Mick Hartley

After the Holocaust antisemitism became unsayable in polite circles, but it never went away: it just re-surfaced as anti-Zionism. Einat Wilf:

Starting Oct. 8 last year, inspired by images of Jewish defeat and weakness after the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists, anti-Zionism exploded worldwide – on university campuses, at international organizations and even in the pages of some respected newspapers. A campaign that had been building for decades, ingeniously devised and methodically executed, has reached its zenith.

Antisemitism was discredited after World War II, once the world became aware of the horrors that Nazi ideology unleashed, culminating in the Holocaust. Anti-Zionism was created to replace antisemitism, initially by the Soviet Union, which exported it to the world. Intellectual “respectability” was key to its appeal, since ideas – especially the most dangerous and vile of them – must be perceived as respectable for educated elites to uphold them.

The spread and rise of anti-Zionism over the last several decades has built on what I call “the placard strategy.” It ingeniously employs a simple, repeated equation, understandable to even a kindergartner. On one side is the word “Israel” or “Zionism,” or an image of the Star of David. Then comes an equals sign, followed by one of a litany of words that have become signifiers of evil: Zionism = Racism. Zionism = Apartheid. Zionism = Genocide.

These words are not chosen because they convey reality. In reality, Zionism is about fighting colonialism, racism, apartheid and certainly genocide. These words are decontextualized and ahistorical, presented to portray Jews, especially those who dared to seek and support sovereignty in their homeland, as evil. These notions are endlessly recycled on placards and through social media and, most consequentially, laundered for respectability through academia and the United Nations.

Academic analysis and citations are the key to conferring a sense of authority. As Wilson Center scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has shown, this process works by writing papers that are then cross-referenced to create an impenetrable structure of supposed scholarship.

The placard strategy has also been laundered through the U.N. General Assembly. Consider the 1975 “Zionism = Racism” resolution. When South Africa brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice last December, it was another a page from this playbook.

The nursery-rhyme repetition of a simple anti-Zionism message in numerous forums – combined with the imprimatur of academia and U.N. bodies – leads to one logical conclusion. If Israel, Zionism and the Star of David are evil, then evil must be eradicated. Think of the latest signs showing a Star of David in a trash bin labeled “Keep the World Clean.” More than any other placard, this one exposes the purpose of the entire project of anti-Zionism: a world without Jews.

So…what is Zionism, really?

Zionism is a political movement that started in Europe in the late 19th century for the liberation and self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. Nothing more and nothing less. Each part of this description is important.

A political movement: Some people argue that Zionism is 3,000 years old. The Jewish connection to Zion, the biblical name for Jerusalem – and, by extension, to the land of Israel – has been baked into the Jewish people, their history, their conception of themselves, their rituals and their traditions. When Jews were exiled in Babylon, in the Roman Empire, and eventually in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, the Jews vowed to never forget Zion. In the 19th century, the Jewish people organized themselves into an action-oriented political movement designed to bring about the establishment of a sovereign state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.

For liberation and self-determination: Like other liberation movements, Zionism emerged from the Enlightenment and the rise of liberal ideas. It rests on the belief that liberty and freedom go hand in hand with the political power needed to secure them. This emerged from the tragic understanding that – whether in Europe, Russia, or North Africa and the Middle East – Jews would never be fully accepted as equals. Therefore, a state of their own was necessary for Jews to achieve equality. Liberation depends on the rise of national movements of self-determination where people can live in nation states and citizens can elect governments by the people and for the people. In that respect, Zionism is not unique. Liberation texts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries included the Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews among the nations that needed to emerge from crumbling empires.

Of the Jewish people: The Jews are a people and a nation. One of the greatest mischaracterizations of Jews is that they are simply members of a religious faith. The notion of Judaism as a religion emerged in the 18th and 19th century, mostly in Europe, in an effort to fit Jews into the structure of secular republics. The idea was to sever the collective, ancient conceptions of the Jews as a people, a nation, a tribe – what in Hebrew is known simply as “Am” – from the private practices of faith and ritual. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, proclaimed the movement as a form of emancipation: “We are a people – one people.”

In their ancient homeland: Before a century-long campaign of erasure, it was widely known and understood that the Jewish people were only ever collectively connected to one land – the land of Israel. The Jews have been exiled and have lived in many places around the world. But as a people and a nation, they have only ever been connected to one land that would make sense as a sovereign nation-state. The Jews have been repeatedly exiled from this land, but they never ceded it. To emerge with their own nation-state, in their ancestral homeland, with their revived ancient language, they had to decolonize themselves from numerous empires – Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, British, to name a few. In that, Zionism is the world’s oldest, most persistent and most successful decolonization movement.

The enemies of Israel, notably the Islamist Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah, know perfectly well what Zionism is, and know that it conflicts with their vision of Islamic supremacism in which no Jews are permitted. In which to put it more bluntly, all Jews must be killed. It's an existential struggle now, Zionism.