Anti-Zionism, Not Anti-Semitism!

The latest episode in the Israel-Palestine saga is the most gruesome in decades. And that is a statement given the bloodied history between the two peoples. For context, the combined death toll had already surpassed the figures of the last Intifada in the first fifteen days of combat. Now, one and half months after the Hamas attacks, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. While, ruefully, this is nothing new for the Gazans, October 7th was (statistically and emotionally) the most horrific day for Israelis since the Holocaust. Thus, while the recent crises passed without any notable scholarly effort at large to investigate and nitpick, I have seen some dense questions tossed in mainstream debate lately. Although I do not claim any expert authority on one of the most complex geopolitical issues in history, I do believe I owe some share of my modest knowledge to my readers to make some elemental sense of one question - Is anti-Zionism just a political cover over anti-Semitism?

Zionism, defined concisely, is the belief that the Jews should have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism, in similarly brief terms, is the opposition to that belief.

As an unbiased student of international relations and world history, one would be unfair to aver that Jews have no right whatsoever on the land they endear. The Jewish people ruled the historic Judean Kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for millennia. Even after spreading over centuries that followed, they were still present in small numbers for the next 2000 years. But on parallel lines, one would also be partisan to deny the Palestinian claim to the land. They also inhabited the land for centuries and held a clear majority over the remnants of Jewish ancestry. There is no doubt, nor is the legitimacy of their claim to their state contested by most learned scholars.

To highlight this history and oppose the existence of a religiously/ethnically defined state that is inherently racist is not anti-Semitic in any sense! For starters, the Jewish forebears didn’t even aspire to a ‘state’ when the British promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration - a 1917 letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to a leader of the Jewish community. In 1918, Chaim Weismann - one of the founding Zionist leaders - met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. This shows that ‘return to the promised land’ was never really the plan!

Moreover, some prominent Jewish advocates concurred with the anti-Zionist theory of a single shared state between Jews and Palestinians before the founding of Israel. In 1921, the Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am wrote that Arab Palestinians “have a genuine right to the land due to generations of residence and work upon it. This country is a national home for them, and they have the right to develop their national potentialities to the utmost.” Even today, there are some eminent Jewish supporters of a single binational state, such as the former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg.

While I do realize that anti-Semitism remains pervasive in the world, decades after the near-destruction of European Jewry, I fail to understand how opposing the foundation of a terrorist state like Israel on logical grounds (not just by Arabs but even Jews) could be blatantly characterized as an anti-Semitic expression?

It is a cruel absurdity to demand of Palestinians (and their sympathizers worldwide) that they not only consent to Israel’s existence but also actively support the idea of an ethnically defined state that excludes them from equal citizenship - one that was made possible only by the flight and expulsion of 700,000 (or three-quarters) of the Palestinian population, driven from their home by Jewish terrorism and systematic ethnic cleansing, in the Nakba of 1948. It is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights in the land you ought to share with others, to oppose a political arrangement that has resulted in what Israeli human-rights groups justifiably describe as a form of apartheid.