If Zionism has become a poisoned idea, how does one defend it? Said another way, how does one defend something that is so unpopular? It’d be like trying to defend apartheid in a world that is anti-apartheid.
This conundrum has bedeviled efforts to defend Israel. In the wake of Oct. 7 and the Gaza war, Israel has become a pariah state. Truth be damned, accusations of genocide, apartheid and colonialism are routinely hurled at the Jewish state and much of the world has bought it.
The Jewish response has been that since anti-Zionism is usually a cover for antisemitism, we should focus our fight on antisemitism. What no one likes to admit is that it’s a lot easier to fight antisemitism than to fight anti-Zionism. Judaism doesn’t carry the poison of Zionism. Whereas being anti-Zionist is widely perceived as acceptable, being anti-Jewish is not.
Focusing our fight on antisemitism, then, gives us a cleaner punch against Israel haters.
So far, so good.
But have we ever asked ourselves what price we’re paying for that cleaner punch? If we fail to defend Zionism because the word has become so dirty, and jump right to antisemitism because that word is still clean, what statement are we making about Zionism?
For starters, by not confronting the poisoned view of Zionism, we’re reinforcing the poison. We’re saying that anti-Zionism is not a big enough sin on its own; that without the moral sin of antisemitism, we’re incapable of challenging the anti-Zionist poison.
In any case, calling anti-Zionists antisemites, even when true, is hardly a good defense of Zionism. It’s too easy to deny. Avoiding a direct defense of Zionism ends up undermining the very idea of Zionism, which ironically is the intent of Israel haters.
Haters aside, the truth is that Zionism isn’t a poison; anti-Zionism is. Zionism is a uniquely powerful and legitimate movement that represents the return of a persecuted people to its biblical homeland. Faced with the world’s oldest hatred, Zionism became a refuge for the world’s most hated.
Anti-Zionism, or being anti-Israel, is no less offensive than being anti-Spain or anti-Italy or anti-Finland.
If “anti” were based on truth, the world would become anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-Sudan, anti-North Korea and anti any country where humanitarian horrors make Israel look like Club Med.
“What is unique about Israel is neither its history nor its conduct, but the widespread belief that its sovereignty is conditional,” Adam Kirsch writes in a must-read essay in the Jewish Quarterly titled, “The Z Word: Reclaiming Zionism.”
“When an idea is challenged, those who believe in it must be able to mount a substantive defense – to show why it is as worthy and necessary today as it was a generation or a century ago,” Kirsch writes. “For Zionists, that means reclaiming the definition of the word from its opponents.”
We won’t reclaim the word until it stands on its own. The Jewish reflex to characterize the demonizing of Zionism as an attack on all Jews is understandable. It bonds the Jews with the miracle of the Jewish state. It tells the world that messing with Israel is the same as messing with the Jews.
But however alluring that formulation is for the Jews, it’s even more attractive for Jew-haters, who get to exploit the poisoned brand of Zionism to poison Judaism, killing two Jewish birds, as it were, with one stone.
That is why Zionism must stand on its own, without the crutch of antisemitism. Keeping the focus on anti-Zionism isolates the brazen rejection of a country’s existence, an insult reserved for no other country than Israel.
No one is suggesting, of course, that we should stop fighting antisemitism. If a Jew-hater goes after a Jew because he or she is Jewish, or if any institution discriminates against Jews based on their Jewish identity, that is antisemitism, and we should fight it as such.
Similarly, when Jew-haters use their animus for Israel to go after Jews, we should defend Israel on its merits. The animus for Israel is the sin, independent of how one might feel about Jews.
Jew-haters would like nothing better than to taint Jews with the toxins they have attached to Zionism. By automatically using the antisemitism tag to defend Israel, we unwittingly follow their strategy, undermining both Zionism and Judaism.
What to do?
A good place to start would be an unapologetic campaign to make the case for Zionism, using bold messages to directly counter the poison.
In the same way that haters associate Zionism with the worst poisons of humanity, we should go in the opposite direction and associate Zionism with the best things humanity has to offer.
Israel is far from perfect and has its share of flaws, but that doesn’t mean we can’t associate Zionism with its true ideals of hope, success against all odds, a better future, a diverse society, universal right to sovereignty, self-correction and basic freedoms.
If our enemies have the chutzpah to poison Zionism with lies, we ought to have the chutzpah to defend Zionism with its own soulful truth, without needing the cavalry of antisemitism.
