Let the Haters Hate
The word antizionist, although not for the lack of trying, might not have the same bloody history as antisemite, but it is objectively more shrill.
We, Jews, invested considerable effort into convincing the world that antizionism is a form of antisemitism. And, of course, it is. If, in the 1890s, one could be skeptical of Theodor Herzl’s ambition, to see Israel today and wish for its destruction — and ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews — is antisemitic.
But here is why we should let the haters self-identify as antizionists.
Let’s start by describing the group whose worldview is informed by the desire to destroy the Jewish state. Self-professed antizionists do not sound much different from hardcore antisemites. They want to obliterate Israel precisely because it’s full of Jews.
For instance, former mixed martial arts fighter and social media gadfly Jake Shields may insist that he doesn’t have anything against the Jewish people, only Zionists, but has no problems posting, “I’m thinking that would be better off had the mustached guy won [sic]” — along with a myriad of other hardcore Jew-hating tropes, blood libel chief among them.
Antizionists imagine Israeli bloodlust everywhere. When the Hamas mouthpiece, the Gaza Ministry of Health, announced that Israel bombed the Al Ahli Hospital, killing 500, the news spread like wildfire. The following morning, the hospital was filmed intact, although the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired a rocket at Israel that misfired and fell on the hospital parking lot. To this day, antizionists continue to believe that Israel bombed the hospital and ate up every allegation of massacres coming from Gaza officials.
Antizionist language is full of overdramatizations. The high-pitched contributor to antisemitic Mondo Weiss magazine, Miriam Barghouti, proposed that Israel is guilty of “worse than genocide” for conducting the anti-terror operations in Gaza. What can be worse than genocide? Surely not a military campaign that warns civilians to evacuate and targets terrorist infrastructure. Like many other antizionists, Barghouti is not opposed to actual Zionism, but to a conspicuous idea of Jews she concocted.
Shields and Barghouti exhibit a common trend that, in social Justice lingo, can be called antisemitic fragility. It’s akin to the idea proposed by the diversity and inclusion grifter Robin Diangelo in White Fragility. Diangelo argued that whites refuse to own up to their racism out of weakness or fragility. It was a dubious idea because, by the author’s own admission, the white people in question did not exhibit any kind of hateful sentiment. They were guilty of simply thriving in their environment and being more successful than certain minorities.
But the so-called fragile whites live confident in their worldviews and don’t need to see the world through the lens of race, which, nevertheless, leads Diangelo to conclude that whites can only be this way because they are in denial of their own racism.
By contrast, the fragile antisemites are fixated on Jews. They tell blood libels, deny atrocities, including the Holocaust and, more recently, the Simchat Torah massacre perpetrated against us, and think that Jews control the world. At the same time, they can’t bring themselves to utter the words Jews or Israel, opting to label their enemies Zionists and calling the Jewish state the Zionist entity — my personal favorite because it’s so pathetic and insecure.
Self-identifying as an antizionist as opposed to an antisemite might be therapeutic to the fragile, but from an outsider’s point of view, it’s not at all preferable. Antizionist is just not a good word.
To begin with, anti-anything has negative connotations in the English language. That’s one of the reasons why the American pro-choice movement long insisted that the term pro-life was invented in order to avoid the bad vibes of anti-abortion, which, given the presence of the antecedent anti-, was guaranteed to produce unfavorable reactions regardless of the attitude towards the termination of the unborn life.
That fragile antisemites so readily associate themselves with the hate of Zion is more puzzling than their readiness to plunge into negativity.
Unlike Semite, a term coined fairly recently during the Enlightenment, Zion is ancient and has multiple meanings. Merriam-Webster provides three English language definitions:
1 a: the Jewish people: ISRAEL
b: the Jewish homeland that is symbolic of Judaism or of Jewish national aspiration
c: the ideal nation or society envisaged by Judaism
2: HEAVEN
3: UTOPIA
Antizionists insist that they only oppose the Jewish state — the definition 1b — but the nature of their obsessions proves otherwise, and the word they chose for themselves brings up all sorts of associations.
Because the root word Zion can be used synonymously with the Jewish people, the connotation of the term antizionist covers the same ground as an antisemite. Negativity doesn’t end there.
Heaven and utopia, the second and third dictionary definitions, universalize Zionism. Even those indifferent — or worse — to the fate of the Jewish people may find themselves deeply invested in the idea of eternal life or ideal social order.
Israel itself is a utopia personified. Political Zionism came to life a few decades after the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. But if Soviet socialism failed spectacularly, Zionism flourishes. Israel is a rare example of a successful liberationist post-colonial enterprise — and of the triumph of an idea over the circumstance.
The Soviet Union, the nation that fathered political antizionism at the height of the Cold War, was deeply hostile to religion. In the Soviet eyes, faith in paradise was an opiate for the masses. Even if the USSR was ideologically committed to building heaven on Earth, it no longer described it in quasi-religious language. It makes sense that to them, Zion, a focal point of the Jewish religion, had negative connotations.
The Western communists may feel the same, but why would devout Muslims, who constitute the core of the world’s antizionist movement, object to eternal life in the heavens? The same goes for the right-wing religious antisemites.
Antisemite is a cerebral term for Jew-hate adopted in late 19th century Germany to give it a scientific luster — in racist eyes, Jews were believed to be inferior to the Aryans. It superseded the fragile medieval rhetoric of hate, and decades later, the Nazis proudly embraced the label.
If to be an antisemite means merely to hate God’s people, to be an antizionist implies the hate of Zion or God himself in his resting place. The word antizionist, although not for the lack of trying, might not have the same bloody history as antisemite, but it is objectively more shrill.
Antizionist self-identification is not an improvement on antisemite. We don’t need to prove that antizionism is antisemitism to convince the world that today’s Jew-hating coalition has barbaric ambitions — the fact that our enemies are cry-bullying racial supremacy freaks attempting ethnic cleansing speaks for itself.
Let the fragile little darlings have the dignity of choosing the name for their movement — Antizionism. It’s an awful name. Let’s use it — and use it frequently.
I am one of the writers who now spells antizionism without the hyphen, just like antisemitism because the word doesn’t confer reasoned opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land, but an unhealthy obsession.
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Comments
Antizionists and antisemites are all racists. Let them out themselves so they can be removed from public.
Henry ford was responsible for a lot of Jew hate, supplied a lot of money to Nazis, and bringing lots of Arabs to Dearborn, MI.
As with racism, antisemitism detection produces a backlash against whining that looks to the detector like what he’s whining about.
You can with blacks well and have a history of wishing blacks well and they’ll still call you a racist if you suggest that whining is now counterproductive.
The political problem is Hamas, and everything else is anti-white legacy narrative. You’d do much better in that frame even for yourself.
Why does recognizing who the racists are offend you so much?
You’re not recognizing racists. Some of them are friends whose advice doesn’t fit your internal narrative.
You have literally said that Jews imagine antisemitism, in a comment thread at Instapundit talking about 10/7.
That’s absolutely correct. It doesn’t mean there isn’t antisemitism, just that a lot more of it is identified than exists. It’s like racism, to blacks. It hurts blacks to do that because you can’t fit in with a chip on your shoulder.
In the case of Jews, it’s part of seeking alienation, so looks like a positive to them. A form of us-vs-them no assimilation.
But guess what, it’s annoying, just like the racism charge is annoying. That doesn’t work in your favor.
Better strategy: identify what you can as anti-white. That gets you white friends instead of tiring them out, and may do some good for everybody.
I can’t reply to his reply, but Einat Wilf sums it up nicely & shows why nothing short of our disappearance will satisfy the rhhardins of the world:
“ The historian Tom Holland, in his excellent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, which my students read, described this centuries-old dynamic as “a program for civic self-improvement that aimed at transforming the very essence of Judaism.” Holland describes how Western ideas of enlightenment and human rights have, when it comes to Jews, been nothing more than a secularized version of the ancient Christian dream “that Jewish distinctiveness might be subsumed into an identity that the whole world could share—one in which the laws given by God to mark the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter.” Despite this being a dream that in modernity was “garlanded with the high-flown rhetoric of the Enlightenment,” Holland explains, its roots go “all the way back to Paul.” Faced with this all-encompassing, new-old campaign, “Jews could either sign up to this radiant vision, or else be banished into storm-swept darkness.” Holland clarifies that “if this seemed to some Jews a very familiar kind of ultimatum, then that was because it was.”
The ancient roots of the “pound of flesh” dynamic make it relentless. It always wants more, until there is no more flesh left. Either Jews are no longer Jews, or they are no longer alive. Throughout history, Jews have discovered again and again that no amount of flesh is ever sufficient.“
https://jewishpriorities.substack.com/p/einat-wilf-zionism-as-therapy
You could have conveyed the same meaning with considerably fewer keystrokes by just saying, “Why don’t you Jews just shut up already!”
That’s the characterization it’s good to avoid provoking – who cares what they say, they always say it. Just as whites now do to black racism charges, even after decades of wishing that blacks do well and hoping they’ll get over the self-destructive habit but not seeing any way to deliver the hope. Blacks are hostile to the suggestion.
Show yourself as a friend, co-sufferer, with whites, is the suggestion.
Hamas is another matter. Just kill them off without the whining.
However, they try to rationalize or justify it, many people are jealous of us. My grandfather always told me this was the root of the problem.
As a group, Jewish people are generally intelligent, resourceful and blessed.
That makes a lot of people mad…remember Saul’s jealousy of David? It will do that to you.
Yes. It’s not that you’re Jewish, but that you’re smart and so successful.
And, you’re jealous.
A lot is attractive about Jewish culture. Has that not come through? The ethical rule for taking on responsibility for the other guy’s troubles being chief among them. It’s how Palestinians wind up cared for in Israeli hospitals. Ethics over politics.
What would that rule say about trashing people for the benefit of your tribal alienation, though.
It’s here that there’s a difference between the high IQ Jews and the mob. Don’t encourage the mob and everybody gets the benefit of Jewish intellectual talent.
Not to mention resenting our being clannish & standoffish while simultaneously resenting our being pushy & trying to impose ourselves where we don’t belong.
If a clamoring after a foolish consistency is the hogoblin of little minds, a foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of hate-filled minds.
If you have the time, Einat Wilf demonstrates why the antizionists’ denial of hating Jews doesn’t hold up, and traces every one of the tropes frequently employed against Zionists, Zionism or Israel directly to anti-Jewish tropes that predate Zionism by centuries.
Fascinating read that summarizes a college course she taught. My description doesn’t begin to do it justice.
https://jewishpriorities.substack.com/p/einat-wilf-zionism-as-therapy
That’s a friendly suggestion but I can’t follow it, anyway at scanning speed. Too much Zionism and Anti-zionism when I’m looking for neither. The therapy part seems to be about feelings. There are some hopeful remarks about European Jewish thinkers looking for a path forward. I’d put Levinas in that and wonder where he would fall in the offered conversation. He’s into the universality of Jewish ethics, which is that I regard as the important part, but also favors preservation of ritual, which makes no sense to me. Usually he’s good on the phenomenology, how something presents itself to consciousness, and it’s not presenting itself that way.
Anyway those European Jewish thinkers invite Levinas to present convocational speeches, so that part seems to fit.
I’ve never seen Levinas mention antisemitism except indirectly once, in the Preface to his Existents and Existence :
These studies begun before the war were continued and written down for the most part in captivity. The stalag is evoked here not as a guarantee of profundity nor as a claim to indulgence, but as an explanation for the absence of any consideration of those philosophical works published, with so much impact, between 1940 and 1945.
Levinas sees and rejects the temptation, which makes him admirable. That’s open to everybody.
If you can cite any particular part of Wilf that’s exceptionally apt please do.
It’s not meant to be scanned. It’s meant to be pondered. Ah, such is the Spark Notes age we live in, when every Cliffs Notes are deemed too tedious.
But here’s one part that speaks directly to your expectations of how Jews should think & act. Keep in mind it is pulled out of context, leaving out a good deal of build-up:
‘The historian Tom Holland, in his excellent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, which my students read, described this centuries-old dynamic as “a program for civic self-improvement that aimed at transforming the very essence of Judaism.” Holland describes how Western ideas of enlightenment and human rights have, when it comes to Jews, been nothing more than a secularized version of the ancient Christian dream “that Jewish distinctiveness might be subsumed into an identity that the whole world could share—one in which the laws given by God to mark the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter.” Despite this being a dream that in modernity was “garlanded with the high-flown rhetoric of the Enlightenment,” Holland explains, its roots go “all the way back to Paul.” Faced with this all-encompassing, new-old campaign, “Jews could either sign up to this radiant vision, or else be banished into storm-swept darkness.” Holland clarifies that “if this seemed to some Jews a very familiar kind of ultimatum, then that was because it was.”
The ancient roots of the “pound of flesh” dynamic make it relentless. It always wants more, until there is no more flesh left. Either Jews are no longer Jews, or they are no longer alive. Throughout history, Jews have discovered again and again that no amount of flesh is ever sufficient.’ ****
‘ Observing nearly a century of European emancipation, Herzl and his fellow Zionists realized that no matter how much Jews strained themselves to be acceptable to their fellow Europeans—changing their clothes, their language, even their very conception of being Jews, away from a collective identity to a personal “faith”—Europeans would just come up with new cover stories to tell Jews the same old thing they had always told them: You do not belong.’ ****
‘Bullies everywhere prey on weakness and shame. But if one is neither weak nor ashamed, they move on to easier targets. The course offered students the ability to understand the genealogy of attacks Jews face today ***By robbing anti-Zionists of the power to shame them, students of these century-old texts discovered they had the power to rob their bullies of their prey. ‘
It would behoove America to attract more Jews, especially Ashkenazi. The way thing are going in Europe that should not be difficult.
The way things are going in the US, it may be more difficult than you think.
The frequent assaults in Brookly and NYC against Chasidic and other identifiable Orthodox Jews are seldom reported in non-Jewish news sources because the attackers are Muslim, black or Latino. If and when they are caught, and if the DA decides to prosecute, the charging, bail and sentencing are a joke.
Not to mention the hostility to Jews on US campuses and the targeting of both Jews and Israel in woke curriculum, down to the primary grades.
Or the fact that 25% of hiring managers surveyed in 2023 (2023?) said they would not hire or advance the career of a Jew, that Jews have too much power and that their are too many Jews in their industry. The degree of bias was worse among younger and more educated respondent.
America is getting too much like Europe.
“one in which the laws given by God to mark the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter”
I take it the other way, as Levinas does: marking Jews out from other peoples is a narrative way of saying that everybody is marked out from other people that they are nevertheless responsible for, that is, with respect to Jewish ethics, everybody is a Jew. It’s the human condition.
What Christians do is make it warm and fuzzy with a personal present God instead of a fierce requirement, which strikes me as a fault in Christians not understanding the ethics. So it’s not assimilation of Jews to universalize the ethics.
Would it then be right to say that Zionism seeks a country with specific rituals? Is that what makes you Jewish? Is it an argument over rituals?
In economics there’s a term “non-rivalrous’ for stuff that everybody can possess at once, like intellectual property. Michele Boldrin argues that we’d all be better off without protecting intellectual property with laws, and that might be analogous to this case.
I had never heard of Emmanuel Levinas, so I took a quick look at wikipedia. It appears he had no tradional Jewish education and no Jewish upbringing. His early education was in secular, Russian-language schools in Kaunas and Charkow, followed by a secular Jewish gymnasium. He studied philosophy at several European universities. Heidegger was one of his major influences, as was Jean Wahl.
I had the impression that, like Martin Buber or Heschel, he was one of those philosophers whom Christian and secular philosophers consider an important source for understanding Judaism, but whose actual influence in the Jewish religious world is marginal at best.
What he has to say about philosophy should never be confused with what the Jewish religion says about Judasim. That may explain why he could come up with a howler like “with respect to Jewish ethics, everybody is a Jew. It’s the human condition.”
Anyone who told you this is strikingly ignorant of Jewish ethics, which are solely a product of Torah. One they become a product of anything else, they are no longer JEWISH ethics.
According to JEWISH ethics, everyone is a human being, created in the Divine Image & therefore of infinite worth, yet obligated to respect the worth of others & to fulfill the Creator’s expecations.
Jews, by virtue of additional favors showered upon them by the Creator, including His making a covenant with them, are subject to quite a few additional expectations. Non-Jews can choose to become Jews by undegoing a prescribed process, whereby they accept those obligations upon themselves.
Anyone who tells you differently is describing something other than JEWISH ethics.
I haven’t looked at Wikipedia but googling: levinas everybody is a jew, the top two results are
Being Jewish written in 1947, before the bulk of his writing, it’s short
https://jst.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/beingJewish.pdf
and a paper I hadn’t heard of either
Emmanuel Levinas: A Jewish Thinker by David Patterson, abstract here
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40419481
Open an account “with google,” very fast procedure, and you can read it – Levinas precisely is based on the Torah, an article written precisely for you, I’d gather. It’s apparently written against some skepticism or other that sounds like yours.
I myself have read almost everything Levinas has written and go on that. Still there are a couple of odd publications left over on top of the bookcase for some other time.
I can’t access the second article. I created a new account, but it kept taking me back to the summary page. The summary page also suggests the original article is in Portuguese.
The first article simply reinforces my initial conclusion. There is nothing Jewish in the thoughts expressed, and the author seems to be totally unfamiliar with lack any firsthand knowledge of Jewish sources in the original.
The article is written from a standpoint of comparative religion. Most of the statements about Jewish belief (and they are very few) are merely conclusory, with no supporting, quotations or citations.
I also had a good chuckle over the description of Jewish scholar Gershon Scholem as being “Palestinian.“ That may have been an accurate description before May 14, 1948, but it was more than half a century out of date when this masterful example of academic – speak was perpetrated.
In short, nothing in that paper changed my view of Levinas. Assuming it’s accurate to say he thinks that Judaism teaches that everyone is Jewish, he is 180° from traditional Jewish texts.
I’m going to be blunt.
Anybody that whines about antisemitism or ‘anti-zionism’ without acknowledging the rampant general racism of the current left, or who CONTINUES to vote left, has no opinion worth hearing.
The left is openly, unrepentantly racist. If you’re going to object to ONLY the antisemitism, then screw you, you just don’t want to be the target.
It’s better to make allies all around when there’s an actually common interest, for both sides of the antisemitism or antiwhite debate.
On another topic:
“The Soviet Union… was deeply hostile to religion. In the Soviet eyes, faith in paradise was an opiate for the masses.”
It’s widely known that Marx said this. What’s not as widely understood is the context — that religion served as a necessary palliative to people’s pain, but was simply a poor substitute to addressing the root cause of that pain.