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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