Benjamin Moser, who is of course anti-Zionist himself, writes in the Washington Post that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitism because anti-Zionism was created by Jews:
Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.
The article is dishonest on a couple of levels. The main deception is that Moser conflates pre-1948 anti-Zionism with today's - and they are not the same at all. After Israel was reborn, anti-Zionism changed from being against creating a Jewish state to wanting to dismantle the only Jewish state. It is the desire to see a recognized nation destroyed - and by remarkable coincidence, only the Jewish one. Not the Christians ones, not the Muslim ones - just the Jewish one. What are the odds?
Secondly, he quotes early Reform Jewish thinkers on the topic:
“This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York declared that “The essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.”
But the Reform movement disavowed its anti-Zionist position before 1948. Its 1937 "Columbus Platform" said, " Judaism is the soul of which Israel is the body." Its 1950 statement said:
The Union of American Hebrew Congregations in Convention assembled send affectionate greetings to our brethren in the State of Israel. We take pride in your heroic achievements. We offer prayers for your continued success. We pledge continued aid for your historic task of rehabilitating the homeless of Israel.We favor the extension of aid to Israel by the United Nations and the United States Government in order to sustain and strengthen a vital democratic State in the heart of the Near East.
Thirdly, there have always been different flavors of antisemitism. The vast majority of Jews overlapped in each of them, but a few outliers didn't. That doesn't make it any less Jew-hatred.
Racial antisemitism claimed it had nothing against the religion per se the way Christian antisemitism did. I list a whole bunch of different flavors of antisemitism here.
Just because anti-Zionists swear up and down that they aren't antisemitic doesn't make it so - just as the phrase "anti-semite" was coined to make hating Jews sound scientific and not bigoted. Antisemites over the centuries always claimed that they had solid reasons for their hate, it was never capricious. Just read Martin Luther.
If the effect of your beliefs is to demonize the vast majority of Jews by any definition - racial, religious, or political - then it is, in reality, Jew-hatred.
Even when done by Jews themselves.
Anti-Zionism is part of a long tradition of finding new reasons to hate Jews. When you look at anti-Zionism through the lens of historic antisemitism you see that it is an old wine in a new bottle.
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