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Why Those Fighting for the Jews Should Concede that Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism
Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, as the latter is typically conceived.
Anti-Zionism is its own libel-spewing hate movement targeting the Jews, and it’s time the Jewish people and their allies recognize this and change our tactics.
We have lost the battle over anti-Zionism on campuses and elsewhere because we have been fighting too hard to identify it with antisemitism. It is time to join the battle against anti-Zionism itself.
A new organization called the Movement Against Anti-Zionism has the mission to make all this clear. Here is just one example that illustrates the need to change tactics.
The widely-made claim that Federal investigations into campus Jew-hatred are “misusing civil rights law to squash political dissent,” as Jessica Corbett recently expressed it, rests on a deep misunderstanding of what that hatred looks like today. It assumes that Jew-hatred still wears its old “antisemitic” uniform: swastikas, slurs, caricatures, and conspiracy theories.
But Jew-hatred manifests differently in different times, and mutates and adapts. The operative Jew-hatred of our era is neither the anti-Judaism of Christian yore nor the antisemitism of late modern race science (though that is on the rise today as well). It is anti-Zionism, a moralized, intellectualized, and socially acceptable hatred of the Jewish collective that masks itself in the language of justice.
Whereas antisemitism treats the Jew as an alien within society, anti-Zionism treats the Jewish state as an alien among nations. The vocabulary has changed, but the underlying impulse remains constant: to mark the Jewish identity of the era as uniquely illegitimate. Anti-Zionism allows (on paper) that Jews may exist as individuals — but not as a people with collective rights, casting their sovereignty not as self-determination but as mortal sin. The hatred that was once expressed through the language of race and religion is now expressed through that of rights and resistance.
The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) and MESA (Middle East Studies Association) report cited by Corbett frames campus antisemitism probes as an effort to silence “criticism of Israel.” Yet its own rhetoric reveals a deeper prejudice. It begins by asserting that Israel is waging a “genocidal war” in Gaza, presented not as argument but as premise. This is not critique; it is anti-Zionist libel, the moral inversion by which Jewish survival is reframed as moral crime. The purpose is not to critique Israel but to isolate it, not to debate policy but to deny legitimacy. Anti-Zionism is not “critique of Israel” any more than antisemitism is “critique of Jews.”
To describe anti-Zionist accusations as “mere criticism” is to misunderstand how modern bigotry operates. Hatred no longer announces itself openly; it hides beneath the cloak of virtue. On university campuses, this takes the form of polite exclusion: the Israeli scholar uninvited from a panel, the Jewish student told that solidarity requires renouncing Zionism, the cultural institution that celebrates diversity except when it includes Jews who refuse to disavow their people’s homeland. Each act seems minor, even principled. Taken together, they constitute the moral architecture of contemporary discrimination.
Anti-Zionism is not identical to antisemitism, but is its direct descendant, a mutation adapted to the moral grammar of the 21st century.
The ongoing Federal civil rights investigations are not an assault on liberty, but an attempt to recognize how hate has changed its form. They do not criminalize dissent, but acknowledge that the boundary between political speech and ethnic animus has blurred — primarily, or only — with respect to the world’s one Jewish state.
To challenge anti-Zionism is not to silence dissent. It is to insist that equality includes Israelis and their supporters too. The refusal to grant Israel what every other nation takes for granted — the right to self-definition and security — is discrimination, whether clothed in theology, theory, race, or virtue. The tragedy of the AAUP and MESA report, and of the article that amplifies it, is that they mistake the exposure of prejudice for its creation. By defending exclusion as conscience, they do not protect freedom — they excuse its perversion.
Anti-Zionism is the hate that learned to pass as justice. To recognize it as such is not censorship. It is moral clarity — the refusal to let an old hatred hide under the banner of a fashionable cause.
If you agree then check out the Movement Against Anti-Zionism–and join the battle.
Andrew Pessin is Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism.
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Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.
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Belgian officials investigating synagogue explosion as possible act of terrorism
(JTA) — Belgian officials are investigating an explosion in front of a synagogue in Liège early Monday as a possible act of terrorism.
The explosion, which took place at 4 a.m., damaged the door of the historic neo-Romanesque synagogue and blew out the windows of multiple buildings across the street. No injuries were reported.
A range of Belgian politicians, including the prime minister and the mayor of Liège, characterized the explosion as act of antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is an attack on our values and our society, and we must fight it unequivocally,” Prime Minister Bart de Wever said in a statement. “We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community in Liege and across the country.”
The explosion comes amid a surge of concern about possible attacks by agents associated with the Iranian regime, against which the United States and Israel launched a war last week. Iran has a long record of supporting attacks on Jewish targets abroad, including two bombings in the 1990s in Argentina that killed more than 100 people at the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center. Now, with Iran being pummeled at home, watchdogs are warning that it might lash out through its Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, responsible for attacks abroad.
Azerbaijan said Friday that it had foiled multiple terror attacks planned by Iranian agents on Jewish sites. In London, four men were arrested last week for allegedly spying on the Jewish community for Iran, with the intent of planning attacks against the community. And a string of shootings at synagogues in Toronto has ignited concern in Canada, too.
Iranian agents have taken aim at non-Jewish targets, too. On Friday, a Pakistani man who prosecutors said had been directed by Iran’s IRGC was convicted of plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump.
The attack in Liège, in the primarily French-speaking Wallonia province, comes amid a range of recent developments that have unsettled Belgian Jews, who number approximately 30,000. They include antisemitic carnival caricatures in the city of Aalst; a ban on ritual slaughter preventing the local production of kosher meat; and an ongoing row between U.S. and Belgian officials over Jewish circumcision practices. The attack also follows a 2014 shooting in which a gunman associated with the Islamic State, a rival to Iran’s Islamic Republic, shot four people to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
A spokesperson for the Liège police described the effects to the area as “only material damage” to the 1899 building. Rabbi Joshua Nejman told local media that he was hoping that security footage would reveal the perpetrator.
“I’m going to try to calm my heart, because it is beating faster and faster this morning,” said Nejman, who said he had been at the synagogue for 25 years.
“Liege is home to a very small but vibrant Jewish community where I personally grew up,” Eitan Bergman, vice president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organisations in Belgium, told Reuters. “Today, the feelings among our community members are a mixture of sadness, worry and profound shock.”
Liege’s mayor, Willy Demeyer, praised the synagogue community to RBTF, Belgium’s French-language national broadcaster. He added, “We cannot allow foreign conflicts to be imported into our city.”
The post Belgian officials investigating synagogue explosion as possible act of terrorism appeared first on The Forward.
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The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life, 2025
In honor of The Algemeiner‘s 12th annual gala, we are proud to present our “J100” list — 100 individuals who have positively influenced Jewish life over the past year.