The current “debate” around antizionism and antisemitism is structured around a false binary:
(1) Antizionism is antisemitism vs. (2) Antizionism is not antisemitism.
Both positions fail when they depend on whether antizionism is recognizable in the terms of classical antisemitism. In this framework, the term antisemitism is deployed with ambiguity. Recognition often hinges on whether antizionists employ classic tropes—conspiracy, racial infiltration, dual loyalty. If those are absent, the accusation of antisemitism falters, even when the underlying structure is clearly one of stigmatizing Jews.
When classical markers are absent, the discussion frequently shifts to a more abstract register—invoking the “Three Ds” of demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. But these terms do not describe the actual content of antizionist rhetoric. Instead, they displace the analysis onto generic features of discrimination or anti-Jewish hate, avoiding the ideological content of antizionism itself.
What’s missing is a third term: Antizionism is not classical antisemitism—but it is a contemporary form of anti-Jewish hate. It doesn’t need to recycle the old tropes to qualify. It operates with a new vocabulary—colonizer, apartheid, genocide—that encodes a systematic assault on Jewish collective identity. It doesn’t look like the antisemitism of the past because it has evolved to fit the moral and political aesthetics of the present.
Until we name antizionism as this new, mutated formation—one that speaks in the idiom of justice while functioning as a structure of exclusion—we remain trapped in a conceptual framework that is already obsolete. The challenge is not to detect traces of the past, but to confront the new form anti-Jewish hate has taken now.
Being an anti-Semite is a low-status belief so most people won't come out and admit it, even online (though sometimes if I prod someone the mask drops). But dealing with this lately I've remembered some old Holocaust docs or even memories of my youth dealing with the Jew haters I knew (Poles, for instance, are enormous Jew haters)—many of these people attempted some rationalization, saying Jews were atheistic Communists, Jews were greedy capitalists, Jews had weird clothes and customs, thus they didn't really HATE them (oh no!), but hated being around them or hated their presence in their country etc, also trying to imply that the Jews deserved it, at least a little bit. (Even real live convicted Nazis used similar evasions.)
Now that we've come to this newer, more sophisticated, veiled anti-Semitism, the best I've come up with is trying to apply a good-faith standard. My questions for the "I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist" crowd usually include: do you oppose any other countries or peoples' desire for safety, sovereignty and self-determination? What other countries do you believe don't deserve to exist? If you oppose "ethno" nationalism, do you oppose Han or Turkish or Hindu nationalism? Do you also oppose the Kurdish, Tibetan and Palestinian campaigns for their own sovereign nations?
But really to get to the root of bad-faith arguments, I try to use the same standard you'd use for someone who seems hostile to a friend or relative, or someone else in general: Do you ever extend charity or sympathy to this person? Ever try to see life through their eyes?...Which in re Israel usually comes to: Do you have any sympathy or even an ounce of charity for Jews and Israel? History's most oppressed group who were almost entirely exterminated not so long ago and who were given a tiny patch of land by the UN only to be at war for its entire existence and surrounded on all sides by genocidal theocrats who have never once accepted their right to exist? Do you really think it's a coincidence that history's most despised minority is now the modern world's most despised country?!
I can't say I've been changing many minds, I'm not sure people change their minds via internet debate, especially considering that people mostly just take the cues of their tribe or their personal prejudices then make their decisions and reason backwards to support them. Not only is there an enormous amount of hatred out there, but people fling these vehement opinions on issues they've never studied or thought about, and only have the most cursory knowledge of.
It's real ugly and stupid out there, but there are many ways to fight back, esp when reality and truth are on your side. Thanks!!
Well said.