Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism
First published by the IWL in 2022
A confusion, always lurking but gaining traction in recent days, is that anti-Zionism is somehow a form of antisemitism. Nothing could be further from the truth. We understand that there are three types of confusion regarding this: the first is deliberate and therefore criminal, as done by the racist State of Israel and its organizations; the second comes from dishonesty or opportunism and is generally linked to the first; and the third stems from error or ignorance, a result of ideologies that frequently permeate mass media and are on the lips of politicians and other personalities. The purpose of this article is to explain the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which is significant.
But what is antisemitism and what are its origins?
Racism against Jews, antisemitism, originated in the European Middle Ages. Kings, nobles, and priests exploited serfs on their feudal estates in medieval Europe; in feudal society, commercial and financial transactions, as well as moneylending, were considered sinful and forbidden to Christians. A non-Christian had to carry them out. In fact, they carried them out at the orders of the nobility and clergy, the ruling classes. Jews fulfilled this role as merchants, artisans, goldsmiths, etc., as well as moneylenders. When catastrophes such as famine and plagues arose, as they did regularly under this feudal system, the ruling classes had an easy scapegoat in the Jews as well. Because of their role in society — as merchants trading goods and moneylenders charging interest — Jews were an easy target; hence the legends spread by the Christian Church, such as the myth that “the Jews killed Christ,” were used by nobles to shift the blame for all the population’s misfortunes onto the Jews.
The French Revolution, with its three mottos — liberty, equality, fraternity — called into question equality before the law among human beings. But, as we know today, the new capitalist society was incapable of guaranteeing true equality to women and persecuted ethnicities and races. It was the Russian Revolution of 1917 that brought the liberation of the peoples of the entire former Russian Empire, ending discrimination against all ethnicities, including Jews, in its territory.
In its imperialist phase, as capitalism intensified its exploitation and its wars of colonization and conquest, racial persecution took on an even more murderous form. It was in this imperialist phase that fascism and Nazism emerged, an ideology that justified genocide and the elimination of races as the only way forward for the German people. Antisemitism was transformed into an industrial policy of genocide, the elimination of Jews.
The emergence of Zionism
Zionism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, argued that the problem of discrimination against Jews would only be solved if Jews had an exclusive state. Zionism thus accepted an assumption that antisemitic racists had been preaching — that discrimination-free coexistence between different races and ethnicities, between Jews and non-Jews, was impossible. Their very racial composition would prevent it. Herzl and the World Zionist Organization (WZO) set out to approach leaders of imperialist powers and ministers of the Russian czarist empire to negotiate their support for this project; among other arguments, reminding them that they could rid themselves of the Jews on their territory. During World War I (1914-1918), through Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader, the WZO obtained a declaration from the British imperialist government, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, committing to allow the establishment of a Jewish National Home in the territory of Palestine. That is, it was a commitment by the British colonial authority to allow Palestine, then their colony, to be used by Zionists to settle new Jewish colonists. But this would only be possible by expelling the existing Palestinian population.
The “revisionist” Zionist leader Jabotinsky (from whom the far-right organizations Irgun and Likud of Begin and Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel for over a decade, derived) would take this vision to its ultimate consequences, preaching an “iron wall” between Jews and the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, and no “mixing of blood” between them, meaning that Israel should be an openly racist state, exclusively for Jews. That was the project that gave rise to the State of Israel, at the expense of the expulsion of the Palestinian population. As revealed by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book “The Iron Wall – Israel and the Arab World,” this was also the undeclared assumption of so-called Labor Zionism — and its leader, David Ben-Gurion — which in fact carried out ethnic cleansing in 1948.
What is anti-Zionism?
Anti-Zionism is to oppose the Zionist political-colonial project and all its consequences. It is to be against crimes against humanity: ethnic cleansing, racism, apartheid — recognized even by Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and international organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Palestinian cause, which brings together the struggles against oppression and exploitation everywhere in the world, is the cause of national liberation from the yoke of the colonizer. What is racist about that? Nothing. Quite the opposite: being anti-Zionist is to fight against racism.
The result of the Zionist colonial project, founded at the end of the 19th century, was the Nakba, literal catastrophe, crowned with the formation of the racist State of Israel on May 15, 1948, through a planned campaign of ethnic cleansing, as even new Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé, now recognize. Eight hundred thousand Palestinians were violently expelled from their lands, and about 500 villages were destroyed in the “conquest of land and labor,” as the Zionist movement advocated.
According to Palestinian historian Nur Masalha in his book Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought – 1882-1948 (2021), in their diaries, Zionist leaders expressed from the movement’s earliest days the perception that for their intent — to create an ethnically homogeneous Jewish state — “population transfer” would be necessary — transferring the non-Jewish native Palestinian population, which was the majority, out of their lands and bringing European Jews into Palestine via immigration. That is what happened: Israel was formed on 78% of historic Palestine, on the rubble of Palestinian villages and on the bodies of its native inhabitants. On the tears of thousands who became refugees overnight.
In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of those lands (Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem)—another 350,000 displaced. Today, there are 5 million in camps in Arab countries awaiting return. There are also thousands in diaspora and 1.9 million originating from the remnants in Palestine, occupied in 1948 (which today is called Israel), considered second- or third-class citizens, subjected to about 60 racist laws. In that area, Israel refuses even to provide basic services to hundreds of Bedouin villages, while real estate speculation advances at the cost of house demolitions. And Palestinians are allowed no permanent residence. The village of Al Araqib, for example, has already been demolished more than 190 times, and Palestinians, in an act of resistance, continue to rebuild it.
Gaza is a true open-air prison, where 2 million Palestinians face a dramatic humanitarian crisis under inhuman Zionist siege for 14 years — with 96% of drinking water contaminated and a supply of only four hours of electricity per day — in addition to frequent bombings. And in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, colonization continues apace, where ethnic cleansing is an integral part. There are about 3 million Palestinians without any fundamental guarantees of human rights, with all sorts of restrictions on movement — demands for different documents, settlers-only roads, hundreds of checkpoints, and an apartheid wall approximately 700 km long that continues to be built, isolating families and annexing more fertile lands. Israel does not even provide the minimum water necessary for Palestinians, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Boycott apartheid vs. hypocrisy
But the Nakba continues: as Amnesty International now also notes, the regime is one of apartheid, “a cruel system of domination and oppression that Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people, whether inhabitants of Israel or the occupied territories or even refugees displaced in other countries.” A crime against humanity, in which Palestinians have been treated for decades as “an inferior race.” B’Tselem describes apartheid as “a regime of Jewish supremacy” also throughout historic Palestine: “The entire area that Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is governed by a single regime that works to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group over another. Through geographical, demographic, and physical engineering of space, the regime allows Jews to live in a contiguous area with full rights, including self-determination. In contrast, Palestinians live in separated areas and enjoy fewer rights. This qualifies as an apartheid regime, even though Israel is commonly seen as a democracy maintaining a temporary occupation.”
In this situation, detailed in reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, Palestinians exist because they resist heroically. And today, the central solidarity campaign is BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), based on the model of the boycott campaign that helped end apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, and which raises the fundamental demands of the Palestinian people: end the occupation, equal civil rights, and the return of refugees to their lands. Zionists, including those who claim to be “left-wing,” (an absurd position, since in practice they defend a colonial project while employing bland rhetoric about opposing oppression), have come to attack BDS. They reject the reports showing that Palestinians are subjected to an apartheid regime. Organizations are simply labeled antisemitic by Israel, as are all those who rise against this racist state.
This is a clear maneuver: an equivalence is made where none exists, according to which calling for the end of the apartheid State of Israel means calling for the end of Jews, their extermination. What would they have said about South Africa, or Rhodesia, which were governed by a white segregationist minority? Would defending the end of apartheid be the same as defending the end of white South Africans? That is not what history shows. It is not what Palestinians say in the case of Israel. As a Palestinian refugee, expelled from his land in 1948 when he was a child, he recounted, “Jews, Muslims, and Christians played together, without labels.” That separation never existed in historic Palestine; Zionism created it and continues to feed it.
The State of Israel, the materialization of Zionism’s central idea, is founded on the elimination of the other through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and continuous dehumanization. Ilan Pappé, in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2017), leaves no doubt: “For many Zionists, Palestine was not even an ‘occupied’ place when they began to move there in 1882, but an ’empty’ land: the native Palestinians living there were largely invisible or, otherwise, a natural difficulty they had to conquer and eliminate.”
Left-wing Zionists, in defense of Israel’s existence, usually claim to be against the occupation, which they differentiate from apartheid, although occupation implies segregation and discrimination. They defend the already dead and buried two-state solution, and recognized as such for years by intellectuals like Ilan Pappé and even by the former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in occupied Palestine, Richard Falk. Even if this supposed solution were not inherently unjust, offering nothing more than crumbs to the Palestinian people and not even addressing their entirety, including the half who are refugees or in diaspora, it would be completely unviable due to Zionist colonial expansion. Today, there is already a single state over Palestinian territory — Israel, an apartheid state.
There is no peace without justice. And justice will only come with the defeat of this colonial project and therefore with the end of the apartheid State of Israel. In a free Palestine from the river to the sea, with the return of millions of Palestinians to their lands. To be anti-Zionist and speak this truth is to be consistent with the struggle against oppression and exploitation throughout the world, including the vehement rejection of antisemitism and the glorification of Nazism.
Check the reports:
Amnesty International — https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
Human Rights Watch — https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2021/04/israel_palestine0421_web_0.pdf
B’Tselem — https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202101_this_is_apartheid_eng.pdf
