Opposing Zionism, a political ideology that supports the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which necessarily entails ethnically cleansing Palestine’s original inhabitants, dispossessing them of their land, and denying them of their human rights is not the same as hating Jewish people any more that opposing apartheid South Africa was anti-white. Certainly everyone reasonable understands this, right?
Zionism originated as a thoroughly Christian idea before it ever became Jewish. After the Reformation, the idea was thrown around in Christian circles of bringing Jewish people to Palestine to fulfill Biblical prophecy, bring about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and trigger the end times. A lot of these proto-Zionists were antisemites and believed that Jewish people could never assimilate into European society and thus needed to be shipped out of Europe.
Then, when Zionism began to be spread among Jewish circles in the mid-nineteenth century, everyone from Reform, Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, and socialist Jews all opposed the idea for various reasons. Some of these groups eventually began to support Zionism, but it took decades and even today, a significant number of ultra-Orthodox Jews remain anti-Zionist.
This brings another important point: some of the largest voices protesting Israel’s actions are Jewish. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, has staged multiple actions and been arrested for protesting the genocide.
A big point Zionists like to make is that a majority of Jewish people around the world support Zionism, so if you’re anti-Zionist then you’re by proxy antisemitic because you oppose what a majority of Jewish people believe.
So this fails on a few logical grounds. Christian Zionists, for example, outnumber Jewish Zionists twenty to thirtyfold. Does that mean being anti-Zionist means you’re by proxy Christophobic because a significant number of Christians believe in Zionism?
Obviously not because Zionism is a political ideology, not inherently tied to one religion or another. Anti-Zionists oppose Zionism because it’s an ideology of ethnic supremacy that requires dispossessing, terrorizing, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians. It doesn’t matter if every Jewish person or Christian person or Muslim person opposed it or supported it. The very idea of the ethnic supremacy of one group of people over another is wrong in itself.
