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Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism because it singles out the Jewish state for opprobrium

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Semitism because it singles out the Jewish state for opprobrium, and with a prescription that anti-Zionists, with very few exceptions, apply to no other state. So, if you just happened to be opposed to the concept of the nation state altogether, nation states like Denmark or other nation states, then it’s plausible you can just simply be an anti-Zionist in the same way that you’re against all states founded on nationhood. But otherwise, it is singling out a Jewish state for treatment that isn’t applied anywhere else.

The second point that’s very important, is that anti-Zionism tends, very frequently, to traffic in images, tropes and libels that have a long history in an anti-Semitic tradition stretching back for thousands of years. For example, when you hear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, which it of course manifestly is not, you are abusing that word and trafficking in a classic anti-Semitic trope, suggesting that the Jewish people have a particular kind of bloodlust. Or if you say that Israel or Israeli leaders have hypnotized the world to get them to do their bidding, that again, goes back to an old anti-Semitic trope.

And finally, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, because like all forms of Jew hatred in history, it has adapted itself almost like a virus to the cultural and political fashions of our day. Today, it is very difficult for people to be anti-Semites and to hate Jews for racial reasons, for the obvious reason that that kind of ideology fortunately went out of fashion with the destruction of the Third Reich. It’s unfashionable to hate Jews simply on a religious basis, but it has become fashionable to hate Jews using the excuse of their statehood, of their nationality, and of their willingness to defend their borders, as the latest pretext to single out Jewish people for opprobrium and for hatred that is applied to almost no other people in the world. That is why in a nutshell, anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism, and it is the anti-Semitism of our day.

Bret Stephens is a columnist with The New York Times.

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