Conflating Zionism and Judaism is antisemitic
Governments and other institutions have recently been adopting definitions of antisemitism, but not to protect Jews from persecution or discrimination. They’re doing it to justify the repression of people who object to the genocidal policies of the apartheid Israeli state and the foreign policies of governments that support them. And they are attempting to create a moral panic about antisemitism.
In the face of media images of destruction and mass murder in Gaza, governments have had problems convincing their populations that they should back Israel as it engages in genocide. Instead, they are resorting to the naked repression of expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians, barely covered by the tattered loin cloth of these antisemitism definitions.
Universities Australia (UA), the peak body of the country’s 39 universities, in late February decided that antisemitism includes “criticism of Israel ... when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”. This parallels the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, which governments use as an excuse to attack Palestine solidarity activity. The alliance says that is it antisemitic to claim “that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
That approach has given free licence for the German government to shut down a Palestine solidarity conference, which included many Jews, and ban former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis from speaking at it, even by video link. It enabled police in the United States to break up campus Palestine solidarity encampments, which included a large proportion of anti-Zionist Jews. This kind of “fighting antisemitism” involved arresting, often violently, hundreds of young Jewish people.
It is the reason that the Australian Labor government appointed a Zionist, whose main priority seems to be targeting critics of Israel, as its special envoy to combat antisemitism. The approach led to the absurd situation at Monash University in Melbourne, where security officers told Palestine solidarity activists that using the words “Zionist” or “Zionism” or accusing anyone of supporting genocide contravened university policy. The Australian National University gave a written instruction to socialists that they could not say “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or display a banner with the slogan on it.
The conflation of Zionism with Judaism paints a bullseye on the backs of all Jews. If you object to the genocide Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians then, according to this false proposition, you should hate Jews—because they all ostensibly support the existence of Israel as a racially defined state (under the cover of religion) and, to a greater or lesser extent, its policies.
Zionists may denounce antisemitism and use it to demand that authorities target opponents of Israel. But Zionism assumes that antisemitism is inevitable. The movement to establish a Jewish state was premised on the notion that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together in peace. That remains an important rationale for the existence of Israel as a state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens. But it also apologises for antisemitism because it is, according to Zionists, inevitable and normal for non-Jews to hate Jews.
So it’s fine for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be best mates with Viktor Orban—the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, who uses antisemitic tropes when it suits him—and for Israel to encourage Christian Zionists. Millions of evangelical Christians, many of them antisemites, are Zionists because they believe that their own countries, especially the United States, should be rid of Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in the “Holy Land” is a sign of “end times” preceding the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ, when Jews will either convert or be eradicated.
But, of course, the vast majority of non-Jews, of different religions and none, don’t hate Jews. There is a history of Jews being persecuted in particular places and during particular periods. But there is also an extensive history of Jews and non-Jews living together, without violence, for hundreds of years, from China, through central Asia, the Arab world, India, Europe (including Spain and Poland), to the Americas and, down the bottom of the planet, South Africa and New Zealand.
In Australia, there is undoubtedly a minority with antisemitic attitudes and a tiny number who commit antisemitic acts. But, in a country where there has been a Jewish governor-general and Jews have held and hold senior ministries in Liberal and Labor governments, Jews are not today subject to structural or systematic oppression.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel organisation, there were 150 incidents of violence against Jews in the USA in the year after 7 October 2023, during Israel’s war on Gaza. That’s bad, but minor in comparison with police and Zionist violence against participants, many of them Jewish, in the Palestine solidarity encampments at US universities, or with German police attacks on pro-Palestine events and protests in Germany.
Both the Universities Australia and IHRA definitions assert that Jews have a right to self-determination. The UA definition even claims that “all peoples” have that right: music to the ears of white nationalists. This was a claim made by the apartheid South African government to support white rule. If Jews are a people with the right to self-determination, is that also true of Christians (or members of different Christian sects), Muslims and Buddhists (as argued by religious bigots, not only in Afghanistan but also in Sri Lanka and Myanmar)?
The conflation of Judaism, a religion, with Zionism, a political ideology, in definitions of antisemitism, is itself antisemitic. No matter that UA acknowledges the existence of non-Zionist Jews, while the IHRA definition is silent about non-Zionist, let alone anti-Zionist, Jews. Defining support for Israel into a Jewish identity that must be accepted, apparently in all its aspects, is racist “identity politics” along the same lines as the self-conceptions of white nationalists and religious bigots.
Thankfully, increasing numbers of Jews, especially young Jews, are rejecting Zionism, both in Australia and the United States.
Rick Kuhn has been a Palestine solidarity activist and socialist since the 1970s. He is Jewish and opposes Zionism.
