Different pro-Israel lobbying groups have been falsely conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism as they attempt to criminalise Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists that criticise Israel and the Zionist project. In response, Adam Sutcliffe, a professor of European History at King’s College London, Antony Lerman, an Honorary Fellow at Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish-Non-Jewish Relations, Southampton University and I drafted an expert opinion that considers ‘anti-Zionism’, both as a political perspective and as a term used in public discourse, with respect to its place in recent and current pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other forms of activism in the United Kingdom.
The expert opinion [available below] focuses on the issue of whether anti-Zionism should be considered as tendentially or intrinsically antisemitic, or otherwise hurtful or disrespectful to Jews. We note, for example, how anti-Zionists often describe Israel as a ‘racist endeavour’ and how according to one illustrative example provided by the IHRA definition of antisemitism such categorisation of Israel is antisemitic. We maintain, however, that whether or not the legal and material privileges accorded to Jews in Israel, and not to Palestinians, make contemporary Israel ‘a racist endeavour’ is most fundamentally an empirical question: such allegations cannot be considered as antisemitic if they are plausibly true. Human rights organisations from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to B’Tselem and Al Haq regard Israeli policies towards Palestinians as apartheid, underscoring that many critiques of Israel as ‘a racist endeavour’ may indeed be plausibly true, and that allegations that they are antisemitic are therefore spurious.
We also note that Jews who consider themselves Zionists and/or are strongly emotionally attached to Israel may well be upset when confronting allegations that Israel has, for example, committed a genocide in Gaza. If, however, this allegation is plausibly true – which according to the ICJ it is – then such arguments cannot be considered to be offensive. Many British citizens find confronting the violence of Britain’s colonial past upsetting, and many Germans, one would expect, find confronting the crimes of the Nazis particularly upsetting because they are Germans. The root of this pain, though, lies not in the manner in which British or German people are confronted with this history, but in the historical record itself.
We conclude the 15-page expert opinion noting that large numbers of people, in the UK and elsewhere, hold sincere anti-Zionist beliefs, and these beliefs are for many of them a very important part of their political outlook. For the vast majority of Palestinians, and for many people who readily identify with Palestinians for political or cultural reasons, the historical record of Zionism, not only in the past few years but since the early twentieth century, is seen as uncontroversially leading them to an anti-Zionist position. A significant number of Jews also consider themselves anti-Zionist, for a range of reasons.
Many people consider themselves anti-Zionist for reasons associated with their wider political commitments to antiracism, anticolonialism and/or economic, political and legal justice. It is clearly reasonable to argue, on the basis of numerous reputable studies that have found Israel to be, in effect, an apartheid-style state, that Zionism is a structurally unjust and/or racist or supremacist ideology.
Antisemitism is a hateful stance towards Jews in toto. Anti-Zionism, in contrast, is a critique of a political perspective. Both Jews and non-Jews can be, and are, Zionist, anti-Zionist, or neither of the two. There is no intrinsic connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism and attempts to argue that there is such a connection typically confuse two profoundly different types of perspective, often using arguments that are highly spurious.
Neve Gordon, Professor of International Law, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London