Antizionism Isn’t About Foreign Policy. It’s About Reopening the Jewish Question

On his first day in office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani moved to revoke the city’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The decision was framed as a procedural correction—an act of neutrality, even principle. In reality, it was far more revealing: a declaration that Jew-hatred would again be treated as negotiable, conditional, and subject to ideological fashion.

This was not an isolated gesture. It reflects a broader effort to launder antizionism into respectability—rebranded as antifascism or antiracism, or, at minimum, as a routine foreign policy disagreement. Zionism, in this telling, is reduced to a mere political preference, or worse, grotesquely caricatured as a racist ideology akin to Nazism or white supremacy. Antizionism, by contrast, is thus cast as moral clarity.

This framing is not merely inaccurate. It is willfully deceptive—designed to obscure what is being argued: that the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely illegitimate, and that Jews, uniquely among peoples, may be denied the right to collective self-defense and self-determination.

To understand why this matters, clarity about Zionism is essential.

Zionism is not a colonial project. It is one of the most consequential anti-colonial movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It emerged from the catastrophic failure of Europe—and much of the Middle East—to tolerate Jewish existence as equals. It was a movement of national self-determination rooted in an indigenous homeland, forged not in abstraction but in sustained vulnerability and repeated catastrophe.

Long before the Holocaust, Jews learned the price of statelessness. Pogroms, expulsions, and legal exclusion were not historical accidents; they were the result of exile and dependence on the goodwill of others. That dependence proved fatal in the twentieth century. During the Holocaust, Jews learned what it meant to have no sovereign state willing or able to protect them—and right after it, they learned that lesson again.

In the years immediately following World War II, roughly 250,000 Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors remained trapped in displaced persons camps across Europe—stateless, unwanted, and barred from immigration by much of the world. Britain enforced strict quotas that prevented survivors from reaching Mandatory Palestine even as Europe lay in ruins. The United States and other Western nations admitted Jews reluctantly and in limited numbers. Jewish sovereignty remained unrealized until May 14, 1948, and Jews paid the price for that delay.

Around the same time, nearly one million Jews—many of whom had lived for centuries as precarious minorities under Arab and Muslim rule—were expelled or forced to flee from Arab controlled lands in the years surrounding Israel’s creation. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere—many predating Arab or Islamic conquest—were erased almost overnight.

Zionism did not cause this vulnerability. It was the response to it. It provided refuge to more than one million Jews when no one else would.

To erase that history—and to reduce Zionism to a racist abstraction—is not critique. It is inversion.

Antizionism does not debate policy or borders. It revives the Jewish Question and pretends it’s moral critique.

In nineteenth-century Europe, the “Jewish Question” asked whether Jews could be tolerated as equals within modern nation-states. Framed as a philosophical inquiry and debated in salons and parliaments, it reliably ended the same way: with Jews informed that their presence or collective existence was uniquely problematic—at best, tolerated conditionally, and revoked conveniently.

Today, that same logic has been revived, with Israel serving as the proxy for the Jew.

Why Zionism Is Treated Differently

No other national movement is subjected to the standards imposed on Zionism. No other people are required to justify their right to self-determination as a precondition for moral legitimacy. No other state is declared illegitimate in principle rather than criticized in practice.

Criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitic. The IHRA definition of antisemitism—revoked by Mamdani for New York City Jews—states that explicitly. But the insistence that the Jewish state alone must not exist—that Jewish sovereignty itself is uniquely immoral—is not policy critique. It is civilizational judgment.

The language makes this unmistakable. Israel is not accused of errors; it is accused of original sin. Its founding is not debated; it is denied. Its security concerns are dismissed as pretexts. Violence against Israelis is contextualized, justified, or even celebrated, while Jewish self-defense is treated as evidence of criminality.

This is not how international politics normally operates. It is how Jews are singled out when societies want a scapegoat instead of responsibility.

IHRA and the Refusal to Draw Lines

This is why the rejection of the IHRA definition of antisemitism matters.

IHRA does not prohibit criticism of Israel. It protects it. What IHRA does is identify when rhetoric labeled as “criticism” crosses into discrimination—when Jews are collectively blamed for Israel’s actions, when impossible standards are applied to the Jewish state alone, when Israelis are grotesquely compared to Nazis, or when Jewish self-determination is denied outright.

IHRA’s opponents understand this perfectly. That is why they oppose it.

Refusing IHRA is not neutrality or even nuance toward antisemitism. It’s a request for permission to engage in it.

When political figures revoke or distance themselves from IHRA—while minimizing or quietly scrubbing prior antisemitic rhetoric—they send a clear signal to Jewish communities: your safety is provisional, your inclusion conditional, and your warnings about the tools of your own persecution will be ignored.

This is not bureaucratic housekeeping. It is moral abdication.

The American Stakes

The question is not whether Jews will survive antizionism. Jews have survived worse. The question is whether American liberal democracy can survive the abandonment of its moral clarity.

America was never free of antisemitism. Before the mid-1950s, Jews faced housing discrimination, employment quotas, social exclusion, and elite barriers. Nor did America’s ideals apply equally to all. What made America different was not perfection, but direction—a constitutional commitment to expanding equal citizenship rather than revoking it.

When antizionism is normalized, when Jewish belonging is made conditional, and when definitions of antisemitism are revoked to accommodate those who practice it, the consequences are no longer abstract. These are deliberate choices about whose rights matter, whose fears are dismissed, and which minorities may be singled out with impunity. Societies do not stumble into this terrain. They enter it knowingly.

This time, ignorance is no excuse. We know exactly what they are doing.