Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, killing over 30,000 at the time of writing, the embers of the Zionism debate have reignited. This ideology is constantly thrown around in political discourse, including in the United States House of Representatives. In early December 2023, that chamber decided to condemn anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism—the irony of that condemnation completely lost on our elected officials.

Zionism, simply put, is the idea that a Jewish state should exist; a more modern interpretation would be that Zionism is the belief the current state of Israel should be protected and preserved. This first appeared in writings by Theordor Herzl—the father of Zionism, in 1897. In the four decades that followed, several Zionist Congresses were formed to deliberate on where to settle. Several regions were mentioned, including, oddly enough, East Africa. But what led us to the modern day debacle is well-known: following World War II and the depravity of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis, Palestine, then under British Mandate, was partitioned. However, what the textbook definition, partition plan and Herzl himself didn’t include, were the Palestinians.

The issue with Zionism—just as with many similar settler-colonialist ideologies—is that it is inherently exclusionary. There is no room for the Palestinians in a Zionist framework—the state must be Jewish only. It must be an ethnostate. Now, one can argue that Zionism takes on many different forms and not all interpretations or implementations exclude the Palestinians. This, again, is untrue. We don’t have to go back to 1897 and examine Herzl’s initial writings to view this in print or in action, we can simply look to 2018, when Israel passed “Basic Law: Israel – the nation state of the Jewish people.” This bill solidified Israel’s intent on becoming an ethnostate. The bill designates that the right to self-determination in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people”—sounds pretty exclusionary. This law, which also makes Hebrew the national language and encourages Jewish settlement, combined with the egregious violations of international law throughout the past six months, perfectly encapsulates what modern Zionism is—the defense of an ethnostate.

Those claims are not unfounded, undocumented, nor are they conspiracies—they are well documented by humanitarian groups, the United Nations and historians alike. B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights group has declared Israel an apartheid state. According to their 2021 report, “B’Tselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.” I beg the following rhetorical question, is B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, anti-Semitic for their report? I’d suggest you read the question aloud to yourself before you answer in the affirmative.

However, despite these being valid criticisms of Zionism and Israeli policy, many, especially within the American and Israeli right, would claim they are anti-Semitic. I have even received these claims under my own articles. Now, what vile conspiracy did I tout in that article? To no one’s surprise: nothing. A reader claimed that my citation of Israel as an apartheid state was anti-Semitic. “By uncritically adopting terms like ‘apartheid’ and supporting narratives that delegitimizes Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state, the article echoes harmful antisemitic tropes.”

Now, there are a few erroneous points made here. First of all, there is no such thing as an “uncritical” adoption of the word apartheid when the target of the term is declared an apartheid state. Apartheid, in a legal sense, is an inherently critical term that is not thrown around lightly. Secondly, ignoring the buzzword “Israel’s right to exist” (an ever changing gotcha term that has no particular meaning), apartheid is not an antisemitic trope—nor is opposing Israeli policy, in the same sense that opposing a tyrannical religious state of Iran is not islamophobic nor opposing Christian Nationalism anti-Christian.

While my own experiences with these wrongful accusations and attempted censorship are laughable, the humor rather falls short on the broader stage. To frame this incorrect assertion more clearly: if you are anti-Zionist, you are an anti-Semite. The notion that anti-Zionism or criticism of the Israeli Government is anti-Semitic is a lazy scare tactic that ignores the long history of anti-Zionism within historical civil rights groups and within the Jewish community. Anti-Zionist Jews are as old as Zionism, with several left-wing Jewish groups opposing Zionism throughout the early 20th century. The most notable being the American Communist Party, a party in which Jews made up almost half of the membership. Those who are also often overlooked are the academic anti-Zionist Jews, Norman Finklestein and Noam Chomsky being two of the most prominent. The former is widely regarded as one of the foremost figures of authority on Israeli-Palestinian politics and history.

All Jewish members of these groups, in academia, leftist circles, or simple anti-Zionist Jews are often the focal point of a common attack from conservative members of the Jewish community: “self-hating Jew.” This term is typically directed at anti-Zionist Jews, claiming that being Jewish and supporting Israel are one and the same, and that if you are not a Zionist, you are not sufficiently Jewish. The use of this term, which is definitely a form of anti-Semitism when used in the context of targeting anti-Zionist Jews, was targeted at Jewish comedian Jon Stewart in 2014.

“How dare they? That they only know the word of God and are the ones who are able to disseminate it,” Stewart said, later adding. “It’s not right. And it’s something that they’re going to have to reckon with. The danger of oppression is not just being oppressed, it’s becoming an oppressor. Because that will deteriorate a society as quickly as being oppressed.”

This is the crux of the issue, Israel and Zionist groups repeatedly attempt to make Judaism and Zionism synonymous. This simply isn’t true. Judaism existed for thousands of years without Zionism and to make broad assertions that those who oppose Zionism or any other political derivative of multi-millennium old religion is offensive, anti-Semitic in this case, is wrong. To equate Zionism with Judaism and Jews with Israel, is anti-Semitic as it treats Jews as a monolith who must follow Israel. By lumping Jews with Israel it makes them collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, despite plenty of Jews objecting to Israel’s actions, particularly during the current assault on Gaza.

This is offensive in the same way it could be offensive to make all Islam and Muslims synonymous with oppressive Islamic states—or even Islamic Jihad, or to equate all Christians to Christian Nationalism. While some of these examples may not be perfect one-to-one comparisons to Zionism, to align religion with a political movement derived from the religion is incorrect, and to claim criticisms of those political derivatives as religious intolerance is rather silly.

“Actually, the locus classicus, the best formulation of this, was by an ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations…. He advised the American Jewish community that they had two tasks to perform,” Chomsky said in 2014. “One task was to show that criticism of the policy, what he called anti-Zionism—that means actually criticisms of the policy of the state of Israel—were anti-Semitism. That’s the first task. Second task, if the criticism was made by Jews, their task was to show that it’s neurotic self-hatred, needs psychiatric treatment. Then he gave two examples of the latter category. One was I.F Stone. The other was me. So, we have to be treated for our psychiatric disorders, and non-Jews have to be condemned for anti-Semitism, if they’re critical of the state of Israel. That’s understandable why Israeli propaganda would take this position. I don’t particularly blame Abba Eban for doing what ambassadors are sometimes supposed to do. But we ought to understand that there is no sensible charge. No sensible charge. There’s nothing to respond to. It’s not a form of anti-Semitism. It’s simply criticism of the criminal actions of a state, period.”