Zionists have taken the phrase "anti-Semitism" from antiracists. We will not get it back.

On House Resolution 894: Part 1 of a series on Zionism as an anti-Jewish, racist ideology

[Sorry it has been a while. I have been compiling a document on all the ways in which Zionism is specifically anti-Jewish racism. While anti-Palestinian racism is inherent in Zionism, Zionist ideology’s anti-Jewish history is less well known. When the document crossed the 11,000 word mark, I realized it would be better to send it out in readable pieces. So here’s the first. I’ll compile the whole thing into a resource at podur.org once it’s all out there.]

US Congress has completed the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in House Resolution 894, passed 311-14 two months and tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths into the Gaza genocide on December 5, 2023. In it, the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” 

House Resolution 894 should be taken as a signal that it is time for anti-racists to retire the phrase, anti-Semitism. 

It was coined by Austrian orientalist and Zionist Moritz Steinschneider during the rise of biological race theory. The phrase was a critique of French biological racist philosopher Ernest Renan’s theories of Aryan superiority over Semitic races and first written in print in 1860. By 1879, German racist journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet arguing that the Jewish Spirit had triumphed over the German Spirit and Marr organized the Anti-Semitic League to combat the “Jewish Spirit” and expel Jews from Germany. The German Nazi leader Goebbels declared in 1938 after Kristallnacht that “the German people is anti-Semitic.” A few years later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union to enslave the Slavs, who they viewed as an inferior race, and to exterminate the Jews, who the Nazis believed were the real power behind the USSR: to the Nazis, the Soviet Union was ruled not by Bolshevism, but by “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as elaborated in, e.g., Paul Hanebrink’s 2018 book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. 

In the age of colonialism, anti-Semitism was based in biological racism at a time when its proponents like Marr and Goebbels and its opponents like Steinschneider and even Antenor Firmin accepted the division of humanity into races (a biologically indefensible position - Firmin accepted that there were races but argued that the races were equal, but biological science today is very clear that there is only a single human species and that race is a social, not a biological construct). 

Open anti-Semitism of the Wilhelm Marr/Joseph Goebbels type was discredited with the general discrediting of race science (really pseudoscience) after the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Closet” anti-Semitism continues to exist and be adhered to by adherents of biological racism generally. Without laws supporting it, it remains covert and its overt manifestations are (correctly) punished according to the law. 

After the creation of Israel, a new concept called the “new anti-Semitism” was declared. This “new anti-Semitism” always had a relationship to the criticism of Israel. The notion was that there was some line between the criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism, and that it was on critics of Israel to demonstrate that they hadn’t crossed that line and that they were not, in fact, new anti-Semites. Pamphlets about “Anti-Semitism on the Left”, “How to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic”, etc., are propagated especially intensely during periods of Israeli atrocities and wars. This has culminated in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism (criticized by, e.g., Independent Jewish Voices) and the aforementioned House Resolution 894. 

The re-definition of the word “anti-Semitism” to mean “criticism of Israel” or of Zionism has been successful. It is not worth fighting over the word. If Zionists wish to take over the use of the word “anti-Semitism” so that it means “any critique of Israel” or “anti-Zionism”, let them have it. 

It is a legacy of a time when the scientific establishment was so racist that it believed that there were different human races - that constant callback to scientific racism alone (implicit reference to “Semitic” race and implied reference to other “races” like Aryan, etc.) is enough for antiracists to phase it out. But another reason is that the terms of discussion have been so stacked that there is no way anti-Zionists can prove that they are not “anti-Semitic” by the Zionist definition of the word.

Anti-racists should abandon the word altogether. 

We call it “anti-Jewish racism” because “Semitic” is an orientalist category invented by race scientists.

Antiracism necessarily implies being against anti-Jewish racism. 

Antiracism, Zionism, and Anti-Zionism

Antiracist theory, adopted in universities and other institutions in North America as official policy, holds that people must not be discriminated against for, among other things, religion. Public events are often preceded by an anti-discrimination statement stating that “the organizers of this event stand against all forms of discrimination, whether by sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or religion, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.” A previous Anti-Empire Project pamphlet argued that these anti-discrimination statements need to be updated to include anti-Palestinian racism as a separate category of discrimination (For the most part, they have not been). 

It follows from anti-discrimination principles that discrimination against Jewish people is unacceptable and sanctionable. Jewish people are minorities in the countries where they live: minority rights must be guaranteed in law and in practice, protected by the majorities. For the majority to respect minority rights is one of the foundations of antiracism. 

Antiracism does not protect any political position, however. Zionism and anti-Zionism are nothing more than political positions - not protected identity categories. 

Whatever their faith or cultural background, Zionists cannot appeal to anti-discrimination law or practice for protection of their ideology. The Zionist desire to erase symbols of Palestinian culture and nationalism from public space is itself anti-Palestinian racism and is not protected by antiracism.

Zionism is not a religion, not a race, and not an ethnicity. 

Anti-Zionism is not discrimination by religion, race, or ethnicity. 

Jewish is an identity, Zionism is a politics and ideology

The question of “who is Jewish” involves not only religion and culture, but also identification, being claimed by a community, history, languages such as Yiddish and Hebrew, racialization by European Nazis, the role of the state of Israel and Zionism, and other factors as well. It is a complex one and will be revisited again and again in this series. 

What can be said is: however “Jewish” is defined, Zionism is anti-Jewish. 

Zionism is a political ideology with roots in 16th-17th century English Protestant Christian religion that states that Palestine should be colonized by Jews.

In the 19th century, Zionism was further developed in Europe into an ideology that Palestine should be colonized by European Jews. The 19th century version absorbed other ideologies including European colonialism and the accompanying racialist concepts. 

Yakov Rabkin, in the book What is Modern Israel? defines Zionism as an “ideology of protestant Christian origin that propounds the assembly of the Jews in Palestine.” We’ll have much more to say about the Christian, Protestant origins of Zionism later in this series.

Zionism is a political position, a colonial claim on Palestinian land, a political allegiance held by millions of people, a plurality of whom are Jewish but millions of whom are not. 

If Zionism is the political position of support for the European colony in Palestine, the majority of Zionists are not Jewish. 

A substantial number, though not the majority, of people opposing Zionism are of Jewish faith, Jewish culture, or have Jewish identity and communal roots. The number of Jews opposed to Zionism is probably in the millions. 

It was stated above that antiracist theory is of no use protecting Zionists from anti-Zionists because these are political ideologies. It is useful, however, to investigate the political ideology of Zionism from an anti-racist perspective. Can the core tenet of Zionism, the prescription that European Jews should colonize Palestine, withstand antiracist scrutiny? 

Political adjudication and Zionist safety

Zionist attacks on campus and other Palestine solidarity or pro-Palestine expression is framed in terms of “feelings of safety”, sometimes “feelings of Jewish safety”. A judge struck down a pro-Palestine resolution by a student union at McGill University in Montreal citing such concerns. Columbia University banned not only Students for Justice in Palestine, but also Jewish Voice for Peace, oblivious to the absurdity of banning a Jewish student group out of concern for Jewish safety. 

On North American campuses, Zionist organizations doxx pro-Palestine students, often targeting Black students and other students of color in a display of racial bias, but also targeting Jewish students whose politics are deemed by them to be anti-Zionist. 

Noah Zatz, law professor at UCLA, has argued that employers could legally require a political, Zionist loyalty oath to employers (as Germany will be requiring for immigrants), but in fact they have (so far) not: 

“Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (proscribing race, gender, national origin, and religious discrimination in employment) would raise no bar to the nation’s leading law firms simply demanding that their employees pledge adherence to a U.S. foreign policy of unconditional support for Israeli war efforts. But, unsurprisingly, the law firms are not taking that tack.”

Instead, they argue that expressions for Palestine make Jewish employees feel unsafe - an argument that conflates being Jewish with being Zionist. Zatz argues that the feeling of non-safety is legally insufficient: 

“... employers cannot shield themselves from liability through such arguments. An employer’s obligation to prevent what’s known as “hostile work environment” harassment extends only to such environments that in fact are created on a discriminatory basis (here, antisemitically). Moreover, subjective experience, however genuine, is insufficient; liability attaches only when workers “objectively,” that is, “reasonably,” experience the environment as hostile or abusive.”

What is really occurring in these workplaces is not adjudication according to discrimination law or policy, but political adjudication based on Zionism, a political ideology. And if the topic is Palestine, those who feel unsafe by the topic are Zionists, not Jews. 

As a matter of logic, Jewish people have a diversity of opinion and feeling about any flag and slogan, including the Palestinian one. There is no such diversity for Zionists, because Zionism has a specific position about expressions of Palestinian identity (succinctly expressed by Golda Meier: “There are no Palestinians. They don’t exist.”) .

“Jews feel unsafe when they see a Palestine flag” is false. What is true is that “Zionists [who may or may not be Jewish] do not want to see expressions of national identity from the Indigenous group they believe should be erased.”

Anti-Jewish racism is a European ideology of the 19th and 20th centuries, the most extreme form of which is Nazism. The anti-Jewish racist ideologies of Nazism and Fascism have been undergoing a resurgence in recent years: the entire Canadian parliament recently rose to give a standing ovation to Nazi Yaroslav Hunka. Notably, they did so in the presence of the Zionist president of Ukraine, Volydymyr Zelensky.

Palestine solidarity has nothing to do with it.