Comment by the_gastropod
2 years ago
This isn't exactly the same, but it's pretty close. Here's Nikki Haley tweeting: "Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. No federal funds for schools that don't combat antisemitism." [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1720501916088590704
Anti-Zionism is asserting that the Jewish state should not exist in the land of Israel. It _is_ antisemitism. You can criticize current Israeli government and it's certain actions, while acknowledging Israel's right to exist and defend its existence.
There are plenty of people in Israel who are opposed to Netanyahu and were protesting against him before the war started, but don't doubt that destroying Hamas is justified.
Israel is an implementation detail, not a requirement. No state has a right to exist: people have rights, not states.
It is about people. Jews have right for their own state and the right to defend it.
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Even if your definition here of Anti-Zionism was correct (it's not [1]), that is categorically different than what antisemitism is: a hatred of Jews, a belief in a global Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews control capitalism / created communism, etc., belief that Jews are racially inferior, etc. Sure, people that are antisemitic can also be Anti-Zionist (e.g., the Ku Klux Clan). But so too can people be proudly Jewish and Anti-Zionist (e.g., most Orthodox Jews). People can also be antisemitic and Zionist (e.g., many evangelical Christians, Donald Trump, John Hagee, etc.).
Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are orthogonal ideas. Conflation of them is pure propaganda.
[1] "Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionism