How Anti-Zionism Shrugs Off Antisemitism

New words and ideas can’t sanitize very old facts.

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Anti-Israel protesters at Potsdamer Platz during a "Freedom for Palestine" march that drew thousands of participants on November 4, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Let’s chat for a moment about anti-Zionism. 

For some of the reasons I laid out in my latest column, I think the Chinese Communist regime is objectively evil and tyrannical. If we could topple it at no significant cost in blood or treasure, I’d be all for it. But we can’t. The regime has a stranglehold on power domestically, and possesses a significant nuclear arsenal and an increasingly formidable conventional military. So, we have to deal with the China we have, not the one we want. Problems without solutions aren’t problems, they’re just facts of life. Or as James Burnham put it, “Where there’s no solution, there’s no problem.”

But for all my issues with the Chinese state and the Communist Party that runs it, it really wouldn’t occur to me to say that the nation of China shouldn’t exist. I mean, I do think several historic nations—or peoples (it gets complicated)—oppressed by China should be allowed to have self-determination. But I don’t think anybody who calls for a free Tibet thinks Tibetan sovereignty would need to come at the expense of the Chinese nation. 

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  1. Maritvogel

    I can understand why Israel is worried about letting people in Gaza into Israel now but why doesn’t Egypt let people from Gaza into Egypt? I have heard that some people cannot leave because Hamas will not let them. What is the truth? If one looks at world history going back a long time, most countries have been taken over and have had boundaries changed at one point or another with hard feelings and clashes between people afterwards and all kinds of maneuvering by governments. Is this current conflict more of the same or is the problem that Muslim Jihadists cannot stand that there is a Jewish country next to them existing after it was merely part of Palestine? Muslim Jihadists are not at all happy that there is a big part of the world that is not Muslim. Little Israel is a small thorn in their side they could take out except for the Judeo-Christian West (Europe and America) helping it to be there and protecting it. The Jihadist Vision of Muslim religion does not allow them to agree to a compromise. They do not believe in freedom of religion. So they send in a ridiculously cruel raid to kill Israelis knowing that there will be retaliation by Israel. They want to keep fighting. And the can also destabilize the rest of the non Muslim West. They kill two birds with one stone. Loss of life of their own people for the cause of the Holy Jihad is ok from their point of view and they can blame Israel who hits back for being cruel. A double play. They need to keep people in Gaza so they have territory they can claim . So why will Hamas and other Muslim jihadists ever stop? They will keep going and going. I think it is evil when a religion cannot tolerate the existence of another religion or belief and advises a holy war. I do not think the crusades were a great idea either but once again, that precious area of the world means a lot to Christian’s and Jews. So we are still fighting about it. So sad. I may be prejudiced because I am a well-educated free-speaking professional Christian American woman, but I think the recent act of malfeasance was the Hamas invasion/raid of Israel. That act was evil and it was never going to bring out any good or resolution. Rather like there was never any good going to come from Russia invading Ukraine. That was a bad idea all the way around. All the countries in the world have had disputes about territories and money but the craziest, most pernicious and most destructive to humanity and the world have been the ones based on racism and religion —the erasure of a race or a religion, the forced promotion of a religion where there was not agreement, and cruel self interested religious scapegoating of which the Jews have been a sad example. We have boundaries between countries all over the world that countries are not happy about. We have religions that differ. We need to let them be. We need to respect and work around them so we do not destroy humanity and the world.

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    Michael Harris

    "China" is less than a century old.

    The idea that at least two dozen hostile dynasties/regimes sacking each other over thousands of years and setting up new regimes comprises a continuous polity is absurd. (Same argument concerning Egypt)

    Not only that, the Mongols conquered China in the 13th century.

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  3. Peter Cohee

    It might be that "anti-Zionism" is not equal to "Jew hatred," but the latter is certainly antecedent to the former. Look at a map of Islamic nations. From the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the outermost regions of Kazakhstan, Islam rules. But on the eastern Mediterranean litoral, a tiny speck of a nation is defiantly, resolutely not Islamic. It is a blight, a stain, an intolerable macula to Muslim faithful, and it must be wiped clean. That's one kind of Jew hatred. Another is a perverse underdog-rooting, in which those who always win are loathed for their successes and the losers gain the sympathy of all fair-minded people. Israel shouldn't always get its way; it should lose at least half the time. That's the kind of Jew hatred we see on our campuses and in faculty lounges.

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    1. Devotus

      Lebanon used to be mostly Christian, but the Christians, who were richer, stopped having babies, so the population dynamics changed, which led to an ugly, ugly civil war.

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  4. Joe1776

    I was thinking about the same thing. I mean when I say I am a "Zionist" and a "Neocon" I almost feel like I am admitting to something horrible. But I simply believe that Jews deserve a nation and Israel is the most sensible place. If you are an anti-Zionist then it seems you are wed to the view that Israel should not exist. Either it should be wiped out or all the Arab Muslims with some sort of claim to have descended from this area should come back and vote the Jews out and effectively eliminate them from the area like they have been eliminated from so many majority Arab Muslim countries.

    The whole "Neocon" just means I think America does well to have a strong military that can support other countries that share our values and potentially fight countries that despise our values and us. Both of these terms seem to have become "bad words" at about the same time. I believe neocon became a bad word because of leftist teachers that hated Reagan and the Bushes.

    I think you are right about anti-zionism. But on the anti-zionism also has to do with race. Even if Israelis were mostly Christian it would still be hated by the left.

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    Normb1442

    My problem with Jonah is that he doesn't know, or chooses to ignore, what antisemitism has always been. It expresses itself as hatred of Jews, justified by accusations that have no basis in fact, and it always has the same purpose -- to deflect attention from a political regime that is in trouble.

    For example, the French went quite bonkers over the Dreyfus case at a time when there were less than 50,000 Jews in the country. This visceral hatred was especially violent in rural areas, among people who had never laid eyes on a Jew in their lives. But the French had lost a war to Germany, wanted revenge, and the military suddenly found itself with a major spy scandal on its hands. The answer to this was to frame a Jewish officer for
    it and thereby unleash years of antisemitism, which the military took to the extent of not even prosecuting the REAL spy when he was identified.

    None of this had anything to do with anything any Jew did or didn't do.

    So is the belief that anti-Zionism is not a good thing for the Jews antisemitism? I don't see how. It should be obvious by now that Israel is not going to win this war politically, not least because it's being conducted under a government of racists and religious fanatics assembled into a coalition by a leader whose principal purpose is to stay out of jail for crimes which most Israelis think he committed and spent much of this year in the streets saying so. The attack by Hamas is probably the ONLY reason the Netanyahu government might survive, though it's sheer incompetence might still bring it down.

    Israel is doing what any country must do given the savagery of Hamas, though when my country was in their shoes, in 2001, we didn't go around deliberately hitting Afghan civilians and encouraging anti-Muslim attacks at home. Biden is acting as an ally must, with calls for restraint that only idiots can view as unfriendly. As for progressives, calling them antisemitic may be true of some, but not of all, and Jonah ought to know better. It is quite possible to think Israel was not a good thing for the Jewish people, and to love those people totally.

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    Gbr0wn

    Go ahead and say I'm a latent pervert or homo, but if you ask me Jordan most closely resembles a side view of a scrotum with erect penis (a rather short one) pointing to the right off the top

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  7. Mattfrommo

    It's all very simple. The Palestinians are in a terrible, pitiable state. In leftist thinking, the more pitiable party is ALWAYS correct in any dispute, regardless of the facts on the ground. It is a worldview based entirely on emotional reaction.

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    The Stray Goose

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGpkd7unXs

    This video gives the left all the attention their opinions deserve.

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  9. Peter Sperry

    Substitute South Africa for Israel and anti-apartheid for anti-Zionist and run the analysis. Yes, Israel has as much right to exist as South Africa. But neither has a right to operate allow a single ethnic group to reduce the majority population to second class servitude. You cannot add “as a Jewish nation” to the question of Israel’s right to exist and assert it is a valid comparison to other countries right to exist. At this point, the territory between the river and the sea should not exist as either a Palestinian or Jewish nation but as a unified country that respects the rights of all its citizens. Sadly, this concept is rejected by both the far right Jewish population and the extremist Paliatinians.

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    1. Indy Tim

      Muslims have been elected to every knesset since 1948. Jews can't even live in Gaza.

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    2. BDM

      First, this argument is based on a falsehood: Israel does not treat ethnic minorities as second-class citizens. Arab Israelis have full citizenship rights. There are certainly arguments to be made that they're treated with suspicion, unfounded or not.

      Second, it's not just "far-right" Jews and "extremist" Palestinians who reject the idea of a single nation, it's the vast majority of both populations and virtually all Palestinians. Always led by communists, putative jihadists and criminals (not mutually exclusive categories, to be sure) the Arabs/Palestinians have rejected every opportunity for a viable two-state solution, beginning in 1948 with the partition of the British Mandate. Unlike Israel's, "Palestine," had never existed before the partition and had the same opportunity as Israel to embrace freedom, peace and prosperity, but they never do. And every time their rejection of peace and cooperation has come at a dear cost to their own people.

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    Another Aaron

    What's Matt Walsh up to these days?

    "Should Israel exist?"

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