First, anti-Zionism calls into question the very legitimacy of nationalism and the Jewish national home. There is no other instance where a people is denied the right to continue living in their state with such obsessive insistence by a political ideology ...The second reason is that anti-Zionism adopts all the prejudices, tropes, and fantasies of anti-Semitism. Thus, instead of killing children to use their blood to make matzah, another persistent rumor claims that Israel harvests the organs of dead Palestinians. The conspiratorial logic at work in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [an anti-Semitic text published in 1901, quickly exposed as a forgery that fantasized a Jewish plot to control the world] is also found in the work of the Swedish environmentalist Andreas Malm. According to him, Zionism was the superstructure enabling the infrastructure of Western oil extraction and is responsible for climate change, and therefore for the destruction of the planet. Contemporary anti-Zionism is not an opinion, but hatred, since it attributes an evil essence to Israel.The third reason is that anti-Zionism contains an agenda of denying antisemitism, its denunciation being viewed with suspicion as a form of manipulation. This, in turn, makes killing Jews less scandalous and more legitimate. Slogans like "Globalize the Intifada" are in reality calls for the indiscriminate murder of Jewish civilians worldwide, since the Second Intifada [2000-2005] was a series of terrorist attacks against more than 1,000 Israeli civilians over five years. Such a slogan thus equates Israelis with Jews and, by establishing this equivalence, exports the conflict to a global scale.While the Dreyfus Affair was French, Marr's anti-Semitic leagues German, and the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 Russian, anti-Semitism is now a global phenomenon, operating on several distinct levels. It is now coordinated worldwide. This is what the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has achieved with great success. This movement emerged following the counter-summit to the UNESCO conference in Durban , South Africa , in 2001. Some 2,000 NGOs declared Israel guilty of being an "apartheid state ," of "racism , " "genocide," and "ethnic cleansing ." On the sidelines of this infamous conference, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were being sold . Heir to this infamous event, BDS is active in approximately 120 countries and thus has a global reach. Good luck organizing a scientific conference today with Israelis and, increasingly, by association, with Zionist Jews.
Some prominent Jewish French anti-Zionists published a rebuttal in the same newspaper. The crux of their argument is this:
The necessary critique of Zionism... rests on a threefold rejection: the rejection of the idea that the destiny of the world's Jews is to emigrate to Israel, the rejection of their assimilation into that state, and the rejection of its ethno-religious character. For us, Jews, combating antisemitism does not involve endorsing Zionism but, on the contrary, recognizing the inalienable and equal rights of all human beings, engaging in universal struggles for the rights of all, and consequently, for the rights of the Palestinians.
1. Zionism does not say that the destiny of all Jews is to emigrate to Israel. This is a straw man argument. Zionism makes no such demand - it is a refuge for Jews who need or want one, ready to accept any Jews who are unwanted where they live.
2. I think this means that since Israel calls itself a Jewish state, then it is responsible for antisemitism against Jews who live outside it done in the name of "anti-Zionism." That is absurd: antisemitism is the fault of the antisemites, and believing their ever-morphing excuses for their hate is playing into their hands.
The other arguments in the letter are also tired, like conflating legitimate criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Zionism, which is by definition eliminationist. These same anti-Zionists were against Israel's existence as a Jewish state even before the 2018 Nation-State Law that they are so worked up about.
Or their claim that Israel is illegitimate because it is "colonialist." Even if you accept that false argument, do they call for the dismantling of Australia, the US and Canada as well?
The implication of the response is that Jews are not really a nation, which we have discussed is antisemitic at the outset. If the Jewish people are a nation - which was universally understood over the two-thousand years of exile, by both Jews and non-Jews - then they have national rights. If they have national rights, then any alleged crimes do not take away those rights; if you argue otherwise then every Arab Muslim nation is illegitimate, and a Palestinian state would be invalid at the outset.
The rules are always different for the Jewish state. And that is what makes anti-Zionism antisemitism. Pointing out these double standards isn't whataboutism - it is evidence of the antisemitism at the core of the arguments themselves.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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