The Spectre of Antisemitism

Since October 7, 2023, there has been a proliferation of Jews on the left speaking out against the state of Israel. Anti-Zionist Jews holding signs that read “not in my name” dominate representations of pro-Palestinian discourse, while organizations like If Not Now, Jews Say No to Genocide, Independent Jewish Voices, and Jewish Voices for Peace grow in strength and support. Exposing Zionism for what it is—a genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in the name of colonial racial capitalism—these Jewish activists, many of whom explicitly call themselves anti-Zionist, draw an important distinction between Zionism and Jewishness, hence the name “anti-Zionist Jew.” One of their primary aims is to delegitimize Israel’s argument that Jewish safety is incompatible with Palestinian life and refuse Israel’s co-optation of antisemitism, which has been used to justify over seventy-five years of gratuitous violence. To make this claim, these activists often draw equivalences. Varied histories of Jewish experience are subsumed into a singular narrative of Jewish suffering and persecution through which we might all recognize our moral and political commitments to Palestinian liberation. How could I sit by and watch the extermination of Palestinian life when my people have been defined by genocide too? How could the Israeli state use my Jewishness to justify such unspeakable violences when it is my Jewishness that informs why I always side with the oppressed? Israel, we argue, does not represent Jewish identity! Not in my name, we chant! But whose name are we trying to protect and at what cost are we willing to protect it? 

In this essay, I tease out a tension that lies at the core of anti-Zionist Jewish discourse. By situating anti-Zionism in the same gesture as the Zionist move to innocence that is used to justify Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestine, I show that there is only a fine line separating the rhetorical purpose of anti-Zionists saying that genocide is not a Jewish value and Zionists’ using this same rhetoric to label Israeli violence as self-defense and not genocide.¹ In fact, I contend that it is not a stretch to suggest that the Jewish anti-Zionist’s re-emphasis of Jewish values as the means by which we validate Palestinian struggle is not a stand against Jewish supremacy but rather an appeal for it.² As Anna Rajagopal argues, to postulate “a grand mythos of undefinable values that seek to valorize [Jewishness]³ as being inherently moral, disconnected, or above the violence being enacted in Palestine” is to simultaneously obfuscate from a much more sinister truth: “that [Jewishness] has been adapted to be a functional vehicle for this violence.”⁴ Every time the anti-Zionist Jew praises Jewish values and suffering as the premise for solidarity with Palestinians, we have, whether consciously or otherwise, chosen “a moral high ground” that is more concerned with distancing Jewishness from “affiliation with colonialism” than constructing a political program equipped to confront the reality that “nearly every single Jewish institution materially endorses and funds genocide in Palestine.”⁵ While this move might appear pragmatic on the surface, I draw attention to its limits. By arresting anti-Zionist Jewish discourse in some of the same logics as Zionism, anti-Zionism limits itself from realizing the full extent of its stated goals. More specifically, by uncritically prefacing our solidarity with Palestine through an account of our own experience with suffering and persecution, I demonstrate that anti-Zionist Jewish discourse is easily co-opted by Zionist Jewish discourse. 

Subsequently, the main question orienting this piece is whether or not the anti-Zionist Jewish commitment to “an exodus from Zionism” alone (as Naomi Klein put it during Passover)—without reckoning simultaneously with Jewishness writ large– can contribute to dismantling the state of Israel in support of Palestinian liberation⁶ My worry is that it cannot. What I will argue is that at the heart of Israel’s move to innocence is not only Zionism but also prevailing constructions of Jewishness. I identify a line of continuity instead of an opposition, between Jewish Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism. This isn’t to suggest that you cannot be both Jewish and an anti-Zionist, but rather to draw a direct line of connection between a belief in the fundamental (and exceptional) oppression of Jews and the grief machine that Israel uses to justify the theft and destruction of Palestinian land and life; these two things cannot be thought of as distinct.⁷ If anti-Zionism, generally understood, is to be in opposition to the state of Israel, but it is simultaneously Jewishness (and Jewish persecution in particular) that provides Zionism with its foundational justification, then the beginning of the statement “I am an anti-Zionist” is in tension with the end of the statement “Jew.” I suggest that this tension is not an aberration or an anomaly of Jewish anti-Zionism, but rather, constitutive of a Jewish politics that even in its opposition to the state of Israel remains invested in claims to victimhood that feed the ontology of innocence used to strengthen Israel’s raison d’être.⁸

The History of Jewish Innocence

Ussama Makdisi has identified three historical bases that underpin the strength of Jewish innocence: 1) the material operation of the Zionist project; 2) the presence of Orientalism; and 3) the philosemitic turn.⁹ For my purposes, I focus in particular on the rise and function of philosemitism, a term used to connote not simply “love for Jews” but an overall support and identification with Jews that came out of Europe post-World War I and proliferated after World War II. The turn to the philosemitic, especially as it relates to antisemitism as its constitutive opposite, produces the condition of possibility for prevailing constructions of Jewishness to function (whether intentionally or not) in service of the (settler)colonial project both in the West and in Palestine.

Integral to the Western world’s quest to rehabilitate itself from the stain of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century was the philosemitic turn, which, at least on the surface, meant a radical departure from the oppression Jews had been subject to across Europe for the last two thousand years. This period of intense modernization and democratization led to the gradual emancipation and assimilation of Jews, enabling a small but steadily increasing population of European Jews to begin planning a Jewish ethnonational state in Palestine.¹⁰ Influenced partly by the global rise of nationalism and partly by a long history of Jewish persecution across Europe, these initial Zionist’s erected the first Zionist colony, Rishon LeZion, in 1882.¹¹ At the same time that Europe was trying to shed its history of racial antisemitism through a commitment to its constitutive opposite, philosemitism, Zionism was beginning to theorize a political project of “implanting and sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious Palestine” in response to the history of racial antisemitism that Europe was trying to erase.¹² On the surface, these two projects were fundamentally at odds; Europe was in a rush to cover up the racist past that Zionism had been wielding to justify a Jewish nation state.¹³ 

Further complicating matters, Jewish emancipation in Europe was violently interrupted by the rise of the Third Reich, an atrocity incalculable for European Jews, but divergently felt by Jews outside of Europe, largely due to proximity, both physical and cultural to those who were murdered in the gas chambers. Those who made it out of Europe and into Palestine before the Holocaust began did not face the same hostility.¹⁴ As Mary Turfah outlines, from the late 1930s onwards, British control of Palestine functioned in service of Zionism at the expense of Palestinians, for example by supplying Zionist militias with the weapons and military power “required to seize the land.”¹⁵ This marked the beginning of a paradoxical relationship between European Jews and non-Jewish Europeans that was simultaneously symbiotic and antagonistic. To some extent, it is the nature of this paradoxical relationship that produced an environment where Jews could gain enough power across Europe to colonize Palestine, yet still be powerless enough to be executed by those same Europeans who had recently extended them rights and freedoms. 

To consolidate these competing forces into a politics that benefited Zionist ideology, early Zionists saw the Ashkenazi¹⁶ Jewish experience as a particularly comprehensible way to justify statehood. This was especially true after the Shoah: the events of the Holocaust became yet another example of the gratuitous violence Jews would inevitably face when trying to integrate into European society (so the Zionist story goes). Strained integration in Europe helpfully reinforced the desire for the Zionist alternative, an alternative that culminated in the first Nakba of 1948 that led to the creation of Israel.¹⁷ Zionism has thus always profited from the same structures it claims to be resisting, a contradiction that forms the basis of Israel’s so-called “right to exist.” At least in part, this is because Zionism has always been a colonial racial capitalist project as well as a (settler)colonial project, even though it has advertised itself as an exodus of the oppressed.¹⁸ Zionists, Makdisi explains, might have been forced to grapple with racial antisemitism in Europe, but “they also expressed, shared, contributed to, and circulated many of the foundational racist tropes of nineteenth-century Western culture.”¹⁹

Before the Holocaust, for example, Zionism offered Europe, especially Tsarist Russia, with a way to minimize some of its Jewish population without having to do all the work themselves. Similarly, during the Holocaust, despite the mass extermination of Jews across Europe, British colonial forces were supporting Zionist Jews in Palestine, allowing at least some European countries a place to point at to alleviate responsibility, all the while advancing their own imperial interests in the Middle East. Following the Holocaust, support for Jews grew, specifically in relation to Zionism, as it allowed Europe to atone for its sins and demonstrate a commitment to the Jewish people, while continuing to advance imperial interests.²⁰ Subsequently, from the twentieth century onwards, whether intentionally or otherwise, the Ashkenazi Jewish subject became the perfect conduit for what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have identified as “a series of moves to innocence” which were adopted by both Europe and Zionism in an “attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity” while nonetheless advancing their own (settler)colonial and imperial interests.²¹ Ultimately, Zionism’s success is due to the ease by which the Ashkenazi Jewish subject was subsumed into whiteness, while at the same time maintaining the position of antisemitism as a core Jewish experience. 

It is in this way that all claims to Jewish victimhood get implicated in Israel’s narrative of innocence. Jewish victimhood, the Zionists have always understood, can be exploited in such a way so that it not only coincides with but is also conducive to its opposite, i.e., Jewish power. Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, for example, identified antisemitism as creating the “requisite impetus” for Jews to embark on an exodus to Israel.²² Em Cohen underscores Herzl’s logic in “Jewish Fear in a Zionist Unreality,” outlining how antisemitic countries have always been the greatest allies to the Zionist cause since they play an integral role in motivating Jews to leave Europe.²³ Underpinning the success of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, then, is both the philosemitic turn and paradoxically its antithesis: the spectre of antisemitism, which must remain present enough that the West can continue to use it as a shield to hide behind (philosemitism is only meaningful if the threat of antisemitism looms nonetheless), and Israel can continue to use it as the “requisite impetus” for Jews to leave the West for the “Promised Land.”²⁴ In other words, regardless of how many gains Jews have made since the twentieth century, the fantasy of antisemitism’s omnipotence remains a foundational justification for Zionism.

Zionism is thus both the thing that produces, as well as the primary way to respond to, the predetermination of Jewish victimhood, which is why we cannot understand the state of Israel outside the function of what I call the spectre of antisemitism. I use the language of spectre here to emphasize how the charge of antisemitism does not exist in a vacuum but rather is haunted by the history I have outlined above. Israel is not a response to, but, as Fred Moten puts it, an artifact of, antisemitism.²⁵ When we incite the charge of antisemitism today, we are using it in the context of a history that, for all intents and purposes, has inverted the meaning of antisemitism. For Esther Romeyn (2020), this history has brought about a literal shift in its meaning. She writes that from the 1970s onwards antisemitism went from a classic strain of antisemitism, “associated traditionally with a biological race concept, prejudice against Jews and the far right” towards a new form of antisemitism, “which expressed itself as animus against Israel and insensitivity and indifference to Jewish concerns.”²⁶ Romeyn’s intervention is an important elaboration on the context surrounding what I am calling antisemitism’s spectre, but I take issue with central aspects of her work: 1) her consistent use of the term Israel-Palestine conflict (a problem that I explore in more depth later in this piece); and 2) the way her work continues to essentialize and exceptionalise antisemitism as something that needs renewed attention today. For Romeyn, antisemitism’s historical shift has “resulted in the forgetting of different histories of racism and racialization, such as the racialization of religion, and of Judaism and Islam in particular” and thus renewed attention to questions of antisemitism in contemporary theories of race and racism is needed.²⁷ But I am not interested in rethinking antisemitism through contemporary theories of race that would suggest Judaism is racialized akin to Islam. As my project here endeavors to argue, antisemitism is a spectre that maintains its legitimacy through continuing to prioritize an exceptional place for Jews as uniquely persecuted, at the expense of Palestinians, which includes drawing equivalences between Jewish persecution and Muslim persecution. Against Romeyn’s project, I identify antisemitism as a spectre so as to put the entire qualification in crisis. Speaking out against antisemitism is to speak about it in the inverse: what once was a concept used to refer to a structural condition of domination affecting Jewish people has now become primarily a spectral presence that legitimates those same structures (structures that now tend to work in service of Jews rather than against). Reinforcing this is the very real power that Israel, with its ties to racial colonial capitalism, has brought Jewish identity writ large.

Alana Lentin has described this as the “political utility of antisemitism” which is used today “not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them,” often in the name of whiteness.²⁸ Take for example the practice of Mizrahi-washing by the Israeli government, a practice that has accelerated over the last decade in response to a growing cross-movement solidarity between Palestinians and Black Americans in their effort to draw attention to Israel’s racist practices. Paid Mizrahi “activists” are hired by the Israeli government to derail and delegitimize this movement by emphasizing how the mere existence of Mizrahim in Israel is proof of racial harmony.²⁹ Mizrahi Jews, they proselytize, moved away from the Arab world and into Israel to escape antisemitism, suggesting that in Israel they live in racial harmony and peace. In reality, however, both Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews across Israel are subject to unequal and discriminatory conditions compared to their white Ashkenazi Jewish counterparts. The function of Mizrahi-washing, then, similar to Israeli pink-washing, uses antisemitism as the primary evil that Jews must escape, all the while promoting a system of white supremacy that unequally benefits the white Ashkenazi Jew at the expense of everyone else. The charge of antisemitism in its inverted form thus becomes an ahistorical principle, an ontological given, that is disjointed from the context in which it is supposedly occurring.

This is not to say that all Jews support or align with Israel’s (settler)colonial project. Historically, the dominant perspective amongst the Jewish diaspora was a rejection of the state form. Overtime, however, Israel (with the help of the West) has come to monopolize the discourse around what it means to be Jewish to such an extent that what was once explicitly an Ashkenazi (European) Jewish experience, supported primarily by a small group of Zionists, has become the dominant framing of Jewish life, accepted by the majority of Jews globally. The Zionist erasure and fragmentation of difference across the Jewish diaspora has only worked to further entrench this inverted version of antisemitism, while simultaneously proliferating the narrative that Jewishness and victimhood are one and the same. The post-Holocaust Jewish subject, who is always-already a victim even when they are put in the position of oppressor, is an example of this: the Jew can never be guilty if they are perpetually understood as victims.³⁰ This ultimately produces a Jewish subject that must balance their newfound power with a contradictory commitment to persecution and suffering.³¹ 

The harmony with which these contradictory aspects of one’s identity come to coexist is representative of Zionism’s inculcation into the fabric of Jewish identity writ large, which also implicates the anti-Zionist Jew. Whether Zionist or anti-Zionist, our subjectivity as Jews can no longer be easily disentangled from the Zionist ideology that justifies Israel’s existence. Post-Holocaust Jewish identity is thus not outside the imperial core but rather at its center, a reality that Jews (regardless of political affiliation) are implicated by.³² Consequently, while the experience of antisemitism for Jewish anti-Zionists is used as grounds for solidarity with Palestinians, it is at the same time used to maintain and ultimately promote Zionist occupation: an occupation that adopts Jewish customs, harnesses Jewish stories, and exploits Jewish memories in the name of a universalized figure of the Jew that can never be freed from the tragedy of Europe.³³

Antisemitism as Deflection 

By oscillating between presence and absence largely at the whims of Zionism—as the above history shows—the threat of antisemitism functions, on the one hand, to allow the oppressor to draw equivalences with that of the oppressed. And on the other hand, this oscillation allows the oppressor to inverse their relationship to power in an attempt to become the victim (at their own whim / when it suits them best) even while they continue to drop bombs on Palestine. The charge of antisemitism becomes both a performance of atonement and an act of legitimation. The West and Israel constantly denounce antisemitism to obfuscate their racism. This produces the backdrop for what Makdisi has termed a “double reality”³⁴: while some of us witness a publicly televised genocidal assault on Palestinian life, large swaths of people are in active denial that what is occurring is genocide, or anything in excess of what can be called “self-defense.” Upholding the latter position is the increasingly sinister strategic mobilization of the spectre of antisemitism, a spectre designed to solidify the Jew’s position as a victim of an unending series of persecutions which conveniently ensure that whatever Jews do to uphold the existence of the Israeli nation-state is preemptively cleared of any wrongdoing. 

Ghassan Hage draws attention to how this functions ideologically. As Hage notes, the threat of “antisemitism” makes possible what initially presented itself as “an impossibility: how to be racist while also claiming that you have a critical relation to your past which requires of you to never be racist ever again.”³⁵ This emboldens the right to attack the so-called antisemitism of progressive and radical activists and scholars, both Jewish and not, for their activism against the Israeli state and in support of Palestinian liberation. All activities designed to expose Israel’s evils become subsumed within antisemitism’s spectre, which must be vociferously defended lest the underpinning lie be revealed: that not only does every European inhabit inside of them a small Hitler, as Aimé Césaire once remarked, but that Israel is an artifact of an antisemitism designed to conceal this truth.³⁶ The threat/accusation of antisemitism functions as the perfect deflection from any complicity in domination, “delegitimis[ing] all those who wish to recognize causality” and therefore call innocence into question.³⁷ 

A recent example of this took place at the end of December 2023 at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where identifying genocide as an explicitly un-Jewish value went from rhetoric to legal defense.³⁸ Tal Becker, an advocate on the Israeli team, argued that Israel’s intimate relationship with the horrors of genocide exempts them from the possibility of committing a genocide of their own. The phrase “never again,” he explained, is one of Israel’s “highest moral obligations.”³⁹ By emphasizing this history—which of course produced the very convention used by South Africa to build their case against Israel in the first place—Becker’s aim was to divert attention away from the overwhelming proof of Israel’s genocidal attack across occupied Palestine by recentering Jewish victimhood. Put differently, a history of antisemitism that reinforces the Jew’s position as victim was used to claim not simply moral innocence but legal innocence. The ICJ may have ruled against Israel, delivering an almost unanimous decision that the country was committing “plausible genocide,” however, Israel’s longstanding campaign to exploit Jewish victimhood, and to implant that victimhood at the heart of Jewishness– a campaign that has rendered it essentially impossible to speak about Palestinian resistance or liberation without bringing up antisemitism—exposes one of the central limits of international law in the face of power. Or in the words of Jake Romm and Dylan Saba, the aftermath of the ICJ ruling highlights the “qualitative asymmetry of war between a stateless population—for whom all political violence is a form of war—and an advanced military power, which can literally pick its battles.”⁴⁰ Antisemitism’s ideological power, in its inverted form, eclipses Palestinian death while simultaneously reifying Israel’s raison d’être.

Focalizing Jewish victimhood at the expense of Jewish power, however, does not only form the basis for the large-scale Zionist denial of Israel’s genocidal assault across Palestine. The anti-Zionist Jew also draws equivalences between Jewish suffering and Palestinian suffering in a way that reinforces Zionism’s impunity. Much of the discourse advanced by Jewish anti-Zionist activists and organizations have relied heavily on the idea that Jewish safety and freedom is wrapped up with Palestinian safety and freedom. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents (one of the largest and most popular journals on the Jewish left today), for example, professed support for anti-Zionist Jewish organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace based on these exact characteristics. In an interview last year, Beinart expressed his support for JVP because their “basic idea that Israeli Jewish safety depends on Palestinian safety . . . [is] one of the best ways of fighting antisemitism . . . because it makes it clear that this is not a struggle of tribe versus tribe.”⁴¹ Here, not only does Beinart characterize JVP’s anti-Zionism as premised on a fundamental equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian safety but he also articulates his support for anti-Zionism as dependent upon the necessity of drawing this equivalence. 

Joshua Gutterman Tranen’s recent take down of Beinart’s new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, articulates the precise problem with this perspective. For Tranen, Beinart relies on a tired (and common strategy within anti-Zionism) to develop a public language for standing against Israel that could simultaneously sidestep the conservative trap of antisemitism. Here Tranen argues that “a neat bifurcation of Judaism and Zionism is neither possible nor politically useful.”⁴² Beinart and his self-indulgent book (although not explicitly anti-Zionist) are a symptom of a larger problem within anti-Zionist Jewish discourse and activism that exclusively relies on expressions of solidarity rooted in a central falsity: that Palestinians and Jews have had symmetrical and comparable experiences. In reality, however, there is a staunch power asymmetry between Jews and Palestinians that cannot be clearly articulated without a willingness to implicate not only Zionist but also Jewish complicity in both racial colonial capitalism and Israel’s (settler)colonial project. As Judith Butler long ago reminded us, “If we start with the presumption that one group’s suffering is like another group’s, we have not only assembled the groups into provisional monoliths—and so falsified them—but we have launched into a form of analogy building that invariably fails.”⁴³ 

And yet, the common anti-Zionist Jewish response avoids attending to Jewish complicity, instead arguing with Zionists over the minutiae of what qualifies as “real” antisemitism and/or “real” genocide. Many anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, for example, have put out statements that redirect the charge of antisemitism back on Zionist administrations and Zionist institutions themselves to debunk charges of antisemitism aimed at Palestinian organizing.⁴⁴ Additionally, they have used their own proximity to the Shoa to corroborate Palestinian claims that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. While these moves are lauded as instrumentally important forms of praxis, they mirror the same talking points Zionists use, albeit in the inverse, to justify Israel’s infinite right to exist. Consequently, the recentering of Jewish victimhood and proximity to persecution works in favor of, rather than against, “Zionism’s strength as a social and discursive phenomenon.”⁴⁵

One site where this culminates is the university, in what Samuel P. Catlin calls “campus panic”—a phenomenon adopted by Western mass media to position the campus as “the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world” threatening Jewish life at unprecedented levels.⁴⁶ Here, the so-called rise of antisemitism across North American campuses gets filtered through the specious claim that this could lead to a second Holocaust.⁴⁷ This outlandish fearmongering, however, remains relatively untouched by anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, who seem to rely on similar appeals to Jewish suffering. The problem with “campus panic,” according to mainstream anti-Zionist rhetoric, is that it distracts from the presence of a more “real” form of antisemitism.⁴⁸ The presence of a real antisemitic boogeyman is thus reinforced rather than diminished in the process, solidifying the seemingly omnipresent spectre of antisemitism. Ultimately this contributes to what Steve Salaita has identified as the “main rationale for Israel‘s war on civilians: Hamas is a perpetual cipher and simulation . . . a peculiar and unknowable Palestinian savagery” at risk of popping up anywhere where there is expressed support for Palestine.⁴⁹

Subsequently, even the most well-intentioned Jewish anti-Zionist strategies of redirecting the charge of antisemitism back at Zionism and helping substantiate the claim that Israel is committing genocide, solidify the position of the Jew as adjudicator of the veracity of all forms of persecution, including the Palestinian experience. This does two things, both of which reinforce each other. First, it supports the ongoing delegitimization of Palestinian’s as truthful narrators of their own experience. Second, it perpetuates an asymmetrical power dynamic where the Jewish experience with persecution is placed over and above the Palestinian experience with persecution. As Catlin observes, the portrayal of antisemitism across university campuses somehow becomes a “greater concern than what is happening in Gaza,” where over the past two years, the IOF has murdered over 50,000 Palestinians, buried thousands more beneath the rubble, injured and maimed over 90,000, and displaced over 85% of the population.⁵⁰

The Jewish Implication 

This is what the anti-Zionist Jew is up against: refusing and dismantling an ideological regime that not only privileges the emotional standpoint of the oppressor/colonizer over and above the colonized/oppressed but also, as Randa Abdel-Fattah articulates it, “inverses the relational power dynamic such that the oppressor becomes the hapless victim, even as they drop weapons of mass destruction, destroy all semblance of civic life, and exact the lethal might of the Western military machine on unarmed men, women, and children.”⁵¹ At present, however, the Jewish anti-Zionist movement has yet to seriously reckon with the severity of the weaponization of Jewish identity, instead trying to preserve Jewishness at the expense of Zionism. Produced in the process is a solidarity that comes with a caveat: Jewish support for Palestinian liberation extends up until the point where Palestinian interests diverge from Jewish interests.

Well-known anti-Zionist Jew Chanda Prescod-Weinstein reflects this position in a now deleted tweet that reads: “Random PSA that saying ‘Jews’ when you mean ‘Zionists’ or ‘Zionist Jews’ is actually indulging and promoting a Zionist talking point and if you’re doing it while criticizing Zionism, you’re doing the critique wrong.” Prescod-Weinstein deleted their tweet in response to the instant backlash it provoked, most notably from well-known Palestine activist Mohammed El-Kurd who exposed the hypocrisy that lay at its core: From a Palestinian perspective the distinction between Jew and Zionist is irrelevant. This point is not only symbolically important, but it is also materially true. Israel is a Jewish ethnonationalist state made up of a dominant Jewish population that both enacts and supports brutal and repressive tactics against Palestinians in the name of Jewish safety and security.⁵² According to PEW research center, 39% of Israeli citizens believe that Israel’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has been “about right” and 34% believe it has “not gone far enough.” ⁵³ In other words, at least 73% of the population of Israel actively supports the genocide of Palestine, a country that houses over 45% of the global Jewish population. 

Despite these numbers, the fact of the matter remains that Israel and its military might, which is made up primarily of Jewish soldiers, acts with impunity in the name of Jewish safety and security, which means that the Jewish anti-Zionist position that Zionism is incompatible with Jewish values simply does not hold up under scrutiny. Appeals to Jewishness (especially Jewish victimhood and innocence), from both the right and the left, have been subsumed by the Zionist project whether we like it or not. Any Jewish commitment to Palestinian liberation must reflect this reality, which means confronting the way, not only Zionism, but also Jewishness, functions in the service of the (settler)colonial project rather than against it. The wholesale weaponization of Jewish identity and/as suffering provides Israel with its foundational justification, legitimizes the Zionist project, funds over seventy-five years of violent occupation, and gives not only Zionists but all Jews, regardless of their political leaning, birthright to the country.⁵⁴ To respond appropriately requires that we radically rethink what it means to be an anti-Zionist Jew on the left today.

Jewish anti-Zionism, at minimum, has a duty to take seriously Palestinian voices, over and above our own, especially when it comes to the future of Palestine. Anything short of this and anti-Zionist Jewish discourse becomes indistinguishable from liberal Zionism. Problematically, a simple cursory glance at the verbiage used by many Jewish anti-Zionist organizations, for example referring to Palestine as Israel-Palestine, or proclaiming a commitment to human rights discourse, international law, and the nation-state, shows how many Jewish anti-Zionist organizations have failed to do even the bare minimum. This feels especially absurd given Palestinians have been critiquing these semantic and political choices as “nothing more than an attempt to legitimize a colonial state” for over a decade.⁵⁵ 

These rhetorical slippages, although not shared by every Jewish anti-Zionist, are symptomatic of the longstanding commitment across anti-Zionist Jewish discourse to extract Zionism from Jewishness and Jewish values, or to de-Jewify Zionism. Some anti-Zionist Jews have even continued to narrate the events of October 7 as a bloody attack by Hamas instead of as an act of anti-colonial resistance.⁵⁶ Regardless of what remarks follow this point, to speak about October 7 as an attack is not only to obfuscate from everything that preceded this event: the seventy-five plus years of a genocidal assault on Palestine done primarily by Jews in the name of the Jewish people, but it is also to maintain an asymmetrical power dynamic that will always put Jews first at the expense of the Palestinian movement. Put simply, until the anti-Zionist Jew is willing to reckon with Jewish complicity and take Palestinian voices seriously, appeals to Jewishness will continue to be used in service of Zionism, regardless of whether that was their intention. In the process, the point I began with is reinforced: Jews are presumed ontologically innocent through their self-proclaimed status as victims, while Palestinians are not even given the presumption of innocence. With all of this in mind, my intention here is to sharpen the contradictions of the present and contribute to/strengthen an anti-Zionist Jewish politic that supports Palestinian liberation “by any means necessary.”⁵⁷ To do this, I am writing against any attempt to try to save Israel and by-proxy Jewishness from itself; this cannot be the priority. Rather, as Noura Erakat points out, “the priority should be the ending of this condition of permanent subjugation that Palestinians have been expected to endure.”⁵⁸

To conclude, I turn to Henry Schwarzschild’s remarks in his letter of resignation from the small journal Sh’ma in protest of Israel’s war on Lebanon in 1982. Here Schwarzschild openly condemns Jewish political and public institutions, including Sh’ma, who believe, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the death of the Jewish people is “inherently more tragic than the death of the Palestinian people.”⁵⁹ Heeding his call today means being willing to commit wholeheartedly to Palestinian liberation even if it poses a risk to Jewish life (at least as we currently know it). As anti-colonial struggles have shown time and time again, the Manichaean conditions of settler colonialism often require inverting the matrix in which the colonizer’s life is worth more than the colonized.⁶⁰ Put bluntly, this means accepting Al-Aqsa Flood as an act of anti-colonial resistance, a necessary prison break initiated by and for a caged people, despite its impact on Jewish life. Depicting anti-colonial resistance as anything otherwise is to put colonialism and the settler before the colonized and imprisoned.⁶¹ Our anti-Zionism cannot come with a caveat. It is not just a ceasefire that anchors our politics, not just an end to the occupation, or an end to the state of Israel, but also an end to the prioritization of Jewish safety and security over Palestinian life. This is not an antisemitic point to make, but even if it were, the settler colonial dispossession and genocide of Palestinians—of which the last two years are only the latest round—demands that we make it.