Opinion | Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism | Israel today

Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitic?

The immediate answer is no.

The very opposition of non-Jews or Jews to the transformation of the Jews into a sovereign people in his country is not necessarily anti-Semitic.

The Rebbe of Satmar held anti-Zionist views.

A Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah was in his eyes a rebellion against God.

But he was not anti-Semitic and did not even deny the existence of the Jewish people.

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt opposed a Jewish state, and in no way could they be considered antisemitic.

But when you delve deeper into the question of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, the answer depends on context and time.

Today, anti-Zionism is almost always associated with anti-Semitism.

The issue has recently come up for discussion around the definition of anti-Semitism under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The discussion focused on the part that applies it to "denying the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, inter alia through the claim that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist initiative." The definition, including the part concerning Israel, has received very broad support in the world and of course in Israel, on the one hand, and has been sharply criticized in the world and in Israel, by certain academic circles, on the other.

A repeated claim by critics is that the definition suffocates or cools criticism of Israel. Indeed, cooling (not necessarily silencing) the obsessive and dishonest criticism of Israel is a welcome thing. But the international alliance explicitly stated in its definition that "criticism of Israel, similar to that directed at any other country, cannot be perceived as anti-Semitic." Therefore, it is clear that the claimants do not seek to defend the legitimacy of the criticism of Israel. After all, the definition of the alliance also accepts the legitimacy of criticism. They present the "right" to deny the existence of a Jewish state as if it were the same as an obvious right to criticize Israel.

The Israeli academics who follow this path seek to protect the "right" of the Palestinians and their diverse supporters, from the fascist right to the totalitarian left, to deny the very existence of a Jewish people, and therefore the right of this non-people to self-determination in a sovereign state. Here is the heart of the debate. To understand how Israeli academics came to this absurd position, one must look at the historical roots of the position that denied the very existence of a Jewish people.

In a dogmatic way, which sometimes characterizes academics, they adhere to a position that once made sense, perhaps, until reality refuted it. In the beginning of Zionism, and even in the midst of its historical enterprise, it was not unreasonable to think that one could not see nationality in the group of people known as "Jews", consisting of completely different groups in their culture, who lived in continents for years, spoke different languages, and did not actually know each other. It was not even unreasonable to argue that Ashkenazis, more than 80 percent of Jews, could not be considered a nation in a valid political sense. Nor was it fundamentally deprived, perhaps, to think like Buber and Arendt that the regulation of the Jews would not be in a sovereign state. Certainly, anti-Semitism cannot be attributed to those who then questioned the possibility of Zionism or the vital need of all Jews, at all corners of the world, for a Jewish state.

But reality has refuted their claims.

It would have been possible to hold them in their time, perhaps, but their time has passed and now they are meaningless.

Today, after anti-Semitism escalated into the horrors of the Holocaust, after the Jewish state was established and about half of the Jewish people live in it, today these claims, which underlie the ideology of the Palestinians and their supporters, are not just a denial of reality.

They are no more than an antisemitic attack on the Jewish people, another link in the very long chain of attempts to uproot it.

Those who deny the right to exist of the Jewish state, while demanding self-determination for other nations, are based on the denial of the existence of a Jewish people.

Whoever defends this false Palestinian story necessarily brings himself to support anti-Semitism, that is, to the position that more than it denies the reality of the Jewish people, it seeks to eliminate it.