The Antisemitism of Zionism

Shane Burley

November 7, 2024

“It has been recently revealed that George Soros donated more than $15 million in recent years to leftist groups that organized the anti-Israel demonstrations where protesters celebrated the Hamas terrorist attacks,” wrote right-wing media provocateur Andy Ngo on X, responding to the recent flurry of Palestine solidarity rallies.¹ Ngo’s rhetoric is a masterclass in the confused way antisemitic narratives are employed. In this case, a Jewish cabal run by George Soros is funding a movement to attack Israel, the Jewish State. The antisemitic nature of Soros conspiracy theories is incredibly well-documented, but Ngo provides a curveball: it is done in the name of defending Jews, or, at least, Zionism.²

This construct creates a problem for the vast world of “anti-antisemitism” groups like StopAntisemitism.org or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who have decided that one of the most persistent and potentially lethal forms of antisemitism is anti-Zionism. This perspective is not simply an advocacy position, but the standard for today’s dominant institutions from political leaders, to transnational NGOs, universities, human resources departments, and law enforcement. All of this makes a certain amount of intuitive sense since the United States is Israel’s primary ally, treating the Jewish state as a proxy for Western imperial interests and therefore has a vested interest in maintaining all ideological structures that protect Israel from accountability. As Palestine solidarity activists hit the streets in the hours after Israel commenced its bombing campaigns, the defensive civic infrastructure went into action to both publicly assert that many of these activists displayed anti-Jewish animus and ensure that they would not get away with it. While manifesting in different ways, anti-Zionism is—in the terms of our ruling powers—in direct intersection with antisemitism, usually in regard to its level of perceived intensity.

What gives this campaign its coherence is the claim that anti-Zionism (and any criticism of the movement for a Jewish state) is a covert form of antisemitic hate, once religious or ethnic and now political. This notion is taken as an article of faith across the world of “Antisemitism Studies” institutes (such as the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at the University of Indiana – Bloomington) and various “Countering Violent Extremism” organizations (such as the Anti-Defamation League), where the degree of criticism of Israel and the associated fervor is measured to determine whether or not it has finally dipped into unfortunate antisemitism—usually understood as when the founding principles of the Israeli state are called into question. On October 25, Kevin D. Williamson wrote in the Dispatch that “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism at Scale,” while an October 31 Jerusalem Post op-ed said that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The Jewish community knows it. The public knows it. And it’s time to say so.”³

If you look at the antisemitism data as tracked by most mainstream “anti-antisemitism” organizations, they will show that anti-Zionist-related antisemitism outpaces all other forms. There are reasons for this that say little about where antisemitism is coming from and more about how the data is collected and qualified. When reanalyzing the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit for 2023, we found that, while they mischaracterized and overrepresented alleged anti-Zionist-related antisemitism, they often undercounted white-nationalist-related anti-Semitism. We also found that the ADL’s focus on groups like Students for Justice in Palestine was not justified by the raw data.⁴

The antisemitic nature and presumed lethality of anti-Zionism is treated as an axiom by these organizations. The ADL’s CEO made waves in 2022 when he declared bluntly that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” but this has been the throughline of this topic for decades.⁵ This “self-evident” assumption has moved further into the foreground since October 7, as people like Dara Horn wrote grand narratives in magazines like the Atlantic, or Bari Weiss turned her new outlet the Free Press into a daily alarm about the encroaching danger of Palestine solidarity protesters.⁶ Many pro-Israel organizations learned their lessons in the 2023–2024 school year and are now pushing policies that explicitly label activism targeting Israeli apartheid as bigoted hate speech. and claiming that anti-Zionism is a Title VI or Title IX violation that undermines student safety due to their religion or nationality.⁷ This came up when several students sued the Berkeley Law School for failing to stop what they saw as antisemitic threats in the form of anti-Zionism, suggesting that “discriminating on the basis of ‘Zionism’ violates Title VI both because Zionism is integral to many Jews’ identity and because it denies the Jewish ‘ancestral’ and ‘historical’ connection to Israel.”⁸ In policy, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which very explicitly suggests foundational criticisms of Israel are inherently antisemitic, have been used to silence professors and students, block contractors, and, ultimately, establish a standard that understands the pressing threat of antisemitism as most obviously expressed in the phrase “from the river to the sea.” In addition to the material effects on dissent, these policies also shift our collective understanding to the commonsense identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and thus undermine critical opposition before it has a chance to form. For example, Israel is said to be the self-evident force that has changed the global antisemitic threat, as well as to act as a haven for fleeing Jews, as best evidenced by the dominant narrative on the Mizrahi dispersion from Arab countries. But this formulation is disconnected from the actual politics and ideologies that birthed and carried the dream of Zionism, which is more fractured and confused than figures like ADL CEO Jonathon Greenblatt are willing to admit.

The notion that anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism when it reaches a degree of intensity is based on a categorical error: it assumes that antisemitism is simply the result of various types of vaguely defined “extremism.” This is part and parcel of the rhetoric of organizations like the ADL, which sees antisemitism as the result of extremism of both the left and the right. Within this rhetorical framework, both the left and right are portrayed as equal offenders. Such an understanding misrepresents the reality of antisemitism. In reality, antisemitism on the left is much less severe, common, or lethal than on the right. Moreover, antisemitism is a systemic feature of many strands of rightwing politics. The “anti-extremism” framework put forward by organizations like the ADL suggests that only political centrism can protect Jews, and only technocratic leaders can administer that protection effectively or ethically. Just as the ADL historically did when offering itself as a moderate alternative to groups like the Jewish Labour Bund, it continues to present antisemitism as an inescapable fact of life that can only be mitigated. This is because it would take a radical, or should we say “extreme,” ideology to address antisemitism’s roots in capitalism, inequality, and modern politics, which would necessarily imply a radical solution.

Instead of analyzing anti-Zionism through the antiextremism lens offered, we need to look to an idea’s roots to find where its beliefs lie. If criticism of Israel emerges from abhorrence of Israel’s very real colonial history and war crimes, then no matter how angry it becomes it doesn’t necessarily imply antisemitism. At the same time, if that anti-Zionism is motivated by the idea that Jews are particularly malevolent or understands Zionism in terms of a vast conspiracy theory, then even the most milquetoast version could suggest antisemitism. The same is true for Zionism, an idea held by both people who sincerely cared for Jewish wellbeing and for those who simply wanted them gone.

If we examine the lineage that created Zionism and fought for Israel’s formation in 1948, antisemitism is not merely its justification—it is sometimes the logic that Zionism produced itself. If modern antisemitism developed as an adjunct to the creation of romantic European nationalism, then modern Zionism replicates much of the ideological scaffolding of the same ideas that relied on antisemitism in the first place. In doing so, antisemitism becomes an entrenched part of not just how we think about political sovereignty, but Jews themselves and Jewishness itself. Consequently, Zionism becomes a method through which shifting political actors can transmit antisemitic ideas themselves or cover for entrenched antisemitic worldviews. When looking at antisemitism as a mask to conceal class antagonisms, and the way that antisemitism remains in the discourses often presented as in defense of Jews, a curious thing becomes obvious: Zionism—both historically and in its contemporary incarnation—has a profound amount of antisemitism within its politics. Because of this, it lacks the tools necessary to ultimately eradicate the threat to Jews. Zionism’s success despite this failure suggests that, ultimately, protecting Jews was not its political function.

The Meaning of “The Jew”

As medieval studies scholar David Nirenberg wrote in his book on antisemitism, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, non-Jewish cultures instrumentalize Jews to develop social cohesion, ingroups and outgroups, or warnings about misbehavior. The traditional antisemitic use of Jews is as instruments for non-Jewish benefit: Jewish money lenders distract attention away from non-Jewish nobility, Jewish tax collectors distract from those who initiate the taxes in the first case, Jewish lawyers, bankers, and professionals are used to divert anger away from a ruling class who institutionalized inequality, and Jewish academics and artists are blamed for an economic and political system that throws people off their family farms, destroys their relationships, and leaves them fantasizing about a supposedly harmonious past. The process by which some Jews filled this economic role was of the design of those in power, from restrictive land covenants that denied Jewish ability to farm to the Christian monopoly on many crafts through the guild system to other types of open discrimination that often forced Jews into intermediary position, a situation that has been compared to what some scholars have called “middleman minorities” (this framework has also been challenged) and what has been also called “middle agent theory” in some Jewish leftist circles.⁹ Antisemitism is not just negative perception of Jews, but a specific ideology that sees Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in a particularly demonic, conspiratorial, and totalizing light, and which can be expressed all the way from the institutional to the interpersonal level. Because antisemitic ideology tells a story about power, it channels dislocated rage, particularly from experiences of class subjugation, and redirects that anger away from the systems responsible onto a mirage.

In medieval Europe, where antisemitism developed, Jews were outsiders that the dominant social forces used as an antithesis to define themselves: for whatever social value you want your community to hold, Jews are presented as the opposite. For example, Jewish “usury” (the lending of money at predatory interest) was the focus of many church denunciations as a method to dissuade Christian usurers from continuing their ways, comparing them to a demonized Jewish population and ensuring that the Christian community could be set apart from the lending practices that were structurally necessary but socially undesirable.¹⁰ While the ideology and the economic utility for this are intertwined, there are some distinctions since a portion of the specificity of the Jewish othering comes from Christian notions of “supercessionism” that saw the Church as replacing Jews as God’s “chosen.” Jewish tradition was thus portrayed as particularly carnal, material, and exoteric when proper faith was thought to be esoteric.

This process of economic marginalization has a particular function: it diverts class anger from the ruling class onto a third party. As a great deal of scholarship shows, the development of the role of many Ashkenazi Jewish figures across Christian Europe was to ensure that the masses connected their class exploitation with Jewish communities who they may have interfaced with on economic issues. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle whereby the material conditions of Jewish life lead to the growth of an ideological superstructure that grows beyond the visibility of the circumstances. For example, as Jews were increasingly pushed into ghettos in the sixteenth century and city ordinances cordoned off Jews from non-Jews, the idea that Jews were intensely clannish and that they distrusted or despised Gentiles became more commonplace when, actually, it was the notion that Jews “poisoned” Gentile lives with frequent interactions that motivated this ghettoization.¹¹

The notion that anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism when it reaches a degree of intensity is based on a categorical error: it assumes that antisemitism is simply the result of various types of vaguely defined “extremism.”

The growth of modern antisemitism emerged as a secularized synthesis of the Christian theological antisemitic narratives, such as that of Jews as conspiratorial, powerful occult actors and their alleged position of holding outside economic power. As Michelle Batini chronicled, modern antisemitic political ideology developed, primarily through Catholic nationalist discourse in Germany and across Europe, as a process of reconciling the economic dislocation field with the development of industrial capitalism and the process of abstraction the economy went to.¹² The combination of the philosophical implications of Christian beliefs about Jews, the perception of Jewish agency in the economy, and Jewish visibility in professions being seen as distinctly “abstract” (such as law and finance), led to the theory that modernity (defined through economic and political abstractions) was the result of assumed widespread Jewish influence (“semitism”). As scholars like Moishe Postone have argued, the impulse to bifurcate the public perceptions of labor between “productive” and “unproductive” is a feature of the process of the commodity fetishism and this bifurcation took on a specifically antisemitic and conspiratorial form of populism.¹³ Thus, capitalism reproduces antisemitism even when those ideologies are not consciously driving ideological predilections because ways of thinking already tied to antisemitic theories are reinforced.

Zionism emerges specifically from this cauldron of modern political nationalism and attempts to use the cause of antisemitism as its solution. If Jews are seen as a politically distinct national entity that operates not as part of a larger collective, then it’s best to simply bring that perception to its logical conclusion. As modern actualization comes from a völkisch form of nationalism tied to a soil, then Zionism is the nationalist attempt to answer the problem of Jewish unsafety. This attempt is a direct appropriation of the Germanic form of romantic nationalism that saw German identity as organically rooted while Jewish identity was urban, cosmopolitan, and abstract.¹⁴ Moreover, Zionism is premised on the notion, supposedly “proven” by the rapid acceleration of modern antisemitism in Europe, that antisemitism is perennial. Consequently, the Zionist solution is to leave and create national autonomy following the colonial model already established as a precedent to contemporary ethnic nationalism. This set of premises allows Zionism not only to supplant other visions of Jewish liberation (such as a Jewish renewal within a socialist or anarchist framework), but to further render these alternative visions impossible: revolution itself can only exacerbate antisemitism because anti-Jewish bigotry is inescapable and will always be inflamed during moments of social upheaval. Nationalism is then understood as a force that is built into our modern political identity and presented as an intrinsic force for identity that can only be channeled, never escaped. In this sense, Zionism is simply learning to play the nationalist game the rest of humanity has already succumbed to. If we understand antisemitism as a way of protecting capital while rechanneling class anger, what Postone called a type of “foreshortened anti-capitalism,” then it’s worth considering how Zionism operates in relationship to class, nation, and empire.

Zionism’s core assumption is what is often called the “eternalist” model of antisemitism: the belief that the Gentile world is fatalistically antisemitic, so we need a type of tragic antiutopianism to simply manage its hostility to Jews. This perspective rejects any pathway to destroying antisemitism as such—a project that would entail looking at the underlying systems of power it protects—and, as antisemitism scholar Richard S. Levy suggests, tempts us to “explain the Holocaust as [antisemitism] history’s logical end—perhaps its only possible culmination.”¹⁵ Zionism instead channels the desire for Jewish safety in every direction other than undermining antisemitism’s point of origin. If we see antisemitism as carried through in the European romantic nationalist project, then Zionism tries to subsume Jewish identity into that same model, hoping then that by embodying its system of power and privilege it will insulate at least some Jewish communities from the ingrained antisemitism of the non-Jewish world. Israeli nationalism is, like all nationalism, a project of class collaboration that mobilizes claims of nationhood to mystify the very real distinctions of class and hierarchy in the larger Jewish world. If we understand antisemitism as bigoted ideas about, and intentions towards, Jews as Jews, then what does it say about Zionist politics when many of these ideas are embedded into the project and across its supporters? And what then does Zionism itself conceal about how power works on a global scale?

The Ingathering of Exiles

There are two historical forces on the political Right today that both were (and continue to be) early proponents of Zionism. The first and most obvious are evangelical Christians, who continue to be one of the largest contingents of Zionist support. “Christian Zionism,” which is the Christian demand for Jews to return to the Holy Land and build a Jewish state for their own reasons, existed (in some form) earlier than the Jewish movement of ostensibly similar goals and was always essential to Zionism’s success. There were early rumblings of the rebuilding of a Jewish national homeland in historic Palestine amongst Calvinists as early as the 1580s, who saw it in their own milleniarian fantasies. The logic that was eventually offered in subsequent generations of Christians, and which developed in sophistication across the remaining centuries, was that Jews were a necessary piece in the Christian eschatology that included the rebuilding of the Kingdom of Israel, the destruction of the Earth, and the return of Jesus Christ. These ideas ramped up in the nineteenth century with the advent of Dispensationalism, created by pastor John Nelson Darby as an end-times theology. He believed this prophecy determined, and spread across, the entire history of the Christian church, which could then be used to illustrate events culminating with the Second Coming.

The future of American evangelism barreled towards apocalyptic fantasies, with Israel pointed to as evidence of God’s continued covenant. Christianity had developed itself since its earliest days as a type of “supercessionist” ideology: the Christian church replaced Israel and the Jews as the holder of God’s chosen covenant. Now the Jews were to rebuild Israel, not simply because they had experienced the horrors of pogroms and the Holocaust, but as a necessary stage in the reclamation of God’s glory. In the Christian Zionist eschatology, a series of events will have to take place: Jews return to the Holy land, most are killed in a mass Armageddon-driven genocide, and those few remaining are forced to convert when Christ “pulls the wool from their eyes” (as many Christian pastors say, referencing John 7:47-49).¹⁶

This has led to an American Zionist movement that has more Christians in it than there are Jews on the entire planet, and where the largest pro-Israel lobby group is Christians United for Israel (CUFI).¹⁷ They are involved in pushing what scholar of Evangelical-Jewish relations Daniel G. Hummel calls “unconditional support for Israel,” funding the Settlements (since Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is part of their post-historical vision), and ensuring that Israel remains the centerpiece of Republican foreign policy.¹⁸ Christian Zionism dominates Evangelical politics, which then overwhelmingly control the GOP, making it a volatile force supporting the most recklessly imperialistic elements in Israel and doing so as a bid for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people.

While Christian Zionists may be the most fervent supporters of Israel and will often perform affinity for Jews in as public a way as possible, their attitudes towards Jews are more in line with traditional antisemitism than almost any other modern perspective.

Some early Christian Zionists even turned to antisemitic notions of Jewish power in stating their case for supporting Jews’ efforts to “civilize” Palestine. Anglican pastor William Henry Johnaton’s book Israel in the World suggested that only a worldwide Jewish financial elite had the necessary power to bring the Jews back to the Holy Land. This has continued as the Christian Right turns to the same conspiracism that is so foundational to the growth of modern conservatism. 700 Club host and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson was a foundational figure in the creation of Christian nationalism, despite having a decades long history of explicit antisemitism.¹⁹ In 1991, he published the book The New World Order, a conspiracy tract citing believers in the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and spinning a tale about a vast cabal undermining Western values and all leading to a demonic conspiracy that would usher in the Anti-Christ (who just happened to be Jewish).

More recently, huge portions of the Evangelical right have turned to Q-Anon, another occultic antisemitic conspiracy theory that revives the “blood libel” (the belief that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood in rituals), through the claim that a Satanic cabal of Democratic pedophiles are harvesting a secret substance from the adrenal glands of virginal children. When looking at polling of evangelical Christianity, the numbers are rather shocking: over thirty percent show some adherence to Q-Anon beliefs, and half revere some version of antisemitic “white genocide” or “great replacement” conspiracy theories.²⁰ The percentages of those who likewise enthusiastically support Israel are rather similar.

In antisemitism, Jews become an incredibly valuable asset inasmuch as they can take the heat generated by a society bent on expropriating wealth from the working class for the benefit of the rich. Once those Jewish targets have been liquidated, according to this antisemitic view, the system remains intact and churning as intended. For Christian Zionists, Jews are simply an opportunity to acquire their messianic fantasies; once Christ returns, their usefulness will be over and their role as sacrifices (as Jews have always played in Christianity) can be completed.

Christian Zionism’s hegemony actually highlights the problems with many ways we try to make sense of the pro-Israel consensus in the United States. While CUFI is often grouped together as a piece of the larger “Israel lobby,” phrasing flattens the fact that these groups often have political conflicts between them.²¹ These conflicts are not uncommon amongst pro-Israel groups, such as when far-right Zionist Organization of American (ZOA) fights with organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which itself often has to condemn many of the same evangelical organizations that support pro-Israel candidates.²² But Christian Zionists are nearly constantly at odds with Jewish groups over issues of conversion, where it’s not uncommon to have Jewish attendees at CUFI conferences pressured to convert or to encounter Christian proselytization groups like Jews for Jesus. In general, even most pro-Israel Jewish groups will fall on the progressive side of most domestic issues, particularly around things like the separation of church and state. By contrast, Christian Zionists are pushing Christian nationalist policies at an increasingly volatile clip. At the more basic level, Christian Zionists are a major force in funneling financial support to West Bank Settlements at the same time as the Israel far-right in those Settlements are arguing to have Christians excised from the country.

Tell Them to Leave

The other historic propagators of Zionism were the antisemites of the various far-right and emerging fascist movements, who saw Jews specifically as an alien semitic or Asiatic race. The term antisemitism, then styled as anti-Semitism, came from the notion that Jews were a semitic people of the Levant whose influence was destructive on the Aryan mind, body, and community. Opposition to this alien influence was seen as a positive political stance. European Jews were demanding emancipation and political enfranchisement in many contexts in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Jews had previously been a sort of “state within a state” in many places and, while they may have been residents of a country, were not necessarily citizens. They had their own courts, rules, and leaders, and because of that, a legal infrastructure existed to marginalize and attack them when it was advantageous for the powerful. But with the post-Enlightenment project of democratic enfranchisement, difference was not necessarily apartness, and instead we could collaborate across lines of uniqueness so as to better create a shared society that can respect everyone’s autonomy, dignity, and aspirations. But as they moved to be equal members of these modern societies amidst the backlash against modernization and capitalism, a large movement formed that saw them as alien outsiders who were responsible for the ills of the contemporary world and needed to be taken out. While there has been a trend of scholarship that attempted to detangle premodern antisemitism and modern antisemitism (for example, Hannah Arendt‘s work), there are large continuities between these elements. Jewish communities were regard with suspicion and theological antagonism was directed at them, but the particular needs of local elite classes dictated the specific instrumentalization of this distrust and antagonism. With the emergence of European nationalism as a dominant force, the “Otherness” of Jewishness was now focused on Jews as an alien nation, often focusing on their Levantine origins and increasingly dictating Jewishness in the ethnic terms that was now the model of identity that political categories were being constructed around (and which is, specifically, not how Jewish communities understood their continuity and bonds). The development of modern Jewish nationalism exists as a response to having European nationalist categories projected onto them (Am Yisrael, the Jewish nation, worked a fundamentally different way in Jewish discourse), and since the antisemitic caricatures often focused specifically on the Jewish lack of autonomy and land, this became a primary vessel for redemption in the Zionist imagination: to become a nation like all others.

This has led to an American Zionist movement that has more Christians in it than there are Jews on the entire planet, and where the largest pro-Israel lobby group is Christians United for Israel.

As has been discussed, a certain ugliness towards diaspora Jewishness, with all its class implications and stereotypes about poor Jews spread by more affluent ones, filtered into a version of the Zionist movement that celebrated muscle and land as the future for Jewish safety. If you read pre-Israeli Zionist writings, everything was on the table: eradicating Judaism and replacing it with Earthy paganism, erasing Jewish history, rebuilding the Temple—anything was possible. An example of this was the Canaanist movement that started in 1939 and argued that “Hebrews” should discontinue their affiliation with Judaism and instead take on a new Jewish identity that ties their nation to the soil of the land they are to inhabit, shedding their diasporic history, and grafting their identity onto that of the Levant.²³ But what had to happen first was to cease to be Juden, and thus to cure ourselves of the disease we have become. “The Jewish idea of colonizing Palestine could be wholesome for both sides,” said Wilhem Marr, the Jew-hater who first coined the term antisemite, saying that exporting Jews would be agreeable for both the “Yids” and the Germans.²⁴

Marr had termed it anti-Semitism, a political movement against the supposed influence of Semitism. This was at a moment when what we know of as modern antisemitism was coming into being, whereby an earlier Christian belief that saw Jews as uniquely evil, conniving, conspiratorial, and secretly powerful, was being secularized and retold using political language. While modern antisemitism did work somewhat differently than the more theologically derived variety, there are continuities as well. As detailed above, some Jews were shuffled off into intermediary economic positions as “middlemen minorities” that served as a buffer between the nobility and the peasants. The structural position occupied by these “middle agents” inflected arcane beliefs about Jewish spiritual malevolence, leading many to turn to premodern antisemitic ideas to explain the alienating changes wrought by the transition to capitalism. Jews seemed to prosper in some sectors of this newly enlightened era, so the theory became that everything modern, abstract, urban, and otherwise “nontraditional” was the result of a conniving Jewish influence, which must be opposed to return to a now romanticized European past. The movement against this influence was called anti-Semitism, but this relied on the belief that Semitism was actually a coherent force controlling Western powers. We have now started spelling it without the hyphen to indicate that its self-description was always a falsehood and is instead an ideology all its own. As Zionism became an idea that was sweeping across Europe, it became a solution for this group to eliminate the allegedly threatening influence these Semites wrought on the Aryan people; whether or not an antisemite supports a Jewish state or opposes one, they do so for distinctly bigoted reasons.

While far-right Zionists never were motivated by Jewish safety, their rhetoric changed after the second world war. This was a moment that, as Paul A. Hanebrink argues, that the language of “Judeo-Christian society” was further developed to invite Jews into the Western project of anticommunism.²⁵ The right became increasingly “pro-Jewish” in their appeals towards Israel, which was accurately seen as an outpost of American military and commercial interests in the Middle East. We now have a right-wing bloc whose allegiance to Israel is almost unwavering, using Zionism for their own ends. After 9/11, the “Counter-Jihad movement” grew as the right reconstructed a global threat in the form of Islam and, particularly in Europe, this meant putting Muslims at the center of any right-wing narrative about defense. Israel became the site of this war since they deemed it a European state in the Middle East, reframing the Israel-Palestine conflict through the demonization of Islam: the Palestinians don’t fight Israel because of the occupation, but because of evil Islamism and hatred for “Judeo-Christian civilization.”

This component of the American far-right has made huge strides in recruiting Jewish support and while the US Jewish electorate still leans far to the left, they have successfully built a Jewish right and have created tacit alliances between some Jewish organizations and far-right US groups like Christians United for Israel on a shared prioritization of Israeli sovereignty. But much of this shifting coalition, particularly in the US context, is about building, as Carl Schmitt might say, a “friend-enemy distinction.” In this case, it is a vision of the nation centered on an American brand of whiteness, a shifting vision of ingroup and outgroup distinctions that help the right build their conception of the nation.

“It’s a war against white people. It’s always been a war against white people,” wrote far-right pundit Ann Coulter in a November 14 retweet of a Newsmax interview with Israeli Defense Forces leader Daniel Norber who says that Hamas’ war isn’t just against Israel, but also the United States.²⁶ “George Washington, TJ, and Columbus; ‘Exterminate whiteness’; expulsion and murder of white farmers in Zimbabwe and South Africa; grooming gangs in the UK; race quotas, mass third world immigration to the U.S. and Western Europe; ‘indigenous land’…” In one punctuation-murdered sentence, Coulter captures the far-right’s use of Israel-as-proxy: they love it when it can be a surrogate for whiteness.²⁷ Israel will then be reconstituted as an outpost of Western imperialism and simultaneously used to prop up the far-right’s own political vision based on antisemitic conspiracy theories. Coulter’s invocation of Jewish whiteness provides a clean example of the opportunistic relationship of the far-right, including white nationalists, towards Jews, racializing them as nonwhite when it helps to establish a particular vision of national unity and then treating them as a totem of whiteness when they can use historical Jewish marginalization as a weapon when attacking nonwhite immigrant groups. Far-right groups like Germany’s PEGIDA or the English Defence League²⁸ (whose founder has been openly supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza) have tried to recruit from Jewish groups, which are historically leaning to the left on immigration, specifically by trying to signal concern over antisemitism that they then think can be mobilized to target “Muslim immigration.”²⁹

Jewish whiteness has been a subject of debate, with some, like Eric Ward, arguing that Jews are essentially not white because of their conditional inclusion into the white project and the intensely antisemitic nature of white nationalism.³⁰ But as the scholar Eric Goldstein chronicled, major US Jewish organizations and figures hoped to bring at least Ashkenazi Jews under the banner of white identity in the United States as a way of developing safety through assimilation: maybe if they were white they would no longer be kept out of the civic project.³¹ Still, what Coulter and others on the far-right are picking up today is that whiteness itself is a social reality because of the privileges and accompanying social benefits that come along with being perceived as white, and those social advantages remain present for Jews understood as white even though they may also experience antisemitism. White Jews are white despite whatever oppression they may face as Jews, just as white people with other marginalized identities still experience white privilege and can be recuperated into the white project. But this complexity is the advantage that Coulter hopes to point to, suggesting that this attack on Jews occurs specifically because of their role in whiteness, and are simply a particularly salient example of antiwhite racism. Within all of this, Jewish particularity, history, and actual vulnerability plays no role except in how it can be mobilized, this this time in defense of whiteness and “Western civilization.”

As conspiracism becomes even more central to the GOP, which is made up of MAGA fanatics on one side and suit-and-tie National Conservatives on the other, antisemitic canards are foundational. As Dan Berger pointed out in 2016, antisemitism is at the heart of much of Donald Trump’s movement in its reliance on cabalistic conspiracy fantasies, even when those beliefs are mobilized against non-Jews.³² So as the movement targets gay people as groomers, trans healthcare as antichild violence, and demonizing immigrants, it does so while saying that this is all orchestrated by the “globalist elites,” like Jewish philanthropist George Soros. This provides the GOP with the ideological scaffolding necessary to explain why they, despite orchestrating wealth transfer from the working class to the rich, are actually protecting the average American: they are defending you against the cabal.

This is best seen in the “great replacement theory,” the idea that someone is trying to replace whites with nonwhite people. This “white genocide” is one of the defining antisemitic claims of the twentieth century: that the progress people of color have made and the shifting demographics in the United States are orchestrated by Jews as an offensive attack on Gentile whites. While the language remains coded, like almost all conspiracy theories, it continues to hold the psychological structures of the older claims that “named the Jew” more explicitly.

The irony of the past few weeks is that those same types of conspiracy theories, which use dog whistles to indicate Jewish people, are being mobilized in defense of Israel itself. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik presented herself as a defender of the Jews when she went to war with the Presidents of elite universities by accusing them of aiding and abetting antisemitism.³³ But her record also shows that she has shown support for the antisemitic “great replacement theory,” so how are we supposed to understand her full-throated denunciation of “antisemitism.” This pattern is common across today’s GOP. Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, one of the loudest pro-Israel voices since October 7, also said that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”³⁴

This all continues as the GOP further shifts into two, competing far-right camps, made up of MAGA conspiracism on the one side, and National Conservatives (often associated with the increasingly powerful Claremont Institute) on the other. There is certainly a move towards Israel-skepticism in many of these circles. However, looking at the round of speakers at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference organized by the Edmund Burke Institute, reveals a nearly totalizing support for the Jewish state. Much of this trend is built around the work of Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American political theorists raised in Tel Aviv who flocked to the Eli (a settlement nestled near Ramallah) after college. His experience of ultranationalism in the Settlement Movement seems to have illustrated his vision when writing the seminal The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018. For Hazony, the national idea, rather than the civic or “propositional” one, becomes the ideal framework for the nation state and the ethnic and identitarian consciousness. Defining in-groups and out-groups based on unalterable characteristics is framed as the natural and normal way of constructing human civilization. In doing so, Hazony has given a Jewish voice in defense of this increasingly Christian nationalist project in the United States, often voicing support for figures and projects derived from political operatives not known for their religious pluralism. The fourth point of “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles”—the movement’s founding declaration of belief coauthored by Hazony—reads that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.”³⁵ While presented as a more neutral support of nationalism, the National Conservative movement’s key institutions (like the Claremont Institute) have deep ties to open Christian nationalist projects more extreme than its veneer typically reveals.³⁶

Yet all of it, from Left Poale Zion to the more vicious revisionists of Lehi, ultimately conceded that antisemitism must remain for the project of Jewish nationalism to succeed.

National Conservatism has become a global project as it builds relationships with the global far-right, noting that nowhere, but in Israel, are Jews the majority. This presents a problem for both American Jews and Jews as a whole, but Hazony’s reasons for aligning himself with a political project that can be read as categorically unfriendly to Jews, is obvious: the United States can be a Christian nation because Jews already have a nation of their own. Jewish safety simply is not a deciding element of the political program since Jews should, ultimately, move away from Gentile lands and return home. No more of this egregious diasporic compromise. No safety is found among the stranger.

When Israel is invoked amongst the National Conservatives it is as a quid pro quo—a way of forging off an even more egregious enemy (Muslims)—and therefore a beachhead for a distinctly non-Jewish US project. This returns us to our question of the Jewish role in whiteness. Jews play a useful, if contradictory, role as figureheads of white civilization and as conspiratorial foils to white dominance. Paul Gottfried has been a frequent speaker at the National Conservatism conferences, and when I spoke with Gottfried last year, he told me that Hazony had credited Gottfried with the inspiration for the founding of the movement. Gottfried had been more recently known for helping to found the alt-right alongside Richard Spencer, appearing on multiple white nationalist publications and at their conferences, and helping to revitalize what many have been accurately labeled the largest openly fascist movement in decades. Gottfried both told me that he was “sympathetic to Israelis” and he thought Jews have been the bulwark of radical Marxism and cultural radicalism. This vision of Jews as cultural interlopers is found across Gottfried’s books, where he frequently rails against “cultural Marxists,” “neocons,” and other enemies in sheep’s clothing. The answer to these scourges is, of course, virtuous nationalism—the movement’s commitment to inequality matched with rigid particularism—and they will support this model abroad if it supports their own vision at home. Gottfried has been at the center of the largest revival of white nationalism in a generation and his acolytes, such as Richard Spencer, continue to innovate new manifestations of antisemitism. Despite (or perhaps because) of these antisemitic commitments, Gottfried still chooses to support Israel, as it helps to defend his vision of the “West,” and its interest.³⁷

If we head further to the right there is a long tradition of white nationalist anti-Zionism that sees Israel as simply another manifestation of world Jewry that has established the United States as a “Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG)”—a client state for Jewish interests (a framing uncomfortably echoed by some on the left as well). If you look across the fascist world of the post-alt-right, you will find figures disingenuously putting Palestinian flags in their bios and sharing the worst of Israel’s war crimes, then tying it back to a conspiratorial worldview that paints Jewishness as uniquely depraved. They don’t care about Palestinians, they just really hate Jews.

But even this is a mixed bag, and some still see Zionism as preserving white interests. “As someone who understands your identity…and the experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogue feelings about whites,” said white nationalist Richard Spencer, presumably to a Jewish audience.³⁸ “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.” Spencer praised Israel’s strict anti-immigrant policies and self-conception as an ethnostate, which Spencer references as a model of a white homeland. Spencer previously had relationships with Jewish members of the “race realist” movement, such as CUNY professor and race science advocate Michael Levin or “traditionalist” educator Rabbi Mayer Shiller. Both figures had spoken at the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, run by leading white nationalist Jared Taylor: “they look white to me,” he often retorts.

In 2016, after explaining for nearly an hour that Jews manufactured multiculturalism, communism, and other instruments of the West’s decline, white nationalist Greg Johnson told me “I think that Israel…is a legitimate thing because I think it’s important that Jews actually have a homeland to live in.” Much of his argument retains the “get off my lawn” appeal of earlier fascists, which is essentially that Jews are more trouble to us when they are in our communities. While he had little nice to say about actual existing Israel, Johnson would prefer them to wreak havoc over there.

Curing the Diaspora

The Revisionist Zionism movement itself, of which Likud represents just one part, saw the diaspora as sick. Jabotinsky’s far-right politics fetishized national identity, biological determinism, hierarchy, and monism, while building heavily on antisemitic European nationalists. There were multiple strands of the Zionist movement, from Cultural Zionists who asked for a “Jewish revival” in Eretz Yisrael instead of a state, to the Labor Zionists who had a social democratic vision of state formation built on exclusivist labor policies. The revisionism offered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky became a different vision of the Zionist project. It was divorced from left-wing economic and social pretentions, and instead saw Jewish sovereignty only emerging from the violent force of the nation. Over time, Revisionism overtook Israeli politics, an ideology that seems to fit better with the type of militant identitarianism that is necessary to maintain a settler colony that must use violence as a normative force for national cohesion.

Fascists believed that the dualism between body and spirit now ravaging the Western world was the invention of Jews, who lacked rootedness. Jabotinsky echoed this commentary by critiquing the diasporic Jewish tendency towards universalism (which is part of why he hated the socialist Zionists so much). For Jabotinsky, Jews would not be saved by fighting for the universal salvation of the working class, but fighting for the Jewish nation by force of might; those solutions found in the diaspora were bound to fail because it was the diaspora itself that birthed their illness.³⁹ “Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of Hebrew with masculine beauty,” wrote Jabotinsky, “the Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn to command.”⁴⁰ Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding luminary, said that the Jew was “spineless, repressed, shabby,” and that he “carries on his dirty deals behind a mask of progress and reaction; with Rabbis, writers, lawyers, and doctors, who are only crafty profit seekers.”⁴¹

For Zionist activist Max Nordau, the Jewish character, constructed through unfortunate circumstances, could only be redeemed by abandoning its current trajectory. “I contemplate with horror the future development of this race of (assimilated Jews of Europe) which is sustained morally by no tradition, whose soul is poisoned with hostility to both its own and to strange blood, and whose self-respect is destroyed through the ever-present consciousness of a fundamental lie,” says Nordau. “This is the picture of the Jewish people at the end of the nineteenth century. To sum up: the majority of Jews are a race of accursed beggars.”⁴²

It’s worth noting that Zionism was at this point a fringe idea. Zionism sought to be a “nation like all others,” except Jews were not a nation like all others, at least not all of us wanted to be: the Orthodox were adamantly opposed to a Zionism which they viewed as idolatrous. Many secular Jews placed their hope for salvation in socialism. It was only when those options failed so catastrophically in the first half of the twentieth century that a majority of Jews came around.

This framework places violence as the flames that forged the Jewish future, necessary to make us whole through the State of Israel. The Revisionists considered themselves enemies of cosmopolitanism, almost repeating the underlying ideologies of anti-Semitism, while offering their own branch of blood and soil nationalism as a way to eliminate the alleged Jewish role in pushing liberal multiculturalism. As scholar of Revisionist Zionism Evan Kaplan noted, the monist philosophy offered by the movement was built around the revival of Israel as a revolutionary national subject and “was a means to cure the Jewish spirit after two millennia of the Diaspora.” Internationalism, as its anthesis, was only good for people who had no land. Jews were busy working on universalistic causes like Marxism only because they were not rooted to the earth like other nations, thereby existing as a kind of absent people or “extraterritorial entity.” The antisemitic fantasy of the cosmopolitan, rootless Jew was claimed by the Revisionists in this way as an accurate depiction of Jewish reality. It was up to them to ensure this Jew would cease to be. “The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent,” wrote Revisionist founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Much of this “muscular Judaism,” as Nordau called it, motivated a profound disgust that was shown to Jewish Holocaust survivors during Israel’s early years.⁴³ How could these Jews fail to fight back? The notion that Jews “went like sheep to the slaughter” reproduced the antisemitic caricature of effeminate Jewish weakness and was only challenged decades later.⁴⁴ The phrase was used by Abba Kovner, who attempted to kill six million Germans in 1945 as revenge for the Holocaust before supporting brutality against Palestinians just a few years later, and his failure to stop the train of German genocide was often proof of what passivity in the face of existential danger meant for the Jewish people.⁴⁵ The Ashkenormative character of that early Zionism was likewise used to target other Jewish diasporas. Notably, it was used to force Jews from the MENA region to repress their own Jewish particularism and join in the supposedly coherent unified Jewish identity upon which Zionism predicated its claim to historic Palestine (this reality was immortalized by Ella Shohat’s famous essay, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”).⁴⁶

Yet all of it, from Left Poale Zion to the more vicious revisionists of Lehi, ultimately conceded that antisemitism must remain for the project of Jewish nationalism to succeed. In his diaries, Herzl wrote that the antisemites would become the “best friends” of the Zionists, since they would consistently make the case that cohabitation was impossible and the only viable strategy for any peaceful arrangement was separation. The cause of antisemitism is then placed on Jewish difference itself, a retreat from the cosmopolitan ideal that suggests different people can be in community while remaining their own person. “The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America,” wrote Herzl in The Jewish State, a line that seems to suggest that Jews carry antisemitism into a new society simply by carrying themselves into it. While this is often portrayed as antiutopian, it actually competes with the strategy of confronting and solving antisemitism head on: why fight it when we can leave?

Jews have always been safer in societies that are cosmopolitan and democratic, when nationalism gives way to pluralism, and when Jews build alliances with other people facing marginalization and oppression.

This capitulation created a mechanism of validation for the antisemites who, at their ideological core, denied the possibility of coexistence since the model of the “Jew” they had invented in antisemitic fantasy was inherently a product of the cosmopolitan world. The Jew that sat in their midst, internally displaced and “othered” by European nationalism and colonialism, was an inherent contradiction to the national consciousness, both of the antisemites and of the Jews themselves. So the underlying premises—that Jews and Gentiles will be forever at war and that ethnic nationalism is the natural and healthy structure of a modern society—are tacitly shared by Jewish and non-Jewish Zionist activists. Herzl and subsequent movements were obviously aided by the material conditions of absolute cruelty European Jews were facing as profoundly oppressed people, but it also cemented the perpetuity of antisemitism and, subsequently, sowed it into the fabric of the Israeli state. In this formulation, Jewish history and future would be forever defined by antisemitism, allowing what Salo Baron Cohen called the “lachrymose story” to become the de facto story.

The Antisemitism Wars

Recently an absolute crisis emerged, as real spikes of antisemitism, including in some leftist spaces, have been drowned out by disingenuous accusations thrown around at an increasingly powerful Palestinian solidarity movement. Organizers from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) faced accusations of antisemitism and groups at Harvard, Columbia, and Brandeis among others faced reprisal for campus activism. This is happening as a moment when the insurgent far right is more openly flirting with antisemitism, such as blaming Jews for nonwhite immigration and for the rise of the LGBTQ movement. Twitter has become the centerpiece of this culture war as Elon Musk strips out its hate speech safeguards and continues his own journey of political discovery. Over the past two years he has increasingly moved into the conspiracist world of the far right, tweeting seemingly in support of the Alternative fur Deutschland party in Germany, retweeting white nationalists, and deciding to set upon the Anti-Defamation League in his sites.

A few months back, a new campaign called #BantheADL emerged from white nationalists like Keith Woods and was discussed heavily across the white nationalist podcast sphere hosted by leading figures like Richard Spencer. Unlike the #DroptheADL campaign, which pushed progressive organizations to disaffiliate from collaborations with the ADL over their tarnishing of Palestine solidarity groups, #BanTheADL was an explicitly far-right rallying cry to denounce and potentially sue the ADL over their work combating hate speech. Musk threatened a lawsuit and the ADL backed down, something they have continued to do as they deleted a page dedicated to documenting the transphobic Libs of Tik Tok social media account and its curator, Chaya Raichik.

But the tension between Musk and the ADL seemed to be resolved when Musk merged his platform with their talking points, tweeting out that the term “decolonization” and the phrase “from the river to the sea” implied the genocide of Jews. ADL CEO Jonathon Greenblatt retweeted this enthusiastically, sputtering about Musk’s “leadership,” and the months of antisemitic conspiracy theories were suddenly a distant memory. This makes a certain amount of sense for organizations like the ADL, which put Israel as the centerpiece of Jewish safety from antisemitism. From this perspective, any threat to Israel constitutes hate speech and any defense of it is simultaneously defense of the Jewish people. The fact that Israeli nationalism is largely being propped up by far-right nationalist movements that are usually built on foundational antisemitism, seems to no longer be of interest.

As the violence in Gaza reached a shocking crescendo, with nearly fifty thousand confirmed Palestinian dead (and with the total numbers likely in the hundreds of thousands), a new phenomenon began to become more apparent. A group of online bloggers and posters that could be grouped under what antifascist researcher Ben Lorber calls “Bronze Age Zionists” began reviving an aggressive, fascist version of Zionism built heavily on the work of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane.⁴⁷ Kahane’s vision of Judaism was based on ethnic chauvinism. He demanded the expulsion of all non-Jewish Arabs from Israel and the reinstatement of the Biblical Kingdom. For Kahane, Gentiles were naturally poisoned with perennial antisemitism.⁴⁸ Despite being killed over thirty years ago, Kahane has continued to be a figurehead for the Israeli far-right, and many of these Bronze Age Zionists point to his vision of ethnic revenge as a pathway to the reclamation of Jewish pride and sovereignty. But what is also apparent amongst many of their community is their belief in a possible alliance with openly antisemitic portions of the far right, including white nationalists, and their agreement with antisemitic ideas as it applies to leftist Jews. “Jewish organizations, like a faithless and atheistic version of the Maharal of Prague, have contributed to the creation of a golem—the abomination of BLM and mass immigration,” wrote one commentator by the name of Hebrew Conservative. As Lorber tracked, many of these figures focus on highlighting Jews throughout history who had supported fascist regimes as a model for redeeming the Yid from his misdeeds.⁴⁹

The problem with this formulation, other than the fact that it provides cover for a rapidly unfolding genocide in Gaza, is that is a figment. There is a certain obvious symmetry to Jewish history: nationalist movements always harm Jews, and cosmopolitan societies built on solidarity and equality always protects them. Israeli nationalism depends on the growth of a global far right because they need partners in arms deals, financial speculation, and police collaboration. Thus, there is a direct correlation between the increasing power of Likud and the national populist upsurge taking place across much of the world. And despite Netanyahu’s seeming love of these nationalist leaders, the actual meat-and-potatos policies and behaviors in their countries show little love for Jews. Antisemitic conspiracy theories have become endemic, religious and ethnic minorities increasingly fear for their safety, there is a global campaign against Jewish archetypes like George Soros, and Jews are increasingly identified as responsible for the decadent modernity they believe is rotting the core of Western civilization. As Jews, we gave up our safety, and got Israel in return.

The Problem Is in How We Define Safety

The problem ultimately lies in what it means to project Jewish life, what it looks like when these collective reaches full flourishing, self-actualization, and care. For those who sit in the highest levels of Jewish establishment organizations, their vision of success is largely like others in similar positions across the non-Jewish world: to be successful at the political mission they believe to be their right. But this is, ultimately, an entirely different question than what it takes for Jewish communities, in all of our multitudes and differences, to be safe to build a future. If we decide that this particular national project, built on dispossession and apartheid, is one and the same as Jewish success, then we can only measure ourselves against the threats to an increasingly unstable military machine in the Middle East. But if we zoom out, that answer becomes murkier, less connected to what most Jews picture when considering Jewish safety. Unless we rethink the assumptions we will never be able to (re)discover that there is a potentially yâpheh future where haimish is anywhere we live and build loving relationships.

Not only is the modern American Jewish community overwhelmingly Zionist, Zionism is also closely intermixed with Jewish identity. This creates a confusion of terms where only a coherent and well-contoured definition can parse out the differences when antisemitism tries to cover itself in criticism of Israel, or when good faith political disagreement is slandered as a “lethal obsession.” To do this we have to understand the role that Zionism played in the creation of modern Jewish politics and to develop criticisms with empathy and understanding of how, for some, generational traumas birthed it. In doing so, we have to refuse nationalisms’ demagogic and authoritarian solutions to the problem of Jewish safety.

The only contiguous element of Jewish identity is that it has always changed. After the destruction of the Israelite Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, Jews had to completely rebuild our religion in the ashes of what used to be the center of observance. Jews have spread across the globe and because of that have brought together one of the most diverse “peoples” in the world, which is a point that makes Jewishness legitimately distinct and is the source of much of the insight from Jewish thinkers, movements, and voices. The alternative to a Jewish identity based entirely on Israeli nationalism is to bring it back to the diversity that provided its dynamic presence in the first place. This is not a rejection of the historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel or a demand to reject Jewish peoplehood, but to recenter that identity by acknowledging that we were forged in all the various homelands we were borne to. Jews are not uniquely called to this diaspora because this is the call that all revolutionary movements have made—to build identities that are meaningful without creating militarized borders around them and privileging ourselves while dispossessing others. These are the lessons that the prophetic Jewish tradition has taught us, and the only way to honor that history, our ancestors, and even the Holy Land itself, is to see our flourishing in concert with all the others with whom we will be building the future of this planet.

To let anti-Zionism become our consensus definition of antisemitism we assume that a militarized, ethnocratic state in historic Palestine is categorically in the interest of all Jews, even while this assumption shifts what Jewish identity means. As Israeli scholar Shlomo Abramovich discusses in relationship to the BDS movement, the framing of anti-Zionist activism is partially about the project of redefining what the center of Jews are, from the diasporic people defined through shared custom and spirituality, to Israel: a successful negation of the diaspora. “The battle with the BDS, and defining the BDS as antisemitic, are parts of a wider process of shaping Israeli identity and strengthening its Jewish elements,” writes Abramovich. “Labeling the BDS as antisemitic creates links between anti-Zionism, and between Israel and Jews. Doing so strengthens Israel’s image and self-identification as the representative of the interests of the Jewish people and even of Judaism.”⁵⁰

Jews have always been safer in societies that are cosmopolitan and democratic, when nationalism gives way to pluralism, and when Jews build alliances with other people facing marginalization and oppression. Because the largest rise of antisemitism was seen in direct relationship to the growth of European nationalism, we saw Jewish social movements built in direct contrast to this. What we now know as antifascism—a heavily Jewish movement from the start—created the models of community self-defense that we turn to even now as we fight off the far right, and which were built on defending everyone from the forces of marginalization. The United States has a much different history of antisemitism than Europe, and part of it was because Jewish difference was explained (at least eventually and tacitly) as respected in its founding myth of religious pluralism. Societies that value religious pluralism, which is explicitly at odds with the legal framework of Israel, have proven best for Jews. For example, Albania was a refuge for many Jews fleeing the Holocaust.⁵¹ All of this is consonant with the logic we know to be true in mass movements: the more of us working together for common ends, the more likely we are to win. When we build a society that sees difference as a strength, we value protecting our distinctions because we no longer see them as something that keeps us apart. Pluralism, democracy, free speech, antiauthoritarianism, and economic and social equality are the models that have seen a direct rise in Jewish safety, and it is no surprise that they are the same social features that aid other communities marginalized by the structures of power.

This is especially true when it comes to Muslim communities, the very ones demonized in Zionist narratives about antisemitism and yet whose experience of oppression often tracks alongside rises in antisemitism. In the development of antisemitism in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain, it was both Jews and Muslims that were sought out by the Inquisition, both facing similar conspiracy theories about the cryptic perfidy their presence suggested.⁵² Today, we see how antisemitic conspiracy theories are often repurposed to focus on Muslim migrants, or when the far-right attacks synagogues we know that mosques are next. None of us is safe until all of us are.

“Since 1948, the greatest number of Jews who’ve been attacked and killed for trying to live as Jews have been Israelis,” pointed out Rob Eshmen at the Forward a couple of months after October 7, thereby highlighting an often unacknowledged fact: Israel is the least safe place on the planet to be a Jew.⁵³ Israeli apartheid has never proven to deliver Jewish safety, but instead benefits a class who profits from colonial exploitation. Simply mimicking Western imperialism does little to build safety because that outcome requires communal flourishing for all peoples, Jews and Gentiles, to undermine the despair necessary that turns many to conspiracy theories or reactionary violence. Assuming Zionism is the key ignores how antisemitism works and erases the history of what Jews have done to become freer. This accepts the status quo instead of dreaming about what is possible, for Israel-Palestine and for all communities yearning for a better life.

Anti-colonialism, Anti-racism, Imperialism, Israel/Palestine, Palestine, Politics, Racial capitalism, Racism, Zionism

Shane Burley

Shane Burley is a journalist and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide for Fighting Antisemitism (Melville House, 2024) and the author and editor of three other books on the far-right and antifascism. His journalism and writing has been featured in places such as NBC News, Al Jazeera, In These Times, Truthout, Jewish Currents, Waging Nonviolence, MSNBC, Political Research Associates, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, and Oregon Humanities. He has published on fascism, antisemitism, Israel-Palestine, and Jewish Studies in places such as the Oregon Historical Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Fascism, Patterns of Prejudice, multiple academic anthologies, and edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Justice in 2019 on “Antisemitism in the 21st Century.” He can be found on X @shane_burley1 and Instagram @shaneburley.

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