This, of course, is true. No country in the world, and no government of any country in the world, should be immune to criticism. Israel and the government of Israel are no exception to this rule – nor is any regime in any other country that a given commentator might perceive (rightly or wrongly) as being good for Israel.
And unfortunately, there are people who will regard someone as being antisemitic if they criticize anything that Israel or Prime Minister Netanyahu do. I myself, on account of my steadfast opposition to the regime and agenda US President Donald Trump have been labeled an antisemite by someone who held the (in my opinion ludicrous) view that Trump is good for Israel. As sad as I am to admit it, there do exist extremists who throw around the label of antisemitism to silence very legitimate criticism.
But it is a severe mistake to regard such extremists as being definitive of those who call out the inherent antisemitism of anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is something that goes so far beyond legitimate criticism of Israel that it isn’t even in the same ball park – not even remotely so.
To explain what is inherently antisemitic about anti-Zionism, one needs a clear understanding of what anti-Zionism is – and to provide that, it is important to first clarify what Zionism itself is. Wikipedia defines Zionism as “the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine).”
Since that is what Zionism is, anti-Zionism is therefore opposition to exactly that. Therefore, if someone is truly an anti-Zionist, they do not merely want Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip (which Israel already has done years ago) and from the West Bank. They are not merely seeking to improve the treatment of Arabic-speaking people who live in the area. Someone who is truly anti-Zionist is someone who wants Israel to disappear altogether, or at very least to be no longer able to function as a Jewish homeland.
As for those who want Israel to disappear altogether (for purposes of this article, I will call them “hard anti-Zionists”) they already are imposing a double-standard on Israel, as despite blemishes on Israel’s human rights records (blemishes which, though vastly exaggerated by Israel’s detractors to say the least, nonetheless do exist) other nations would have to commit violations far more egregious, and often under much less pressure, to even get close to the point that their very right to exist would be called into question.
But then there are others (who for purposes of this article I will call “soft anti-Zionists”) who don’t necessarily want Israel to disappear altogether, but want Israel to adopt policies and/or accept terms that would make it impossible for Israel to function as a Jewish homeland. Some of these people call for Israel to repeal the Law of Return which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to Jews who move to Israel. Some demand that Israel permit descendants of Arabs who were deported to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to re-settle what is now known as Israel Proper. There may be other policies that these soft anti-Zionists call on Israel to enact that would be equally destructive to Israel’s ability to function as a Jewish homeland. And many (if not most) of these soft anti-Zionists call on Israel to enact multiple such policies, if not all of them.
The inherent antisemitism of soft anti-Zionism may not be as obvious at first glance as the inherent antisemitism of hard anti-Zionism. After all, some people might argue granting Jews automatic citizenship of the State of Israel while not doing the same for others constitutes a double-standard of sorts. They might see allowing the descendants of Arabs who were deported to re-settle Israel proper as an equitable act of restitution that ought to be done.
However, as reasonable as these demands might seem to be on the surface, their apparent reasonability falls completely apart in the face of historical literacy.
The region in question is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people, and Jews are by a great margin the vast majority of the indigenous people of the area. Religious lore describes the ancestors of the Jews as having come to the land from Mesopotamia and later again from Egypt, displacing the Canaanites who were there previously. However, actual historical sciences paint a different picture by which Jews (and other Israelites, namely the Samaritans) are in fact not descended of foreigners who came to displace the Canaanites, but are (along with the Lebanese) descended of the Canaanites themselves.
The region of Palestine is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people, where the Jewish people lived from the time the time that we became a distinct people up until we were exiled to other parts of the then-known world and often enslaved by Roman colonists early in the first millennium of the common era.
A lot of people like to claim that the Ashkenazi Jews, the largest population of Jews, are not actually descended of the Jews who were exiled from Palestine, but descended of other people who converted to Judaism. The most common variant of this claim asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are of Khazar descent – but other variants ascribing our origin to other people, like the Germanic people of the Rhineland, exist as well. These claims, of course, had no serious basis when they were first made – but nowadays, with modern genetic analysis, these claims have been positively debunked. While there has indeed been some admixture of European DNA into the Ashkenazic genome (mostly from Southern Italy) the bulk of Ashkenazi DNA is from the same Levantine origin as most other Jewish populations. The only Jewish populations that genetic evidence suggest are descended primarily from converts are the Beta Israel from Ethiopia, and the Bnei Menashe who are just one of the several Jewish groups in India. Neither of these groups come even close to being the largest Jewish population.
So the vast majority of Jews, who are in turn the vast majority of the indigenous people of the Palestine region, have been living in exile, being kicked around from country to country at the whim of the rulers of whatever land we happened to live in. We would enjoy brief periods of relative tolerance – but often these periods of tolerance were merely the calm before the storm only to be followed by especially severe periods of persecution.
Establishing the State of Israel and having laws and policies that allow it to function as our homeland is our escape from this. It is also a matter of an indigenous people’s right to their ancestral homeland.
The Arabs of the area, on the other hand, despite calling their proposed state the “State of Palestine” and having adopted the term “Palestinian” to refer specifically to themselves, they are not by any stretch the indigenous people of the Palestine region. Their ancestors came to the land midway through the first millennium of the common era at earliest, many of them being descended of people who came much later. Now, it is true that sixtieth-generation colonists should not be treated the same as founding-generation colonists, and these Arabs should indeed have the right to self-determination. Nonetheless it is a blatant act of historical revisionism to consider them to be by any means indigenous to the area.
The indigenous people to the land are by and large the Jews – a people who, it so happens, have the desperate need for the maintenance of a homeland in that area.
So, by all means, go ahead and criticize Israel when Israel does something wrong. But make sure that you are not holding Israel up to a double-standard – and to that end, make sure that you are receiving accurate information about any conflict that goes on in the area before you form your opinion on it. And if you wish for Israel to disappear, or to accept terms that would make it impossible to function as a Jewish homeland – then what you are doing (which is what anti-Zionists do) goes way beyond legitimate criticism of Israel, and you will have well earned the label of “antisemite”.
How true! Well written.