ruled by leaders
far to their right.
“I was born
after the Oslo accords had fallen apart,” Ms. Borgwardt said. “I’ve never known
any kind of actual hope for a Zionism that does not demand occupation,
apartheid and the oppression of Palestinians to fulfill the identity of the
Jewish state.”
The
prevalence of that view has prominent Jews and mainline rabbis extremely
worried. Labeling Jews who question the centrality of Zionism antisemitic will
do nothing to keep them from abandoning Judaism altogether, said Ms.
Schakowsky, a veteran congresswoman.
“I think
there is a contempt for active, engaged American Jews who think it’s not just
about Israel existing,” she said, “but Israel existing in a context that does
include the Palestinians.”
Jonathan
Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic
and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman
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