News Flash: If you hate most Jews, you are a Nazi.
"Anti-Zionism" is antisemitism, period.
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This is a guest essay written by Mallory Mosner.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
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Is there anything more asinine than someone saying: “I’m not antisemitic, I just hate Zionists!”
Some basic math for those whose brains have not rotted from infectious, rabid Jew-hatred: About half of the world’s Jews live in Israel, and while there’s no perfect survey to capture the exact percentage of Zionists in the Diaspora, most research indicates the vast majority of Jews (usually estimated at 85-to-90 percent) worldwide support Israel.
For those who have not taken a statistics class in a while, or never received an education in basic math, hating the majority of an entire people definitely qualifies as, you know, hating that group of people. (You know: bigotry, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, oh my!)
To put it in terms that may serve your political view of the world, it would be like saying that you do not have a problem with all African people, just the ones that classify themselves as African Americans.
To be very clear on terms here, Zionism means the right to self-determination on ancestral homeland for Jewish people, who are indigenous to Israel (though most of us were forced into the diaspora through multiple devastating, violent conquests, including the Arab empire in the 7th century). This is an indisputable fact, validated by vast archaeological, historical, genealogical, and cultural evidence (aside from the fact that Jewish people have continuously lived in Israel for thousands of years.
But the virulent, insidious neo-Nazi rhetoric that collectively demonizes Jews and Israel is propagated through all kinds of absurdities and mental gymnastics, so let’s address and debunk some of the major talking points of an “anti-Zionist” Nazi:
1) “It is not antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel!”
I love this one, mainly because the vast majority of the imbeciles who say this are hilariously conflating “criticizing” a country with demanding that the entire country ceases to exist.
It is an irrational leap that takes not only blinding hatred, immense privilege and audacity, but also requires a willful ignorance of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who continuously protested their own right-wing government for months until October 7th.
Please, do think of a single other example where not only are the entire people of a nation held accountable for their government (which enormous swaths of them actively organize against), but their entire race all over the world is also collectively punished for that government — and no, you silly goose, examples like Japanese internment do not count (even though the people who enacted that policy in World War II have pretty much been reincarnated through the voraciously violent, racist anti-Zionists).
I am looking for a contemporary example. I’ll wait…
Seriously, can you imagine if the entire world advocated for constant repeats of 9/11 until America was completely obliterated, just because Donald Trump or Barack Obama was our president, or because of what America did to Black and Native people?
Why do you think the only Jewish country in the entire world (one in 195 countries, and just 0.02 percent of the global population) is “criticized” as a proxy for the murder and displacement of all its people, when the most violent and barbarous countries and empires of this century are not only allowed to exist without question, but enjoy spots on the United Nations’ so-called Security Council?
Hint: These double-standards are ignored because Jews are involved, and people love dead Jews, as Dara Horn reminded us with her brilliant 2021 book.
2) When is the last time you heard of a global movement to annihilate an entire country, other than Israel?
They should add a mental gymnastics category to the Olympics, because Western saviors would take the gold medal. The cognitive dissonance it takes to foam at the mouth about Western intervention in the Middle East, only to literally devote your entire personality and all your time to destroying an entire country is absolutely, hilariously mind-boggling.
We know that China has been committing genocide against the Uyghurs, and yet these leftist “activists” happily buy everything from Apple products to Shein, manufactured in China, and give plenty of extra dough to the Chinese government as they erode their brains with QAnon and communist propaganda on TikTok.
Fascinatingly, not only have I not heard calls to boycott China, but I have not heard a single proposal that the entire Chinese state be abolished, despite their lengthy and continuous violent imperialism.
I would love to take a moment to note here the two definitions of what most Hamas supporters mean when they call for a “Free Palestine” — you know by now — “from the river to the sea.” Aside from the fact that most of these nimrods do not even know which river or sea they are chanting about, the options for said “Free Palestine” are almost universally for either ethnic cleansing or genocide against Jews.
I will save you some time by informing you that virtually none of these people are advocating for the two-state solution, which is what most Jewish people favor, i.e. peace and sovereignty for both Palestinians and Jews.
Instead they want to grant Palestinians their own single Hamas- or Palestinian Islamic Jihad-run ethno-state, whereby they can gleefully, institutionally fulfill their original charter: to kill all the Jews. Of course, the leftists who argued that killing the Israeli (i.e. Jewish) babies on October 7th was justified because they were “future IDF soldiers” are among the throngs of internet troglodytes who claim that it would be indeed warranted if Palestinians “decided” to kill all the Jews upon taking back their “rightful” ownership of the state.
Cue: yada yada, cold brew, meth, pink hair, Marxism, “rape is resistance,” daddy never loved me, yada yada.
Hypothetically, notwithstanding the historical revisionism on the Left that imagines Jews in Islamic countries as being “peaceful” before Israel’s modern statehood was granted in 1948, even if there was a one-state solution that had Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Palestinian Authority “coexisting” with Jews, the very best case scenario is what happens to other minorities in Islamist countries. Go ahead and research how it is to be a Copt in Egypt, or a Kurd in Iraq.
And by the way, most Israeli Jews coexist very nicely with the 20 percent of Arab Israelis who are also not interested in Islamist rule or a caliphate (and just to clarify, those Arab Israelis have full and equal rights to Jews in Israel, although there is some room for improvement, like there is in every society on Earth).
But the overwhelming majority of Gazans who supported the attack on October 7th do not inspire confidence that a single state, offered in presumably a surrender from Israel (hahaha) to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would be peaceful or safe for Jews.
The other option our modern-day Nazis suggest is that Jews need to “go back to Poland where they came from,” despite the fact that the majority group of ethnic Jews in Israel are Mizrahim who were in the Middle East and North African countries (which Jews have generally been banned from after mass persecution and genocides). This logic also disregards hundreds of thousands of Beta Israel Jews who fled Ethiopia, Bene Israel Jews from India, and many more non-Ashkenazi Jews whose families never set foot in Europe.
And that’s all aside from the fact that Poland, which exterminated its Ashkenazi Jewish population in the Holocaust (though Ashkenazim are also Middle Eastern and indigenous to Israel, and only wound up in Europe through forced Diaspora, including enslavement during Roman conquest), passed a bill only a few years ago criminalizing accusations that Poland was any way complicit or accountable in perpetrating the Holocaust.
When they say “send Jews back to Poland,” what they mean is: “We want another Holocaust to kill you all.” Some of them are at least honest enough to say what they mean and do the sieg heil (Nazi German for “hail victory”) without attempting to hide behind any kind of moral virtue.
3) “My Palestinian grandmother is older than your made-up state!”
Now this one is a bit of a head-scratcher. Despite the fact that there has literally never been a Palestinian state, you will often hear people flexing that Israel should not exist because … its official, contemporary statehood is only 76 years old?
Here is why that’s very bizarro, reader: More than 100 (over half) of the 195 countries in the world today were created on or after 1948!
I am bewildered by this notion that Israel is a “made-up state,” as though every border of every nation is not technically “made up.” This is the kind of reductive #NaziMath that only makes sense when you are selectively trying to vilify and condemn something because it involves Jewish people. (In other words, you are an antisemite.)
The ethno-genesis of the Jewish People originates in Israel more than 3,000 years ago. Sorry, but your Palestinian grandma is not 3,000 years old; there are thousands-year-old Hebrew coins from the Kingdom of Israel with “Israel” on them (among countless other artifacts and archaeological and historical sites).
Just because you do not like the fact that Israel is and has been the Jewish homeland does not mean that you are permitted to employ historical revisionism to make it sound like Jews are “settler colonizers” in our own land.
4) “Ethno-states are fascist and wrong, and therefore Israel has no right to exist!”
Relating to that last point, the mental gymnasts do all kind of backflips as they base one part of their identity on yelling “Land back!” in the West and preceding their Marxist screeds with land acknowledgments, while simultaneously spewing nonsense about how ethno-states are wrong in the case of Israel, which alone stands as a grave enough offense for it to cease existing.
When one ponders, for example, where all non-Native Americans go if there was to be full “land back” and an established American country (with borders and all!) that was only for Native Americans (AKA an ethno-state), the drug-addled responses usually range from somewhere between “Everyone would go back to where they came from!” to “We would go out into the woods to establish non-Native societies and give the cities and parks as autonomous states back to the Native people!” (Who is going to tell them?)
These are fantasylands constructed in the minds of bored, overeducated, privileged lunatics with low self-esteem, no less a deep will to scapegoat and harm Jews. These same useful idiots who parrot and consume propaganda like it is candy prefer to infantilize Arabs and Muslims (who in their minds would never do anything bad or wrong unless they were absolutely forced to by evil Jews and the irredeemable West), thus turning a blind eye to the fact that most states in existence are ethno-states, and there are already more than 50 Muslim ethno-states in the world.
“Palestine” would, of course, be another one!
And this is how we circle back on the double-standards that are at the root of much of the most flagrant antisemitism: Aside from the fact that Israel is exceptionally diverse and possesses a pluralistic population of many different ethnicities, religions and identities, Jews are not allowed to have any influence over a state for us to live safely in our homeland, simply because people hate Jews.
5) “Judaism has nothing to do with Israel!”
“Israel” literally appears thousands of times in the Torah, which is the most sacred text of Judaism.
As previously mentioned, Jews have maintained a continuous, albeit painstaking presence in our holy land for thousands of years, because the land of Israel is precious to us. Jews travel from all around the world to pray and cry at the Western Wall, the remains of our most holy Temple, destroyed twice by violent empires.
The Shema is the most sacred prayer in Judaism; the second word in the Shema is “Israel.” Whether it is Hanukkah, Passover, or Tu Bishvat, there is nary a Jewish holiday that does not effectively center Israel; when we pray, we pray towards our Temple in Jerusalem.
Those of us whose ancestors were forced into the Jewish Diaspora yearned to return home. And yet, for the same reason that most leftists do not demand that refugees return home to places where they are actively being persecuted and hunted, for a very long time, returning to Israel was not an option.
But Israel as our homeland has remained an active, daily, deep spiritual yearning and a cornerstone of Jewish life, prayer, and tradition — for thousands of years. And no assimilated self-loathing “as a Jew” (who grew up believing that Judaism is only bagels and “Seinfeld”) has the right, the authority, or the credibility to decide that Israel means anything else to Jews and Judaism outside of what it has been for thousands of years.
6) “But I have a Jewish friend who is an anti-Zionist, and they said anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!”
Remember from 2016 to 2020, when the widespread “social justice” awakening had people learning about all kinds of intersectional social justice topics, including the concept of “the token”?
We all learned that it is practically a hate crime to tokenize [insert minority] that validates your perspective, if that is not the experience of the majority of [that minority]. People took notes, and started to do “the work” to try to be more open-minded and not talk over minorities.
First of all, I can say with great confidence that your “Jewish Voice for Peace” friends — if they are actually even Jewish — are not only exceptionally self-loathing and actively harmful minorities within the Jewish community, but they are likely to have the most assimilated Jewish identities that are the most dissociated from Jewish tradition.
That is all to say, no one gives even a quarter of a sh*t about what your token Jew shill says in order to make their Nazi friends like them and think they are “one of the good ones.”
Despite these troubled, spoiled duds who would eagerly champion the deaths of millions of people just like them for conditional acceptance from other pseudo-intellectual Nazis, there already is a formal definition of what “antisemitism” actually is — and non-Jews and their goyish token “pick me’s” do not get to rewrite that.
By the way, for anyone who has heard the “but Palestinians are Semites too” nonsense, please understand that the term “antisemitism” was uniquely and specifically coined to refer to anti-Jewish hatred; “Semites” are not a people, but otherwise generally a reference to Semitic languages — including Hebrew, the language Jews have been speaking and reading in our Torah for thousands of years, the language closest to that of the Canaanites in the region we are indigenous to.
All of this to say, if someone is fixated with the only Jewish state in the world, while silent about atrocities elsewhere, they are antisemitic.
If someone is calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state, they are antisemitic.
If someone is spreading blood libels and disinformation about the Jewish state, they are antisemitic.
If someone is collectively holding Jews everywhere responsible for the war that Hamas started, they are antisemitic.
If someone is dehumanizing Israelis, they are antisemitic.
If you are non-Jewish and spend even a millisecond of your time defending why you are an anti-Zionist, congratulations, you are a 21st-century Nazi.
History will look upon you as such. May you have precisely the life you deserve.
Most excellent piece. Insightful, beautifully written and with just the right amount of FU to the empty-headed demi-wits. Am Israel Chai baby 😎🇮🇱
This is gold.