Israel/Antizionism

• The question of whether Anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Jewish and antisemitic is not theoretical. In practice, every society that adopted Anti-Zionism as its defining ideology ultimately became hostile to Jewish life. The Arab world is exhibit A. They claimed to only be “Anti-Zionist” and yet within years of Anti-Zionism becoming a defining feature of Arab societies no Jews were left across the Arab world.

• The USSR is exhibit B. Within a few years after 1967, when Moscow first made antizionism its domestic & foreign policy priority, some 250k Soviet Jews emigrated, mostly to Israel. 25 years later 1.5 million were gone. (The only reason it took that long is that the USSR shut down Jewish emigration for nearly a decade in the middle.) The Soviet case also shows how effortlessly left-wing antizionism merges with extremist far-right, neo-Nazi type Jew-hatred. During perestroika, as the state began to fall apart, all kinds of neo-fascist groups started to emerge, which until then had been suppressed. Among their leaders were the ideologues of late-Soviet antizionism—people who gave us the pearls about Zionism being racism, settler-colonialism, imperialism, etc. They preached the tropes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion & the antizionism of the left in the same breath. Their audiences were ordinary Soviet citizens yearning to understand why their world was falling apart. Nobody among them knew or cared that antizionism & antisemitism are not supposed to be the same. Theoretical distinctions between Jews and Zionists didn’t matter to them one bit. They were just glad to learn that there was, in fact, a big & dangerous enemy out there that controlled & undermined everything. Everything finally made sense.