Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism

The argument requires precision about what is being opposed. The slogan does much of its work by holding the meaning of "Zionism" deliberately loose.

Zionism, in its original and continuing meaning, is the proposition that the Jewish people, like other peoples, are entitled to national self-determination, and that the proper site of that self-determination is the historic territory of the Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean. It is not a single political program; it has encompassed religious and secular variants, socialist and revisionist variants, expansionist and territorial-compromise variants, theocratic and liberal-democratic variants. What unifies it is the claim of Jewish peoplehood and the entailment of self-determination, on equal terms with the claims to peoplehood and self-determination of other groups ¹⁶¹⁷.

Anti-Zionism, correspondingly defined, is opposition to this proposition. In its post-1948 forms, opposition to the proposition has had to take the form of opposition to its realization: opposition to the existence of the state in which Jewish self-determination is exercised. Anti-Zionism today is in its dominant forms the position that the State of Israel ought not to exist, or ought to be dismantled, or ought to be replaced by a different polity in which the Jewish national character of the existing state is dissolved.

Even in this strong form, anti-Zionism is not a single ideology but a family of related positions. It includes liberal binationalism (Jewish-Arab one-state arrangements within a single democratic framework, in the tradition of Brit Shalom in the 1920s–40s), religious anti-nationalism (the Satmar Hasidic and Neturei Karta theological position, awaiting Messianic restoration), revolutionary anti-imperialism (treating Israel as a Western imperial outpost to be dismantled as part of a broader anti-imperial struggle), eliminationist anti-Zionism (the explicit goal of replacing the Jewish state with a non-Jewish one and rejecting Jewish national self-determination anywhere), philosophical diasporism (the position articulated by Judith Butler and others, drawing on Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt), and academic decolonial frameworks (treating Israel as a settler-colonial polity to be unmade through decolonization processes). These positions differ substantially in motivation, projected outcome, treatment of Jewish flourishing, and rhetorical content. The rebuttal's analysis applies most directly to the structurally dominant activist and mass-political forms of contemporary anti-Zionism; those that have produced the empirical record discussed in section VI and that fail the diagnostic tests of sections II–IV. Some liberal binationalist positions, some religious anti-nationalist positions, and some philosophical positions including Butler's diasporism can hold the strong anti-Zionist view without exhibiting the diagnostic features of the activist mass movement; their position survives the rebuttal's analysis because their substance is different, not because they hold a different label.

This is also not the same as criticism of Israeli policy. Criticism of Israeli policy: settlement construction in the West Bank, the conduct of specific military operations, the treatment of Bedouin communities in the Negev, the rhetoric of particular ministers, the inadequacies of the Israeli welfare state, the underfunding of Arab municipalities, is the normal currency of democratic politics. Israelis themselves engage in it daily, vocally, and with considerable acrimony. It is not anti-Zionism. The conflation of policy criticism with opposition to Israeli existence is a recurrent move in contemporary discourse; it usually serves to make anti-Zionism appear more moderate than it is, and to make the defense of Zionism appear more illiberal than it is.

The position that is rebutted here is therefore the strong form, in its dominant activist and rhetorical expressions: opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, or to the principle of Jewish national self-determination of which it is the realization, in the rhetorical forms that fail the diagnostics of the next sections. The rebuttal is not to a moderate position dressed up as a strong one; nor is it to the philosophical and binationalist forms that the taxonomy above acknowledges may preserve the distinction. It is to the dominant strong position in its mass-political form.

The most influential framework for distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism is the 3D test, articulated by Natan Sharansky (former Soviet refusenik, political prisoner under the USSR, and Israeli minister) in The Case for Democracy (2004), drawing on an earlier Commentary essay ⁵⁶. The 3Ds are:

Demonization. Criticism crosses into antisemitism when it portrays Israel, or Zionism, or Israelis, in terms that exceed what is proportionate to the conduct being criticized, when Israel is compared to Nazi Germany, when Israeli soldiers are equated with SS officers, when ordinary Israelis are described in dehumanizing terms, when Israeli conduct is characterized through the imagery of medieval ritual murder. The criticism is no longer of conduct; it is of being.

Delegitimization. Criticism crosses into antisemitism when it denies Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state, when it treats Israeli existence as illegitimate per se, rather than treating specific Israeli policies or conduct as wrong. The right to exist is denied to no other state on Earth as a matter of structured political program; the assertion that Israel alone forfeits it is the antisemitic move.

Double Standards. Criticism crosses into antisemitism when it applies to Israel standards not applied to other states. The treatment of national minorities, the conduct of asymmetric warfare, the use of detention without trial, the response to terrorism, the resort to military force, the practices of border control: every one of these is the conduct of many states, and every state's conduct is properly criticized on its merits. When the criticism intensifies in volume, severity, or vocabulary uniquely for Israel, the differential is not a response to conduct. It is a response to identity.

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism (2016), the most widely adopted contemporary definition, gives explicit form to closely related principles. Among its illustrative examples of antisemitism are: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor"; "Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation"; "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis"; "Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel" ⁴. The definition is not law; it is a working tool used by governments, universities, and corporate actors to assess specific cases. Its illustrative examples are precisely the points at which criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism shade structurally into antisemitism, and they are not arbitrary inventions: they describe patterns documented across decades of research in the field.

The 3D test and the IHRA examples are not designed to suppress criticism of Israel. They are designed to identify a specific failure mode. They were articulated by Jewish thinkers and adopted by Jewish communities because the failure mode in question, anti-Israel discourse that smuggles antisemitism through the front door under the cover of political criticism, is one that Jewish communities have observed with great consistency and at great cost. Each of the test's components can be turned on actual cases. When that is done, mainstream contemporary anti-Zionism, as practiced in activist, academic, and media spaces, reliably triggers one or more of demonization, delegitimization, or double standards: frequently enough that the diagnostic is one of the most reliable indicators available that the slogan's claimed distinction is not, in the case at hand, being preserved.

The deepest structural difficulty for the slogan is the asymmetry. There are approximately 200 states on Earth. The great majority are nation-states of one kind or another: states that articulate themselves, in their constitutions, in their flags, in their national days, in their immigration laws, in their established religions or civil religions, as the political expression of a particular people. France is a French state; Japan is a Japanese state; Greece is a Greek state; Saudi Arabia is an Arab Islamic state; Ireland is an Irish state; Armenia is an Armenian state; Pakistan was constituted as a Muslim state. Some of these formulations are gentle and some are illiberal; some grant generous accommodation to internal minorities and some are harshly exclusive. None of them is currently the subject of a structured global political movement that asserts the state ought not to exist.

The Jewish state is the principal contemporary exception. Anti-Zionism, in its dominant contemporary form, is the position that the Jewish people alone, among the world's peoples, are not entitled to a state. It is not the position that nation-states are wrong in principle (a coherent if unusual cosmopolitan position, which would require its holders to oppose all of them). It is not the position that ethnically articulated states are wrong (which would require opposition to most of the states currently administering the international order, including states with worse records than Israel by available metrics). It is the position that this particular nation-state, formed for this particular people, is uniquely illegitimate.

The standard answer to this observation is that Israel is not uniquely targeted because of its identity but because of factors that would predict heightened scrutiny of any state in its position. The salience explanation has several variants: extensive Western military and diplomatic support, which gives Western publics a sense of complicity in Israeli conduct; geopolitical centrality in a region of strategic importance; religious significance to three major faiths; ongoing accessibility to media coverage; alliance relationships that implicate Western foreign policy. The rejoinder is real and deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissal.

The answer has two parts. The first concerns scale. Comparative quantitative analyses (NGO Monitor's documentation of NGO funding patterns and reporting volumes, UN Watch's documentation of UN Human Rights Council resolutions, content analyses of major Western media) consistently show attention to Israel exceeding what salience factors would predict by margins of one to two orders of magnitude. The UN Human Rights Council has, in many recent years, devoted more critical resolutions to Israel than to all other states combined, including states that share Israel's salience features and have substantially worse human rights records (Saudi Arabia, a Western ally with religious significance; Iran, a regional power with extensive Western entanglement; Russia, an existential strategic concern; China, an economic and military superpower with mass-scale ongoing human rights violations) ⁴⁷⁴⁸. Salience predicts elevated attention; it does not predict attention at the magnitudes observed.

The second part concerns the strongest comparative counter-case: apartheid South Africa. South Africa was, between approximately 1960 and 1990, the subject of a structured global delegitimization campaign comparable in form to the contemporary anti-Israel mobilization: UN resolutions, sports boycotts, academic boycotts, divestment movements, characterizations of the state itself as illegitimate. The South African case is real and the comparative argument is honestly available; it is the strongest objection to any uniqueness claim about Israel. It is also significantly different in structural respects that matter for the present analysis. The South African delegitimization campaign was coextensive with the formal racial apartheid regime as constituted law. It largely ended with the constitutional transition of 1994, after which the campaign collapsed and South Africa was reintegrated into international institutions, the campaign did not survive democratization. The Israel campaign has no such structural feature. It has continued with consistent intensity across many changes of Israeli government (left and right, dovish and hawkish), across the Oslo process and its collapse, across periods of active negotiation and periods of stasis, across the unilateral 2005 Gaza disengagement and its aftermath. Its persistence is largely uncoupled from changes in the state's policy in a way the South African campaign was not. The comparative case demonstrates that structured delegitimization campaigns happen; it also demonstrates that, in the South African case, the campaign tracked the specific structural feature (formal racial law) and ended when that feature ended. The Israel case does not show this tracking.

Other comparative cases the slogan's defenders sometimes raise (Rhodesia, partition-era critiques of Pakistan and India, criticism of various Yugoslav-successor states) follow the same pattern as South Africa: they were either bounded campaigns tied to specific structural features that dissolved when those features changed, or they were the subject of policy criticism rather than structured global delegitimization of the state's existence. The Israel case is the principal contemporary exception in the combination of duration (now seven decades), breadth of international coalition, persistence through policy change including major territorial withdrawals, and the specific rhetorical content that has accompanied it.

None of this by itself proves that the asymmetry reflects antisemitism. What it shows is that the salience explanation is empirically inadequate to the magnitudes observed, and that the closest comparative cases differ in ways that matter to the analysis. The argument for antisemitism rests on the residual asymmetry, the portion of attention to Israel that is not explained by salience factors and not paralleled in cases sharing those salience features, combined with the trope diagnostic of section IV and the empirical record of diaspora harm in section VI. Where these three diagnostics converge, the diagnostic conclusion follows. The asymmetry by itself is one indicator. Combined with the trope record and the empirical record, it is one of three converging indicators that, taken together, identify the prejudice the slogan denies.

A separate version of the salience rejoinder, that Israel is held to a higher standard because Western publics expect more of an ally and a democracy, has some force, but it does not survive its own logic. The same Western publics do not hold Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, or the UAE, all Western allies, to comparable standards; nor do they hold India, the world's largest democracy, to standards approaching those applied to Israel even where its conduct in Kashmir, in the Northeast, and toward its religious minorities raises issues that on any consistent application of standards would prompt equivalent scrutiny. The "higher standards for allies and democracies" explanation predicts a pattern that the data do not show.

A final rejoinder, that Jews cannot be the objects of racism because Jews are "white", recurs in some contemporary discourse and deserves brief notice. The framing imports a specifically North American racial schema into a historical question that pre-dates it by millennia, applies a binary categorization that fits poorly to Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who constitute the majority of Israeli Jews, and is contradicted by the long history of Jews being expelled, persecuted, and murdered by the people who considered themselves white. The framing is also unstable: the same discourse that places Jews on the "white" side of its binary will, when discussing earlier periods, place them on the other side; it is the contemporary placement, used to remove the conceptual possibility of antisemitism, that does the rhetorical work. The instability of the categorization is its own diagnostic.

A second diagnostic, harder to evade because it does not depend on what the speaker intends and easy to verify because it depends on what the speaker says, is the trope problem. The contemporary discourse of anti-Zionism, in its mainstream activist and propagandistic forms, frequently and predictably reaches for the classical tropes of antisemitism. This is not an accusation; it is an observation about content.

Blood libel imagery. The medieval blood libel (the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children, particularly infants, to use their blood in religious rituals) produced massacres of Jewish communities across Europe from the twelfth century. Its imagery and emotional structure recurred in Tsarist publications, in Der Stürmer under the Nazis, and in Soviet anti-Zionist material. Children die in every war and their deaths are real, properly reported, and properly mourned; the question for the diagnostic is not whether deaths are reported but what character the reporting takes. In some activist and propagandistic contexts that travel under the anti-Zionist banner, the imagery of dead Palestinian children acquires symbolic and mythic characteristics strongly reminiscent of older antisemitic motifs concerning Jewish cruelty toward children: a ritualized iconography rather than a journalistic record, a stylized emotional structure that recurs from one Israeli military operation to the next in close to identical form, an obsessive concentration on Jewish responsibility for child death in particular while broadly similar or worse child death tolls in other conflicts (Yemen, Syria, Sudan, the various theaters of the Russo-Ukrainian war) attract no comparable iconography. The diagnostic is not the reporting; it is the symbolic structure into which the reporting is folded, and the asymmetric application of that structure to the Jewish state alone ¹¹¹³.

Jews as the new Nazis (Holocaust inversion). The application of vocabulary specifically associated with the destruction of European Jewry to the conduct of the Jewish state was substantially constructed in Soviet anti-Zionist material, as documented by Tabarovsky in the archival record, and is now a common frame in mainstream anti-Zionist discourse: "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," "concentration camps," "ghetto," "Nazi," "fascist," "final solution," "Holocaust." It is not universal (many anti-Zionists avoid Nazi comparisons entirely, and several anti-Zionist intellectual traditions are explicitly hostile to them) but its recurrence is persistent enough to be one of the most-studied features of the discourse. The rhetorical move, where it appears, is precise: the language coined to describe what was done to the Jews is applied to what the Jews are alleged to be doing, transferring the moral weight from the victims to the perpetrators and, over time, corroding the meaning of the original crime ⁷⁴.

Jewish power, control, and conspiracy. The recurrent description of pro-Israel advocacy as "the lobby," the documented interest in donor networks identified by Jewish surname, the framing of Western foreign policy as the product of Jewish manipulation rather than as the rational pursuit of state interest, the periodic appearance in mainstream anti-Zionist discourse of figures and themes drawn directly from Protocols of the Elders of Zion and from the Henry Ford / International Jew tradition: none of this is fringe in the spaces where it appears. It is widely circulated and widely tolerated in some contexts where the equivalent framing of any other group would produce immediate institutional response. The framework of "Zionist control," in many contemporary practical deployments, is difficult to distinguish in form from the framework of "Jewish control" that preceded it; the terms are frequently interchangeable in audience reception and effect.

Dual loyalty. The classical antisemitic charge that Jews are loyal to their own people first and to the state in which they live only conditionally (an accusation that has produced violence against Jewish communities for centuries) recurs in contemporary anti-Zionist discourse in the form of suspicion of diaspora Jews who express support for Israel. Jewish public figures are asked, with a frequency that exceeds the analogous questioning of most other diaspora communities, to denounce a foreign state's conduct as a condition of participating in public life. Jewish students are asked the same question on university campuses. The question is one of loyalty, and the structure of the questioning is one with substantial historical pedigree.

Cosmopolitan rootlessness; financial control; manipulation of media. Each of these classical tropes recurs in segments of contemporary anti-Zionist discourse. They are not necessary to the position, and many serious anti-Zionist writers do not deploy them; their persistent recurrence in mainstream activist materials reflects the framework's substantial inheritance from earlier antisemitic forms.

The trope problem is the simplest of the diagnostics because it is observable on the page. Where the discourse uses these images and these structures, the discourse is, in its rhetorical content, doing antisemitic work: regardless of what the user of the discourse intends or believes about themselves. The diagnostic is the substance of what is said, not the identity or stated motives of the speaker.

The genealogy section above gives the outline. The detail that matters here is structural: contemporary anti-Zionism is not the product of a single intellectual lineage, and an honest analysis must acknowledge this. Several independent intellectual streams have converged in the contemporary framework, and the Soviet stream is one important component of the convergence rather than the sole or even the dominant cause.

The Soviet anti-Zionist apparatus operated from the late 1940s, intensified after a Stalin-era interruption, and reached its full development after 1967. Its outputs included the work of Trofim Kichko (Judaism Without Embellishment, 1963, denounced internationally as openly antisemitic but reissued in lightly modified form), the work of Yuri Ivanov (Beware: Zionism!, 1969, published in mass print runs and translated into multiple languages), the work of Lev Korneev, Valery Yemelyanov, and many others, and the operation of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public from 1983. Tabarovsky's archival work shows that the framework treated "Zionism" not as a political ideology to be assessed on its merits but as a transhistorical Jewish conspiracy with continuous identity from the Pharisees of the New Testament through medieval Jewish moneylenders through the Rothschilds to contemporary Israel and the global Jewish diaspora. Specific tropes that recur in contemporary Western anti-Zionism (the assertion that Zionism is racism, that Zionists are the new Nazis, that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis, that the Holocaust has been instrumentalized by Zionism, that Zionism is a global conspiracy operating through controlled diasporas) have substantial Soviet origin or substantial Soviet amplification ⁷¹¹. This is the rhetorical-tropological inheritance the Soviet stream supplied.

Postcolonial theory and the settler-colonial frame. Independent of the Soviet apparatus, Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979) articulated a reading of Zionism as settler-colonialism that drew on intellectual resources of its own: Frantz Fanon, the French Annales school, structuralist literary theory, Said's own work on Orientalism. Patrick Wolfe's later theoretical work on settler-colonialism (notably "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," 2006) gave the frame a more general theoretical foundation applicable in principle to many cases. This is a genuine intellectual current with its own internal logic; characterizing it as Soviet-derived would be historically inaccurate and would understate its substantive intellectual content. The frame's specific application to Israel, with the asymmetry of comparable historical cases noted in section III, is what brings it into the present analysis.

Third Worldism and the Non-Aligned Movement. The post-1955 Bandung tradition of Third World political solidarity produced its own framing of Israel, partly in response to the 1956 Suez crisis and its aftermath, in which Israel was characterized as a Western imperial outpost in the Arab and African world. This framing developed parallel to Soviet propaganda rather than as its product; its institutional vehicle in the UN voting blocs, overlapping with but distinct from the Soviet bloc, was central to the passage of Resolution 3379.

New Left anti-statism and post-1968 radical politics. The Western New Left produced a critique of nationalism in general, and a critique of Zionism in particular, that drew on Marxist anti-statism without Soviet endorsement (indeed, the New Left was often anti-Soviet). This stream has been particularly influential in academic and student politics.

Palestinian nationalism itself. The PLO and the broader Palestinian intellectual tradition produced their own articulations of opposition to Zionism, with their own internal logic, organizational histories, and intellectual cadres. Treating Palestinian anti-Zionism as derivative of any external propaganda apparatus would be both historically inaccurate and disrespectful to the Palestinian intellectual tradition.

Human-rights universalism. The post-1945 development of international human rights law, with its emphasis on individual rights and its skepticism of nationalist projects in general, produced framings critical of any ethnic-national state, including (sometimes prominently) Israel. This stream is independent of Soviet construction.

The relationship between these streams and the Soviet contribution is one of convergence and mutual reinforcement rather than derivation. The Soviet apparatus supplied a specific rhetorical-tropological inheritance, the classical antisemitic tropes embedded within an ostensibly political vocabulary, that other streams have adopted, sometimes consciously and often without awareness of the provenance. The contemporary framework is the combination: substantive structural arguments from postcolonial theory, Third Worldism, the New Left, Palestinian nationalism, and human-rights universalism (which on their own would not necessarily generate antisemitic content), combined with the rhetorical inheritance the Soviet stream provided. This combination is what makes the contemporary framework simultaneously intellectually substantial and, in many of its actual rhetorical practices, structurally entangled with antisemitism. The slogan "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" defends the substantive structural arguments by treating them as if they could be reliably separated, in the practice of those invoking it, from the rhetorical inheritance with which they have in fact fused. They cannot always be so separated, because the fusion is part of what gives the contemporary framework its specific contemporary shape.

The framework's migration into the Western left in the 1970s and 1980s, accelerating after the collapse of the Soviet Union, took place through specific channels: through pro-Soviet and post-Soviet left intellectuals, through the Non-Aligned Movement and its Western sympathizers, through Palestinian advocacy organizations, through United Nations bodies in which the relevant coalition retained majority voting power long after 1991, through the expanding apparatus of human rights NGOs, and through Western academic disciplines (postcolonial studies in particular) whose intellectual frameworks proved congenial to selective application.

The point of detailing this is not to claim that every contemporary user of anti-Zionist vocabulary is a Soviet propagandist or a knowing inheritor of one. They are not. The point is that the framework (its specific tropes, its specific rhetorical moves, its specific way of identifying Israel with the crimes of its enemies, its specific construction of "Zionism" as a transhistorical entity rather than a political movement) emerged from multiple streams of which the Soviet one supplied much of the rhetorical content that does antisemitic work. The fact that contemporary users have absorbed the framework without knowing its construction does not change what the framework does. It changes only who is responsible for it.

The slogan "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" operates as part of this framework's defense. It does not refute the genealogy; it restates one component of the framework's own claim about itself.

The conceptual arguments above are answerable to evidence. If anti-Zionism and antisemitism are structurally distinct, if the slogan describes a real separation reliably preserved in practice, then anti-Zionist activity should not, systematically, be accompanied by attacks on Jews qua Jews; antisemitic incidents should not, reliably, track anti-Israel mobilization; the diaspora Jewish populations of countries thousands of miles from Israel should not be targets when Israel goes to war. The available data points consistently in the opposite direction, over decades.

The 2014 wave. During Operation Protective Edge (July–August 2014), Western European cities recorded the highest sustained levels of antisemitic incidents in postwar memory. In Paris, the synagogue on Rue de la Roquette was besieged by a crowd chanting "mort aux juifs" ("death to the Jews") on 13 July 2014; the synagogue in Sarcelles was attacked the following weekend. In Berlin, demonstrators chanted "Jude, Jude, feiges Schwein" ("Jew, Jew, cowardly pig") at protests. In London, central protests featured placards equating the Star of David with the swastika. The Brussels Jewish Museum had been attacked two months earlier (24 May 2014, four killed). The Community Security Trust in the UK recorded its highest-ever monthly total of antisemitic incidents in July 2014, more than double the previous record ²¹²³³⁵.

The 2021 wave. During Operation Guardian of the Walls (May 2021), the pattern repeated with greater geographic spread. The ADL recorded a 68% increase in reported antisemitic incidents in the United States in the weeks following the start of the operation, including assaults on visibly Jewish individuals in New York and Los Angeles, attacks on Jewish diners at restaurants identified as Jewish-owned, and convoy attacks (an organized convoy of vehicles flying Palestinian flags drove through Jewish areas of north London on 16 May 2021 shouting "fuck the Jews, rape their daughters"; four people were arrested) ²⁵²¹³⁴. CST recorded 661 antisemitic incidents in May 2021, at the time its highest-ever monthly total, with the year's total of 2,255 incidents itself a record until it was surpassed in 2023.

The post-October 2023 wave. The pattern recurred at unprecedented scale after Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack and Israel's subsequent military response. Within hours of the attack (before any Israeli response had begun, in some cases before the scale of the Hamas attack itself was public) antisemitic mobilizations were under way globally. On 9 October 2023, a crowd gathered outside the Sydney Opera House, which had been lit in blue and white to mourn the victims of 7 October; participants burned an Israeli flag and chanted anti-Jewish abuse. A widely circulated claim that the crowd chanted "gas the Jews" was investigated by New South Wales Police (Strike Force Mealing), whose forensic audio analysis concluded the chant was "where's the Jews"; Jewish community bodies accepted the forensic finding while maintaining that other abuse ("f**k the Jews") and the threatening character of the gathering were not in dispute ²⁹. In Dagestan on 29 October 2023, a crowd of several hundred stormed Makhachkala airport searching for Jewish passengers from a flight arriving from Tel Aviv; the airport was overrun, the runway invaded, and around twenty people were injured before security forces restored control, with roughly sixty later arrested ³⁰.

Across Europe and North America, the period from October 2023 onwards has produced antisemitic incident totals without modern precedent. The CST in the UK recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023: the highest annual total in its history, more than double the previous record, and the great majority of them recorded after 7 October ²¹. The ADL in the United States recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023: also the highest in its history of recording such data, with a similar concentration after 7 October ²². The Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union reported corresponding patterns across member states. The 2024 totals, where reported, showed continued elevation.

The post-7 October incidents have included: synagogue arson attempts and arsons in multiple Western cities; attacks on Jewish schools (Melbourne, Adass Israel synagogue arson, 6 December 2024, investigated and declared a terrorist incident; multiple incidents in France); the harassment of Jewish students at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and dozens of other universities, with Jewish students reporting being told they could not enter encampments or campus spaces because they were Jewish (the encampment organizers commonly framed this as a Zionist exclusion, but Jewish identity and Zionist identification were treated by the gatekeepers as interchangeable in practice); the appearance of "Zionists Not Welcome" stickers on businesses identified as Jewish-owned, in the same physical placement and rhetorical form as historical antisemitic boycotts; coordinated harassment of Jewish-owned restaurants in cities including London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne; the targeted vandalism of Jewish memorials and Holocaust monuments; the appearance of swastikas, blood libel imagery, and Holocaust-denial slogans at "anti-Zionist" demonstrations in Western capitals ²²²¹²³.

A pattern of this scale, recurring across decades, continents, language environments, and Jewish populations with no operational connection to Israeli policy, is difficult to reconcile with the slogan's premises. The slogan says that anti-Zionism is distinct from antisemitism. The data show that periods of intense anti-Israel mobilization are consistently associated with dramatic increases in antisemitic incidents directed at diaspora Jews: incidents directed at people who had no operational role in the conduct the mobilization purports to oppose, in cities and countries far from any active theater of conflict. The correlation is reliable, the magnitudes are substantial, and the pattern repeats. What this suggests is that the practical boundary between anti-Zionist activism and antisemitic expression is often poorly maintained; that the principled distinction the slogan asserts is not, in mainstream mobilization, reliably preserved by the people invoking it. The slogan offered as a defense is contradicted by the conduct it is offered to defend.

A standard counter-move at this point is to cite the existence of Jewish anti-Zionists (organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, the historical Bund, Neturei Karta) as decisive proof that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitism. "How can it be antisemitic when Jews themselves hold the position?"

This argument has more weight than it is usually given, and less than its proponents claim. Each point in order.

The position has more weight than it is usually given because Jewish history does include genuine anti-Zionist traditions held by people whose Jewishness is undeniable and whose motives were not anti-Jewish. The pre-1948 Bundist position, Jewish socialist organization in the diaspora rather than territorial nationalism, was a Jewish position about Jewish flourishing. The Reform position that Jewishness is a religion rather than a nationality was a Jewish position about Jewish identity. The Satmar and Neturei Karta theological objection to pre-Messianic Jewish statehood is internal to a particular construction of Jewish religious obligation. None of these is antisemitic. Each was held by Jews who took their Jewishness seriously and reasoned from it. The historical record does not support a flat assertion that no Jewish anti-Zionism has ever been principled.

The position has less weight than its proponents claim, however, for several reasons that must be stated clearly.

First, the empirical scale. In every survey ever conducted of Jewish opinion globally and in every individual major Jewish community, support for the existence of Israel and identification with Zionism are overwhelming majority positions among self-identifying Jews. The Pew Research Center's recurring surveys of Jewish Americans, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research surveys of British Jews, the various surveys of French, Australian, Canadian, and South American Jewish communities, all converge: anti-Zionist Jews are a small minority of the Jewish populations from which they claim to speak, and this has been stable for decades ¹⁹²⁰. The argument from Jewish identity is being made by something on the order of 5–15% of the relevant Jewish population, depending on country and definition, claiming to demonstrate something about a position the other 85–95% reject.

Second, the visibility differential. Jewish anti-Zionists are platformed by non-Jewish anti-Zionist movements with a frequency and prominence that is many multiples of their share of the Jewish population. The platforming has a specific function: it provides the non-Jewish movement with a Jewish-identified shield against the charge that the movement's positions are antisemitic. The political economy is visible and uncontroversial: anti-Zionist movements actively seek Jewish endorsers and elevate them precisely because the endorsement performs this function. This is not in itself a criticism of the individuals involved; it is a description of how the system operates. The numerical disproportion between the Jewish population (small) and the visibility (large) is itself a diagnostic of how the slogan operates.

Third, Jewish identity does not preclude antisemitic content, the most fundamental of the objections. The "anti-Zionist Jews" argument depends on a hidden premise: that being Jewish, by some definition, guarantees that one's views or output cannot be antisemitic. The Jewish historical record does not support this premise. Halachic Jewishness (descent from a Jewish mother, the most inclusive traditional definition of Jewish identity) has not in practice insulated those it defines from producing antisemitic content. Karl Marx is the textbook case. Born of a Jewish mother and a Jewish-born father (Heinrich Marx, who had converted to Lutheranism shortly before Karl's birth), Marx published in 1844 his essay "On the Jewish Question" ("Zur Judenfrage"), whose content reproduces, with little distance, the most familiar antisemitic tropes of nineteenth-century Christian Europe: "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism" ³⁶. Whether Marx the author intended the essay as straight antisemitism, as ironic appropriation, or as dialectical critique of bourgeois society is a question scholars have debated for a century; what is on the page is antisemitism in the most familiar form of its era, regardless of the author's intent or origin. Otto Weininger, born to a Viennese Jewish family, produced in 1903 Sex and Character: a text containing some of the most virulent antisemitic passages in pre-Nazi German-language writing, and one that Hitler is documented to have admired. Bobby Fischer, born to a Jewish mother, was a vocal and public antisemite throughout his adult life.

The logical entailment matters for the counter-move. The "anti-Zionist Jews" argument requires the premise that Jewish identity precludes the production of antisemitic content. The historical record establishes that it does not. If a halachic Jew can produce antisemitic content, and the record shows that some have, then the Jewishness of an anti-Zionist establishes nothing by itself about whether the anti-Zionism is antisemitic. The premise on which the argument rests is empirically false; the inference that proceeds from it does not follow. The identity of the speaker has never been, and is not now, dispositive of the substance of what the speaker says.

Fourth, the dissenting-in-group-member problem. It is a familiar pattern that prejudiced movements include, and elevate, members of the group against which the prejudice is directed. The pattern does not refute the prejudice. There were Jewish anti-Jewish writers in the German nationalist tradition; there are members of every persecuted group who have aligned with the persecutors. The existence of such individuals is part of the human condition; it does not establish that the position they have taken is not prejudiced toward the group they originated in. The IHRA Working Definition does not exempt antisemitism merely because some Jews adopt it; nor does the legal definition of any other form of prejudice operate that way.

Fifth, the substantive test still applies. Jewish anti-Zionists, like non-Jewish anti-Zionists, can be assessed against the 3D test and the trope diagnostic. Some pass; many do not. Organizations like JVP have deployed material that meets multiple IHRA examples: including the rejection of Jewish self-determination, the comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany, and the application of standards to Israel not applied to other states. The Jewishness of the speakers does not transform the substance of what is said. If a Jewish writer produces work that traffics in classical antisemitic tropes, the work is antisemitic in the same way that work produced by anyone else with the same content is antisemitic. The author's identity affects the politics of how the work is received, not the substance of what it is.

Sixth, the case of philosophically serious Jewish anti-Zionism, Judith Butler as the leading example. The most prominent contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist of philosophical standing is Judith Butler, whose Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) articulates a Jewish anti-Zionism drawing on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and the diasporist intellectual tradition ⁴⁴. Butler's position is intellectually substantial and operates from within a Jewish theoretical inheritance rather than against it; it is also a minority position within the contemporary Jewish intellectual community whose substantive disagreements with mainstream Jewish theoretical positions are themselves internal Jewish disagreements. Butler's existence demonstrates that contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism with serious intellectual content exists, and the section's earlier sub-points should be read with that demonstration in mind. What Butler's existence does not demonstrate is that the mass mobilization of anti-Zionist discourse, with the rhetorical features identified in sections IV and VI of this rebuttal, escapes the diagnostic. The question for any individual case remains substantive: where Butler's writing engages the philosophical question of Jewish statehood and the substance of Israeli policy without recourse to the classical tropes catalogued in section IV, the substantive analysis is internal Jewish philosophical disagreement and the rebuttal's framework does not apply to it. Where the broader activist movement Butler has lent her standing to deploys those classical tropes, the standing of the philosopher does not transform what the movement does. The framework applies case by case, to substance, regardless of the speaker's identity.

The honest position, then, is that the existence of Jewish anti-Zionists complicates the picture without resolving it. It establishes that the principled distinction has historical and contemporary instantiations among Jews, including some that are philosophically serious; it does not establish that contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism, in its mainstream organizational forms, preserves that principled distinction. The substantive tests still apply, and the application of them yields a verdict that does not depend on who the speaker is.

The slogan "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" does specific rhetorical work, and the work is identifiable. The sociologist David Hirsh has named the move that the slogan typically deploys: the Livingstone Formulation, after a series of episodes involving the British politician Ken Livingstone, which is the claim that those who raise the charge of antisemitism are doing so in bad faith, in order to silence criticism of Israel ¹⁰⁹.

The Livingstone Formulation has three structural features that make it powerful.

It is irrefutable from the position of the accused. The Jewish institution or individual raising the charge of antisemitism is by the very act of raising it placed in the position of having raised it in bad faith. Any further argument they make can be characterized as more bad faith. The Jewish person who objects to antisemitism is, in this move, definitionally an enemy of free speech.

It inverts the moral position. The party identifying antisemitism becomes the aggressor; the party producing antisemitic content becomes the victim of "smears." The vocabulary of victimization is transferred from those targeted by the discourse to those producing it.

It reframes the substantive question. Rather than engaging with whether the content was antisemitic, the conversation becomes about whether the accusation was made in good faith. The substance is displaced by a procedural objection that can never be resolved in the accused party's favor.

A genuine note of nuance is required here, because the Livingstone Formulation analysis can itself be deployed too categorically. There have been specific cases in which charges of antisemitism have been raised opportunistically: to discredit specific critics whose substantive arguments deserved engagement, to deflect political pressure unrelated to genuine antisemitic content, or to function as a partisan instrument in contexts where the substance of the charge was thin. The existence of such cases is real and observable, and pretending it is not would be its own form of bad faith. What the Livingstone Formulation does, however, is move from the existence of some bad-faith charges to the conclusion that this particular charge, the one currently being raised, is bad faith, without engaging the substance of the specific case. It is the universal generalization from local instances that does the rhetorical work. The right response to a bad-faith accusation is a substantive response showing the accusation does not meet the diagnostic features in the specific case; the right response is not the meta-claim that all such accusations are bad faith. Distinguishing the genuine examples from the generalization is part of what taking the question of antisemitism seriously requires.

The slogan "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" performs the three Livingstone-Formulation functions in compressed form. It places the Jewish or pro-Israel interlocutor in the position of having to relitigate the principled distinction from scratch; it inverts the moral position by characterizing the raising of antisemitism as itself the offense; and it relocates the conversation from the substance of what was said to the categorical claim about category itself.

It is, in many of its deployments, what one would expect the framework's internal defense mechanism to look like.

Before stating the conclusion, the rebuttal must engage the most serious philosophical objection to its framework. That objection is mounted most rigorously by the philosopher Brian Klug, who has argued: in his essay "The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism" and in later work including a 2018 Jewish Quarterly essay on the left, the Labour antisemitism controversy, and the demonizing discourse around Zionism; that conflating "Jews" with "Israel" or "Israelis" is itself a category error, and that the appearance of overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is partly an artefact of this conflation rather than a feature of anti-Zionism itself ⁴¹⁴²⁴³. On Klug's account, the diagnostic framework (the 3D test, the IHRA examples) risks collapsing the distinction between Israel as a state (a legitimate object of political criticism) and Jews as a people (a group against whom prejudice is real), and so risks registering political criticism as antisemitism through analytic confusion rather than substantive identity.

This is a serious challenge, and the rebuttal's framework must answer it rather than dismiss it. The answer is that Klug's analytic move, the strict separation of "Jews" from "Israel" and "Israelis", is itself a contestable theoretical commitment, not a neutral preliminary that can be adopted in advance. Zionism is, among other things, the proposition that Jewish nationhood and Jewish statehood are constitutively connected; for the substantial majority of Jews globally (on the survey data referenced in section VII), the strict separation Klug requires is precisely what is at substantive issue, not a neutral terminology that can be stipulated before the debate begins. When Klug stipulates that "Israel" and "Jews" must be conceptually separate for analytic purposes, he is enacting one side of the substantive Jewish theoretical dispute under the cover of analytic neutrality. The dispute is whether the strict separation is the right framework or whether the connection Zionism asserts is real. Treating Klug's stipulation as a neutral starting point assumes one answer to the substantive question.

This is not a refutation of Klug's broader position. It is an identification of where the disagreement actually lies. The rebuttal does not require Klug's stipulation to be wrong on the merits; it requires only that the stipulation be recognized as itself a substantive position rather than a neutral one. With that recognition, the diagnostic frameworks (3D, tropes, empirical outcomes) remain available, applied to substance rather than ruled out in advance by terminological fiat. Klug's analytic separation may correctly describe how some non-Jewish anti-Zionists understand their own position; it does not describe how the substantive question of what anti-Zionism does in practice is correctly approached, because that question is what the framework is investigating.

Klug's framework is also internally limited in a specific way: it accounts well for principled philosophical anti-Zionism (and would, on its own terms, exempt much of what Butler, the Bund, and Neturei Karta have produced from the diagnostic) but accounts less well for the mass activist forms documented in section VI, in which "Jews" and "Israel" are visibly conflated in practice even where the speakers maintain that they are not. The Klug stipulation is descriptively accurate to some anti-Zionists; the rebuttal's framework engages with the others.

With that engagement on the record, the rebuttal's positive position can be stated.

The argument of this rebuttal does not require denying that the principled distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism exists. It exists. There are conditions under which anti-Zionism would not be antisemitism. Those conditions can be specified.

The position would have to be applied consistently. If the holder opposes nation-states in general, on cosmopolitan grounds, opposing the Jewish one is part of a coherent position. If the holder opposes only ethnically articulated states, opposing the Jewish one is part of a coherent position, provided the holder also opposes the Greek, Japanese, Armenian, Saudi, Pakistani, Irish, French, Norwegian, and other comparable cases with equal vigor. If the holder restricts the objection to states formed by settler-colonial dynamics, the holder must oppose Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Argentina, and many others on the same principle, with the same intensity. Anti-Zionism that uniquely targets the Jewish case is hard to characterize as principled. The diagnostic is consistency.

The position would have to refrain from classical antisemitic tropes. The discourse would not deploy blood libel imagery, would not deploy Holocaust inversion, would not deploy Jewish-control conspiracy framing, would not deploy dual loyalty insinuation, would not deploy cosmopolitan-rootlessness motifs. It would assess Israeli conduct on its merits in the same vocabulary used to assess the conduct of any other state, without reaching reflexively for the imagery the historical framework deposited in its inheritance. The diagnostic is the actual content of what is said.

The position would have to be empirically uncoupled from antisemitic outcomes. Mobilization in its name would not produce reliable spikes in attacks on diaspora Jews; would not produce the harassment of Jewish students; would not produce the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses identified as Jewish; would not produce the targeting of synagogues and Jewish cultural institutions. The diagnostic is what the mobilization actually does to people who had no part in any of the conduct the mobilization purports to oppose.

The position would have to acknowledge the genealogy honestly. The honest version would acknowledge the rhetorical inheritance the framework carries from its various sources, including the Soviet stream that supplied much of its antisemitic content; it would distinguish itself from that inheritance with care in its own rhetorical practice; it would not deploy the slogan as a defense against the charge. The diagnostic is whether the holder can describe accurately the framework they have absorbed.

Each of these conditions is meetable in principle. Each is met, in practice, by some fraction of contemporary anti-Zionists: including the philosophically serious Jewish anti-Zionists discussed in section VII (Butler, certain Brit Shalom-tradition binationalists, Neturei Karta), various academic writers who have done their own intellectual work, and individual activists who maintain the distinction in their own rhetorical practice. The category of principled anti-Zionism that is not antisemitism is not empty.

The category, however, is not what the slogan "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" typically defends. The slogan, in its dominant contemporary deployments, defends the mass activist and rhetorical forms of anti-Zionism: the forms that frequently fail one or more of the conditions specified above. The slogan asserts a categorical separation in language that presents it as already established. The substance of those mass forms, in many cases, does not preserve the separation in practice.

The honest position is therefore this. The technical distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is real and important. The technical distinction is preserved by some anti-Zionists, including some philosophically serious Jewish ones, who satisfy the conditions specified above. The slogan that asserts the distinction is, in many of its actual deployments by mass activist movements, not a description of a substantive separation but a defense against the recognition that the separation has often failed to be preserved. The slogan does not, by itself, refute the substantive charge it is offered to disable. It functions, in much of its contemporary use, more reliably as an indicator that the substance of the charge merits engagement than as a refutation of it.

On paper, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. In contemporary practice, in its dominant mass-political and activist forms, contemporary anti-Zionist discourse frequently, structurally, and predictably overlaps with antisemitic frameworks, tropes, and outcomes. The overlap is reliable enough to be one of the most studied patterns in the contemporary sociology of antisemitism. The slogan, where it is deployed as a meta-defense against this observation rather than as a substantive distinction within it, performs more reliably as part of the pattern than as a refutation of it.