Stop making excuses for anti-Zionism.
The problem is not that anti-Zionism criticizes Israel. It is what anti-Zionism ultimately demands.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Many people have become remarkably skilled at explaining away anti-Zionism.
They do not hate Jews, we are told. They only hate the Israeli government.
They do not object to Jewish safety. They simply oppose nationalism.
They do not support Hamas. They merely understand the anger that produced it.
They do not want Israelis expelled. They just want “Palestine” to be free “from the river to the sea.”
They do not oppose Jewish self-determination. They simply believe that the one Jewish state on Earth should no longer exist as a Jewish state.
Every time anti-Zionism reveals what it actually means, someone rushes in to translate it into something more respectable.
Enough.
It is time to stop judging anti-Zionism by the gentlest possible interpretation of its rhetoric and start judging it by its principles, its double standards, and the political reality it seeks to create.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Debate about an Israeli government is not antisemitism. Supporting Palestinian rights is not antisemitism. Being inquisitive about a military operation, a settlement policy, a coalition partner, or a prime minister is not antisemitism.
Anti-Zionism is something different.
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish People have the right to collective self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism is the rejection of that right.
That does not mean every Zionist supports every Israeli policy. Zionism is not a position on certain Israeli politicians, Gaza, settlements, or the precise borders of a prospective Palestinian state. It is a position on whether the Jewish People are entitled to political existence at all.
Anti-Zionism answers no, unequivocally. And we need to stop pretending that answer is harmless.
The excuse that anti-Zionism is only criticism of Israel is the most common defense because it relies on deliberately blurring two entirely different ideas.
Israel is a country. Its government makes decisions. Those decisions can be debated, condemned, and reversed. Zionism is the principle that Jews are a people with a right to govern ourselves in some portion of our historic homeland.
Criticizing Israel asks what the Jewish state should do. Anti-Zionism asks whether there should be a Jewish state at all. These are not variations of the same argument.
When someone moves from “Israel is doing something wrong” to “Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state,” the subject has changed. The argument is no longer about conduct. It is about legitimacy. No other country is expected to justify its continued existence every time anew.
China is not threatened with dissolution because of its repression. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not cause respectable institutions to debate whether Russia should cease to exist. Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds does not lead activists to demand the dismantling of Turkey. The United States’ history has not created a mainstream movement insisting that Americans surrender national sovereignty.
Governments are condemned. Policies are opposed. Leaders are removed. Only in the case of Israel does criticism so quickly become an argument for national erasure.
Some anti-Zionists claim that they oppose all nationalism. In theory, that can be a coherent philosophical position. A person may genuinely believe that humanity should transcend borders, flags and nation-states. But this defense deserves scrutiny, not automatic respect. Does the person opposing Jewish nationalism also oppose Palestinian nationalism? Kurdish nationalism? Ukrainian nationalism? Indigenous sovereignty? National liberation movements everywhere?
Or does universalism suddenly appear only when Jews seek national protection?
Many people who condemn Zionism as an unacceptable form of nationalism enthusiastically support Palestinian national aspirations. They celebrate national liberation in almost every other context. They defend the right of peoples to preserve their culture, language, history, and connection to land.
Then they reach the Jews. Suddenly, peoplehood becomes a fiction. Ancestral connection becomes mythology. Self-determination becomes supremacy. National survival becomes colonialism. The standard changes precisely when Jews become the subject. That is not opposition to nationalism. It is opposition to Jewish nationalism.
A person who rejects every nation-state may be philosophically consistent. But such people are rare. Far more common are those who support national self-determination for everyone except the Jewish People and then hide the exception beneath universal language.
Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People. That does not mean only Jews may live there, vote there, serve in government, or enjoy civil rights. It means the state exists partly to secure Jewish self-determination, just as many countries reflect the language, culture, and national identity of a majority people.
The existence of a Jewish state does not inherently require the oppression of non-Jews any more than the existence of a French state requires the oppression of non-French citizens. Israel can and should be judged on whether it protects equality under the law. Its failures should be confronted honestly. But the concept of Jewish national sovereignty is not made illegitimate merely because a national minority also lives within the state.
The same activists who insist that Palestinians constitute a people entitled to sovereignty often insist that Jews are merely followers of a religion and therefore have no comparable national rights. But Jews did not become a people in the 19th century to win a political argument. Jewish peoplehood is older than Christianity and Islam. Jews maintained a common identity, collective memory, legal tradition, liturgy, and attachment to the Land of Israel across centuries of exile.
Judaism is a religion, but Jews are not only a religious denomination.
Anti-Zionism often depends on reducing Jewish identity to faith alone because once Jews are recognized as a people, the question becomes uncomfortable: Why should this people alone be denied self-determination?
Not every anti-Zionist wakes up hating Jews. Motive matters, but motive is not the only thing that matters. An ideology can discriminate in structure even when its supporters describe themselves as compassionate. Anti-Zionism takes the most persecuted people in recorded history and argues that their exercise of collective power is uniquely illegitimate. It tells Jews that they may be tolerated as individuals but not recognized as a people capable of governing themselves.
They may pray, but not protect themselves. They may remember Jerusalem, but not return to it. They may celebrate Jewish culture, but not exercise Jewish sovereignty. They may survive at the mercy of other nations, but they may not build a nation capable of defending Jewish survival. This is why anti-Zionism so often becomes indistinguishable from antisemitism in practice.
Jewish schools, synagogues, businesses, and cultural events are targeted over the “actions of Israel.” We are required to denounce Zionism before entering certain spaces. We are asked to prove their moral worth by separating themselves from the world’s largest Jewish community. “Zionist” becomes a replacement word that allows old hostility toward Jews to be expressed in contemporary political language.
The target is supposedly an ideology. Yet somehow the intimidation keeps reaching Jewish people.
Some Jews are anti-Zionists. That is true. It proves only that Jews, like every other people, disagree with one another. A Jewish person can support an idea that harms Jewish interests. A woman can defend misogyny. A member of a minority can repeat prejudices about that minority. Identity does not make an argument correct, consistent, or harmless.
Jewish participation can provide anti-Zionist movements with moral cover, but it does not resolve the underlying question: Does the Jewish People have the same right to national self-determination as other peoples?
A Jewish anti-Zionist may answer no. The speaker’s ancestry does not make the answer less discriminatory. Nor should a small number of highly visible Jewish activists be treated as more representative than the millions of Jews who live in Israel or the countless diaspora Jews who regard Israel as central to Jewish security and identity.
Too often, Jewish anti-Zionists are elevated precisely because they tell hostile audiences what those audiences want to hear: that Jewish fear is exaggerated, Jewish history is irrelevant, and the destruction of Jewish sovereignty would somehow liberate everyone.
They are free to believe that. The rest of us are free to stop treating their identity as the end of the argument.
Anti-Zionists often describe their goal in soothing terms: one democratic state, equal rights for everyone, no ethno-nationalism, and no discrimination. It sounds beautiful because the difficult questions are left unanswered.
What happens to Israel’s Jewish national institutions? What happens to the Law of Return? What happens to Jewish control over immigration, defense, and security? What happens when Jews become a minority inside a state shared with populations shaped by generations of war?
Who disarms Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and other terror groups? Who guarantees that Jews will not again become dependent on the goodwill of rulers who may turn against them? What happens to the millions of Israeli Jews who have no other country, including families expelled or driven from nations across the Middle East and North Africa?
“Equal rights” is not an implementation plan. The demand to dismantle Israel is frequently presented as though it were an administrative reorganization rather than the forced termination of an existing country. Israel will not disappear because a university panel adopts a resolution. Jewish sovereignty cannot be abolished without defeating the state, dismantling its institutions and overcoming the resistance of millions of its citizens.
That requires coercion.
Anti-Zionism rarely explains how its vision could be imposed because the answer would expose the violence hidden beneath its humanitarian vocabulary. Israelis are not going to volunteer to become defenseless because foreign activists promise that everything will work out. Jewish history has made such promises difficult to trust.
October 7th revealed the moral consequences of anti-Zionism more clearly than any academic debate could.
More than one thousand Israelis were murdered, kidnapped, and terrorized. Yet before the victims had even been identified, people across the world began explaining the attack as resistance. The atrocities were not denied only by fringe conspiracists. They were contextualized, minimized and treated as the inevitable result of Israeli existence. This is what happens when a population is taught that Israel is not merely flawed but illegitimate.
If Israel is a colonial intrusion, then Israelis become settlers. If Israelis are settlers, then their civilian status becomes negotiable. Their homes become stolen territory. Their communities become military targets. Their deaths become acts of liberation. Anti-Zionism creates the moral vocabulary through which violence against Jews can be transformed into justice.
Not every anti-Zionist celebrated October 7th. Some condemned the killing of civilians, but too many immediately followed their condemnation with a “but,” as if Jewish victims needed to be placed on trial before they could be mourned. The issue was not simply a lack of empathy. It was the logical result of an ideology that treats Jewish sovereignty as the original crime. Once Israel’s existence becomes the crime, almost anything done against Israelis can be portrayed as a response.
The answer for Palestinians is not to deny Jewish history, erase Jewish nationhood, or dismantle the Jewish state. Recognizing Jewish self-determination does not require indifference toward Palestinians. Supporting Palestinian dignity does not require opposition to Jewish sovereignty.
Anti-Zionism does not solve the conflict. It avoids compromise by declaring one side’s national claim fundamentally illegitimate. It does not ask how Jews and Arabs can share the Middle East. It decides that Jewish sovereignty is the obstacle and imagines that removing it will produce justice. That is not coexistence. It is victory disguised as equality.
Anti-Zionists often insist that their goal is liberation, justice, or human rights. Perhaps many sincerely believe that, but noble language does not exempt an ideology from examination. What matters is not only what anti-Zionists say they want. What matters is what their program requires:
Jews to surrender the sovereign power that protects them
Israel to accept that its creation was illegitimate
Millions of Israelis to place their future in a political experiment they overwhelmingly reject.
Us to believe that dismantling the only Jewish state will somehow make Jews safer in a region where armed groups openly call for our destruction
A standard applied to no other people — that Jews may possess history, culture, memory, and religion, but not political power
We should stop making excuses for that. We should stop pretending the movement is only criticizing a government when it seeks to abolish a country. We should stop accepting claims of universalism from people whose universal principles end precisely where Jewish rights begin. We should stop allowing the word “Zionist” to function as a socially acceptable substitute for Jew. And we should stop acting as though Jewish self-determination is an embarrassment that must be defended apologetically.
Jewish sovereignty is not uniquely illegitimate. The Jewish People do not need permission to exist as a people. We do not need to apologize for surviving. And we do not need to surrender our country to prove that we deserve one.
Excellent article.
At some point, we need to stop allowing people the luxury of playing semantic games. Zionism simply means that the Jewish people have the right to a homeland and national self-determination. Anti-Zionism means opposing that. It's really that straightforward.
Instead of endlessly debating labels, we should ask one simple question: Do you believe the Jewish people have the same right to a homeland and national self-determination as every other people? If the answer is no, then you know exactly the kind of person you're dealing with—someone who is anti-Israel and antisemitic. It's as simple as that.
In addition, we spend far too much time qualifying the discussion by saying, "Of course you can criticize Israel or its government." In a democracy, that goes without saying. The real issue is never criticism of Israeli politics. It's whether Jews alone should be denied the right that so many other peoples are granted without question.
The bottom line is fairly straightforward. An anti-Zionist believes that one Jewish state is one too many. They would rather send the Jewish people, worldwide by the way, back to 1939. Better In their eyes for Jews to be stateless, defenseless and at the mercy of the first tyrant to come down the pike. But don’t call them antisemites. Heaven forbid…