🕊Adam Da Rat🕊

An Open Letter to Antizionists Dear Antizionists, You probably do not think you hate Jews. Many of you have built an entire political vocabulary designed to assure yourselves that Jews have nothing to do with your movement at all. You oppose "Zionists." You condemn "Zionist power." You warn about "Zionist influence," "Zionist money," "Zionist control," and a uniquely bloodthirsty "Zionist state." And because you can point to a Jewish person who agrees with you, you believe the accusation of Jew-hate has been answered. It hasn't. Antizionism is not simply a political position about Israel. It is one of the principal forms Jew-hate has taken in the modern world. Israel is frequently its object because Israel functions as the collective Jew: sovereign, visible, capable of defending itself, and no longer dependent upon somebody else's permission to survive. Jew-hate has never remained frozen in one form. It adapts to the moral vocabulary of its age. Jews were accused of murdering children for their blood, conspiring secretly, controlling governments, manipulating money, and possessing loyalties that could never truly belong to the countries in which they lived. Today, the villain is often called the Zionist. The Jew who supposedly controlled governments becomes the Zionist lobby controlling governments. The Jew accused of manipulating finance becomes Zionist money buying politicians. The Jew charged with disloyalty becomes the Zionist with suspicious dual allegiance. The secret Jewish conspiracy becomes the Zionist network manipulating media, universities, and foreign policy. The blood libel becomes the claim that Israelis uniquely delight in killing children or possess a cruelty so monstrous that ordinary political language is apparently insufficient to describe it. The nouns changed. The accusation did not. And libels have a purpose. They make cruelty feel justified. Once Jews are portrayed as uniquely dangerous or bloodthirsty, excluding them becomes self-defense, harassing them becomes activism, and violence against them acquires an explanation. Modern antizionism has worn many ideological costumes, from Soviet anti-Zionism and Arab nationalism to Islamism and parts of the contemporary far left. The costume changes. The target remains Jewish collective existence. This is why the claim that antizionism has nothing to do with Jews collapses the moment Jewish institutions and ordinary Jews are targeted for their relationship to Israel. When a synagogue is protested because it supports Israel, you call the target Zionism. When Jewish students are expected to denounce Israel before they are accepted into political spaces, you call the issue Zionism. When Jews are treated as morally suspect because they refuse to repudiate the Jewish state, you insist this is merely politics. At some point, "Zionist" stops functioning only as the description of a political belief. It becomes a category that makes differential treatment of Jews acceptable. And here is the part many antizionists refuse to confront: Zionism is not some foreign ideology imposed upon Jews. It is an expression of Jewish peoplehood. Jews are a people with a history, culture, language, homeland, collective memory, and political will. Zionism holds that Jews possess the same right other peoples claim for themselves: to organize politically, defend themselves collectively, and determine their own future in their ancestral homeland. Once you declare Jewish collective political existence illegitimate, you are no longer merely criticizing Israel. You have decided that Jews, uniquely, may not exercise a right you recognize in other peoples. That is the singularity of the demand. This is also why pointing to antizionist Jews proves very little. Every people contains dissenters, and Jews have never suffered from a shortage of disagreement. The existence of Jews inside a movement cannot tell you whether that movement is hostile to Jews. A Jewish person cannot grant you a universal permission slip to define Jew-hate for everyone else. Selecting the Jews who agree with you while dismissing the Jews who do not is not evidence that you listen to Jews. It is evidence that you listen to useful Jews. Nor can this discussion be reduced to the current Israeli government. Governments change. Prime ministers leave. Coalitions collapse. Policies are reversed. None of that explains why the Jewish state is so often described not simply as wrong, but as fundamentally illegitimate. Many countries have disputed borders, ugly histories, military abuses, ethnic conflicts, and governments deserving severe criticism. Yet there is an international movement devoted to convincing people that the continued national existence of the Jewish state is itself an injustice. That exceptionalism should tell you something. Zionism emerged from an ancient Jewish relationship with the Land of Israel and from the political reality of Jewish vulnerability. Jews spent centuries living at the pleasure of rulers and majorities whose tolerance could disappear. Zionism was the decision that Jews should no longer outsource Jewish survival. You may believe Jewish sovereignty is unnecessary now. You may imagine that if Israel were dismantled and replaced by some larger political arrangement, Jews and Arabs would simply become equal citizens and old hatreds would lose their power. We have heard versions of that promise before. Jews received rights in Europe that later vanished. Jews became citizens in Middle Eastern and North African countries from which many later fled or were driven. Jewish history gives us very little reason to confuse promised equality with guaranteed security. This does not mean Israel is beyond criticism. It does not mean Israeli governments are always right. It does not mean Palestinians do not have rights, suffering, grievances, or legitimate aspirations. None of those propositions require antizionism. Antizionism makes a different claim. It says Jewish sovereignty itself is the injustice. That is why the movement so easily moves from criticizing what Israel does to demonizing what Israel is. Israel becomes not merely a country involved in a bitter national conflict but a symbol onto which enormous evils can be projected. Colonialism. Racism. Imperialism. Genocide. Whatever the moral emergency of the moment happens to be, Israel somehow finds itself at its center. Jews have seen that pattern before. The individual Jew once served as an explanation for society's problems. Now the Jewish collective often does. So I am asking you to examine your movement differently. Stop asking only whether you personally feel hatred toward Jewish people. That tells us almost nothing. Most people who participate in hate movements do not think of themselves as hateful. They think they are fighting something dangerous. They think the target deserves exceptional treatment. They think they are exposing hidden power. They think their anger is righteous. Ask harder questions. Why are Jews expected to answer for Israel in spaces where other ethnic and religious groups are not required to answer for foreign governments? Why does "Zionist" so often appear in accusations that once used the word "Jew"? Why are Jewish institutions treated as legitimate political targets because they maintain relationships with Israel? If your movement truly opposes Jew-hate, none of this should frighten you. You should want to know when an old blood libel has been dressed in contemporary language. You should want to know when conspiracy theories about Jews have become conspiracy theories about Zionists. You should want to know when political criticism has crossed into collective demonization. And when Jews tell you that this is happening to us, your first instinct should not always be to explain why we are wrong. Listen. Not because Jews are infallible. We are not. Listen because we have lived with Jew-hate for a very long time. We know that it changes costumes. We know that every generation insists its version is different from the last. We know that hatred rarely introduces itself honestly. And we know how dangerous it becomes when the people spreading it are completely convinced that they are the righteous ones. Antizionism is not dangerous because it criticizes Israel. It is dangerous because it takes ancient ideas about Jews, attaches them to the Jewish collective, and presents the result as virtue. If you genuinely care about fighting hatred, look at that possibility seriously. Not as an accusation. As a warning. Because the history of Jew-hate is filled with people who were certain they were fighting something other than Jews. Sincerely, A Zionist Jew