This past winter, a Portland-based Asian-American organization issued a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza that described Zionism as “the erasure” of the “indigenous” Palestinians and a form of “white supremacy” leading to “genocide.” Yet, in a meeting after the statement was posted on their website, the group’s leaders sought to assure me that they unequivocally condemn antisemitism.
Around the same time, the Portland State University School of Gender, Race and Nations hosted a pro-Hamas “teach-in,” which featured David Lloyd, a UC Riverside scholar actively involved in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Declaring Zionism to be a highly infectious “virus,” Lloyd depicted Israel as the shadowy presence lurking behind all kinds of putative government repression occurring in the US and Europe. This at a university claiming to have no tolerance for antisemitism.
More recently, a local high school teacher, who moonlights as an anti-Israel activist, placed posters made by her students on one of the school’s hallway bulletin boards. The posters represented a total distortion of the history of the Zionist movement, portraying Zionism as oppressive and racist. In a letter displayed alongside the posters, the teacher wrote, “I send a wish that we can honor the humanity of all people.” Apparently, all people except Zionists.
A core strategy of the BDS movement, which is amplified by radical anti-Zionist Jews perversely serving the cause, is to disassociate Zionism from Judaism and thereby avoid charges of antisemitism while rejecting the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in our ancestral homeland. “I don’t hate Jews, I’m only against Jews having their own state” is the common refrain among anti-Zionist circles.
It’s one thing to criticize, even vehemently, Israeli policies, which isn’t antisemitic. The anti-Zionists, however, routinely go well beyond legitimate criticism, forcefully rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish state’s right to exist. At the same time, they falsely portray Zionism solely as a political movement separate from the Jewish religion to delude others into believing they oppose antisemitism.
This isn’t just an obfuscation. The anti-Zionists are effectively claiming to have a better understanding of Jewish identity than Jews themselves.
What Zionism means to Judaism
For most Jews worldwide, Zionism is central to our religious and cultural identity. Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Since the time of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Jews living in the Diaspora have prayed for a return to our homeland, a yearning that’s recited as part of our daily liturgy. The Land of Israel is where many Jewish traditions originated and where Judaism’s holy sites are located. In our sacred texts, moreover, the land is paramount to the Jewish people.
To be sure, there’s confusion about the meaning of Zionism among some, especially younger, Jews, the term having been corrupted and politicized. Even so, the last comprehensive survey of the American Jewish community (Pew Research Center, 2020) indicated that the vast majority of US Jews say that caring about Israel is an “essential” or “important” part of what being Jewish means to them. This connection is the very essence of Zionism.
Thus, when BDS activists ban “Zionists” from a march in support of LGBTQ rights or Students for Justice in Palestine calls for a boycott of “Zionist” student groups on a local campus, make no mistake – they mean Jews.
This isn’t to suggest that every anti-Zionist intends to be antisemitic. Even without intention to harm, however, the impact is still harmful. In its “Statement of Principles against Intolerance,” the University of California Board of Regents acknowledged, “Opposition to Zionism often is expressed in ways that aren’t simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture.”
Sadly, it’s what this statement calls “antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism” that have been witnessed during the recent widespread anti-Israel protests on college campuses.
In a 1970 interview with Thames Television, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir lamented, “Liberal people that are for self-determination sympathize with the Palestinians. Everybody has the right to self-determine except [us]…We have to be, evidently, minorities all over the world, and we have no right for independence.”
Anti-Zionists support a Palestinian state in place of Israel and take no issue with the fact that there are 50 Muslim states in the world, 22 of them Arab. By contrast, they deem Jews to be acceptable only if we disavow Zionism; only as long as we live as minorities scattered throughout the Diaspora and do not have a single state of our own (we’ve seen how well that has worked for us over the centuries).
The Jewish community needs to confront this issue. It’s time to expose ostensible anti-Zionist opposition to antisemitism for the duplicity it is. ■
The writer is director of Community Relations and Public Affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.