Earlier this week on my Substack I promised a follow-up on whether to write “anti-Zionism” or “antizionism.” The follow-up grew into something much larger.)
In the 1870s Wilhelm Marr needed a better word. “Jew-hatred” — Judenhass — named the thing too plainly, carried the stink of the mob and the medieval church, and marked its holder as a relic. So he reached for a clinical substitute built from Greek and Latin, founded a League of Antisemites, and gave the world “anti-Semitism.” It was the same hatred masquerading as a legitimate, even scientific position. Many Europeans could now profess anti-Semitism the way they might profess a position on tariffs, as the considered conclusion of a serious person rather than the reflex of a bigot.
A century later the heirs of that hatred needed the same favor in reverse. While the term never took hold in English speaking countries as anything but prejudice, the Holocaust had made “anti-Semitism” toxic, a prejudice a respectable person could not own in public. So the hatred required a new address, a category that sounded like a stance rather than a sickness.
It found one in opposition to the Jewish state.
“Anti-Zionism” arrived already dressed for the part. It named a real object, Zionism, and opposition to an object reads as politics, the proper business of citizens. The maneuver was Marr’s maneuver run a second time: take the same animus and move it into whatever vocabulary the age treats as legitimate. Marr fled religion for science. His heirs fled the post-war horror of “anti-semitism” for the safety of “politics.”
The move succeeded by construction rather than accident.
In the first decades after 1948, irrational hatred of Israel was understood, by the ordinary person and by the chancelleries alike, as the old hatred wearing a flag. The American Council for Judaism opposed Zionism on principle and remained marginal, a curiosity rather than a movement. When Arab spokesmen insisted they bore no grudge against Jews and quarreled only with Zionists, the disclaimer was received as the propaganda everyone knew it to be — the Arab League boycott of those years targeted Jewish-owned firms worldwide, not only Israeli ones. The line between a legitimate critic and an eliminationist was visible to the naked eye, and almost no one mistook one for the other.
Moscow started erasing that line. During the mid-1960s negotiations over the international convention against racial discrimination, the US and Israel tried to include antisemitism as something to be condemned; the Soviet Union refused to allow that unless Zionism was condemned alongside it, along with Naziism and apartheid. In the end, the ICERD condemned neither to avoid the conflict, but the seed was planted to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. After 1967 Moscow intensified the campaign, recasting Israel as the moral heir of the persecutor it had so recently escaped. The rhetoric matured into United Nations Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination, and which the General Assembly passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The resolution was repealed in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, but the association lived on. The equation migrated out of the Soviet bloc and into the academy and the human-rights NGO, where it shed its Cold War accent and acquired the idiom of decolonization. There the hatred completed its costume change: from a sickness one had to deny, to a politics one could defend, to a virtue one could parade.
That migration is the campaign whose half-success we now live inside. The modern anti-Zionist no longer denies the charge of hatred in the embarrassed tone of the 1950s Arab diplomat. He preempts it. Every article carries the disclaimer, every placard the mantra — “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” — repeated with a discipline that would impress any marketing department, and a growing share of the audience has come to believe it. The bolder ones complete the inversion the Soviets drafted and announce that Zionism is the true bigotry, that the Jews who insist on a state are the racists. The Big Lie method works. The line that once stood in plain view, between the man who criticizes Israel and the man who wants it gone, has been deliberately smudged until much of the public can no longer find it.
The question is, how do we restore that line?
There are three options. Each has a real advantage and a real cost, but they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is to call the hatred by its name and say plainly that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. The advantage is that it is true, and true at the root, because the thing that animates the obsessive hatred of the one Jewish state is the same thing that animated the obsessive hatred of the Jew next door for two thousand years. The cost is that the enemy has spent sixty years inoculating the public against exactly this sentence. He hears “that is antisemitic,” reaches for the prepared rebuttal, and the exchange collapses into a meta-argument about whether the accuser is weaponizing the term — which is itself the victory, since the oxygen meant to counter the hatred gets spent instead on the accusation.When a bigot denies his bigotry, the level of proof needed to refute him is quite high, and this ends up moving the argument into a distraction.
The second is to defend Zionism as the moral and legitimate thing it is, and to turn the enemy’s own word against him. This is my preference, because it concedes nothing. The whole force of “anti-Zionism” as a shelter depends on Zionism being a fair target, an ideology one may decently oppose; the moment Zionism is restored to what it is — the national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning home — opposition to it stands revealed as opposition to that people’s existence, which is the hatred under a thin coat. The cost is that the coat has been painted on for decades. “Zionist” has been so thoroughly poisoned that to defend Zionism is to fight uphill against a meaning the enemy has spent a half-century manufacturing. This battle is also hard. The battle cannot be abandoned, because to abandon it is to concede the enemy’s central premise that Zionism is the kind of thing a good person opposes.
Here my own definition of antisemitism does its sharpest work, because it locates Zionism where it belongs, inside Judaism rather than beside it. Zionism is an expression of Jewishness no less central than religion, culture, or descent — the longing for return is woven through the liturgy and the calendar millennia before it became a political program — and an attack on it is therefore an attack on an aspect of the Jewish whole. Most Jews today do not keep kosher, yet a campaign to ban shechita is recognized as antisemitic without difficulty, because the prevalence of a practice has never been the measure of whether hatred of it targets Jews. Zionism stands in the same relation to Jewish identity, and hostility to it is antisemitic on the same logic, whatever the proportion of Jews who happen to be Zionists or live in Israel.
The line falls between criticism that means to repair and criticism that means to wound. Honest critique aimed at improving the thing is legitimate for both — the agunah problem, the plight of the woman chained to a dead marriage, is a serious criticism of Jewish law made by people who love the law and want it mended, and criticism of an Israeli policy by people who want Israel to be better stands on exactly the same footing. Sharansky’s three Ds mark where repair ends and hatred begins: demonization, delegitimization, and the double standard. The agunah critic trips none of them. The campaign against the Jewish state trips all three.
The political costume fails the same test that exposes the welfare argument against shechita. When a European parliament bans Jewish ritual slaughter on grounds of animal welfare while leaving hunting untouched, the welfare concern is revealed as pretext by what it declines to prohibit; the principle is selectively applied to land precisely on the Jewish practice. That selectivity is Sharansky’s double standard in miniature, and anti-Zionism dressed as principled politics performs the identical sleight on a global scale. The professed concern for human rights, self-determination, and the rest finds its single uncompromising application in the one Jewish state, and the selectivity gives the game away. Any move that admits anti-Zionism as legitimate political expression is as disingenuous as crediting the hunting enthusiast with tender feelings for the welfare of animals.
The third way is to change the playing field. “Anti-Zionism” is now a loaded term because the haters have made Zionism a loaded term. This new fight intends to change the nomenclature to “antizionism,” closed and unhyphenated, as the scholars and activists now naming it have done, because the closed form makes it easier to show that what wears the mask of politics is hatred underneath. Anti-Zionism is indeed a hate movement but the haters who apply that term to themselves deny it; by calling it “antizionism” the haters cannot counter it because they don’t accept that term for themselves. The fighters against antizionism are able to create their own definition that can bring the stigma back to “anti-Zionism” since the words are pronounced the same.
This is where the lexical comparison to antisemitism is relevant. Using the older term “anti-Semitism” opened up accusers to the spurious charge that Arabs are Semites (or Jews are not Semites) and therefore they cannot be considered anti-Semites. It was an attempt to distract from the actual meaning of the word and unhyphenating it showed that it is its own word, unrelated to semitism. “Antizionism” does the same - it separates the word from Zionism itself and moves the argument away from endless discussions about the minutiae of the history of Zionism and into a new territory, where it is much more clearly a term of bigotry.
The cost of this move is that it implicitly concedes the pro-Zionism argument. Those who use “antizionism” are not defending Zionism, they are calling out a hate movement. Moreover, to name antizionism as its own distinct thing concedes, by the grammar of the move, that it might be something other than antisemitism — which may hand these modern antisemites a victory
This is why my own old instinct ran the other way. Years ago I coined “misoziony” — hate of Israel built from the Greek root for hatred — to point out that this is just as irrational as traditional antisemitism is. Misoziony is no more moral than racism or misogyny. The verdict is built in to its own body. The term never spread, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it was right: my blog was too small to mint vocabulary, the prefix means nothing to an English ear, and no one was sure how to pronounce it. The lesson is not that coinage fails but that naming is hard for reasons orthogonal to truth, and that the word which already owns the public’s stigma will always start the race far ahead of the word that must build its own. (”Israelophobia” falls at the same hurdle and one more, because the dominant emotion is hatred and not fear, so the word mislabels the thing at its root.)
Set the three side by side and you see that they all have pluses and minuses. Calling it antisemitism is the truth-claim, but it bounces when the targets deny it. Shifting to “antizionism” is the tactical entry, but it implicitly concedes the war over the morality of Zionism when it stands alone. The defense of Zionism alone is the most comprehensive and least possible of the three, an impractical one in today’s environment.
But it isn’t a menu where you must pick one. Each strategy has its place, depending on the audience and the medium.
I will continue to use the term “anti-Zionism” because I defend Zionism as much as I denounce anti-Zionists as antisemites. I refuse to concede that battle.
Others, like the ICSA and Movement Against Antizionism, see antizionism as its own pathology disconnected from Zionism. They are not wrong: Antizionists use Zionism as a bogeyman to direct their hate of Jewish national rights, and since these groups’ tactics are to go on the offensive, “antizionism” works well for them. Defending Zionism, for them, is a distraction from their missions.
My only disagreement is that the term “antizionism” may also implicitly cede the other argument, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By studying it or fighting it as its own phenomenon, it can be seen as admitting that antizionism is unrelated to the world’s oldest hate, not merely a new flavor. If we can agree that antizionism is in fact a straight line descendant of the entire catalog of other antisemitisms, then we are on the same page. This is not a question of tactics - it would be a distraction for these organizations to expand their missions to fighting antisemitism, and there are plenty of others who (claim to) do that. I just want to make sure that the new antisemites who claim to only hate a political movement are still, in the end, recognized as antisemites, across the board, from all of us fighting the good fight, even if that is not where the argument is made.
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