Antisemitism vs. Anti-Zionism: Drawing a Line Without Erasing the Truth

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Antisemitism is rising in America. Jewish students feel it in the chants outside their dorms.¹ Rabbis feel it in the added security at synagogue doors.² Parents feel it in the trembling quiet when their children ask why their school was vandalized.³ And in the wake of recent protests and counter-protests, one line keeps getting blurred, often on purpose: the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

It’s time we drew that line carefully, and with dignity. Not to police ideas, but to protect people—and not just Jewish people.

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First, the Basics

Antisemitism is hatred or prejudice against Jews. It is not mere disagreement or critique—it is a worldview that sees Jews as threatening, manipulative, disloyal, or subhuman.⁴ It’s as old as empire, as recent as Pittsburgh.⁵ It takes many forms: religious, racial, political, conspiratorial. And it doesn’t need Israel as a pretext to spread.

Zionism, by contrast, is a modern political movement affirming that the Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their historic homeland.⁶ That’s it. Zionism has taken many shapes: secular, religious, liberal, revisionist. But at its core, it’s a claim to nationhood—not superiority.

Anti-Zionism, then, is opposition to that idea. Sometimes it means rejecting the state of Israel’s founding altogether. Sometimes it means opposing specific Israeli policies, or all forms of ethnic nationalism. Sometimes it means something more radical—advocating for the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state.

These are not the same thing. But they’re not entirely separate either.

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When Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism

Criticizing Israeli policy is not antisemitic. It never has been. Not when Jewish Israelis do it, not when diaspora Jews do it, not when Palestinians do it. Israel is a sovereign state. Its policies—on settlement, security, citizenship, and war—are all fair game for public debate.⁷ So is Zionism itself. One can oppose nationalism, critique settler colonialism, advocate for Palestinian liberation, and reject the religious claims of modern nation-states without hating Jews.

There are Jews who are non-Zionist, and Jews who are anti-Zionist.⁸ There are rabbis who believe a Jewish state should not have been established until the messianic age.⁹ There are activists who believe that Jewish flourishing must be rooted in diasporic ethics, not sovereignty. That, too, is part of the Jewish story.

So no—anti-Zionism is not automatically antisemitism.

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When It Becomes Something Else

But let’s not be naïve.

Anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism when it crosses certain lines:

• When it refuses to distinguish between a government and a people.

• When it applies to Jews alone what it would never apply to other nations.¹⁰

• When it denies that Jews are a people at all—reducing them to mere religious adherents, foreign to the lands they’ve lived in for millennia.¹¹

• When it blames all Jews everywhere for Israel’s actions, or demands that they disavow their existence to be accepted.

• When it traffics in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, influence, and control.¹²

• When it demands the dismantling of Israel “from the river to the sea,” but offers no plan to protect the millions of Jews who live there.¹³

• When it cheers the murder of civilians under the language of “resistance.”

Anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism when it forgets that Jews, too, are vulnerable. That Jewish history didn’t start in 1948 or 1967, but in exile, in persecution, and yes, in yearning for safety and return.¹⁴

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And Prejudice Doesn’t Stop There: The Other Side of the Conflation

We must also name another dangerous conflation: equating all Palestinians with Hamas, all Palestinian protest with terrorism, and all Palestinian grief with incitement.¹⁵

Just as antisemitism dehumanizes Jews, anti-Palestinian prejudice dehumanizes an entire people, reducing them to threats, suspects, or collateral. We’ve seen this in public discourse, in policy debates, in airport detentions, and on college campuses.

Palestinian Americans, especially students, have been harassed, interrogated, and doxxed—not for promoting violence, but for calling for ceasefires, mourning civilian deaths, or simply expressing solidarity with their families.¹⁶ Protests that speak to displacement, occupation, or injustice are often treated as security threats, rather than political speech.

The tragedy is this: when the fight against antisemitism becomes an excuse for anti-Palestinian bigotry, we have not defeated hatred—we’ve just given it new armor.

No people should be reduced to the worst acts committed in their name. Not Jews. Not Palestinians. Not anyone.

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The Consequences of Blurring the Line

When we conflate all anti-Zionism with antisemitism, we shut down necessary conversations. We alienate allies. We tell Jews who criticize Israel that their voices don’t count, that they are “self-hating” or “naïve.”¹⁷ We undermine our own credibility.

But when we pretend that all anti-Zionism is innocent, we embolden those who use it as a mask for hate. We excuse chants that dehumanize Jews. We ignore harassment. We abandon nuance—and with it, our moral clarity.

And when we refuse to confront prejudice against Palestinians, we make our own calls for justice sound hollow. We teach young people that some pain is worth protecting—and some is not.

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What We Need Now

We need to reclaim the civic middle. We need to name antisemitism clearly, wherever it appears—right, left, or center. We need to name anti-Palestinian bigotry just as clearly. We also need to defend the space for legitimate political critique, especially in moments of deep pain.

Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity are not mutually exclusive.¹⁸ Both demand a deeper commitment to truth, to justice, and to refusing the easy certainties of ideology.

The difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not just academic. Neither is the distinction between resistance and dehumanization. These are the lines that define whether we build a civic culture of dignity—or feed the very fears that tear democracies apart.

Let’s draw those lines. Not with a sword, but with a light.

1. Morstead T, DeLongis A. Antisemitism on Campus in the Wake of October 7: Examining Stress, Coping, and Depressive Symptoms Among Jewish Students. Stress Health. 2025 Feb;41(1):e3529. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3529. PMID: 39804586; PMCID: PMC11750057.

2. Following attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh (2018), Poway (2019), and Colleyville (2022), many Jewish communities have substantially increased security measures. According to a 2023 survey by the Secure Community Network, over 90% of synagogues in the United States have implemented new security protocols in the past five years.

3. FBI hate crime statistics show that attacks targeting Jewish schools and community centers increased by 36% in 2022-2023. These incidents have profound psychological effects on Jewish children and families, creating what psychologists call “identity-based traumatic stress.”

4. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism identifies several manifestations of antisemitism, including “making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews” and “accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing.”

5. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on October 27, 2018, was the deadliest attack specifically targeting Jews in American history. Eleven worshippers were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue by a gunman who had expressed antisemitic views online.

6. Zionism emerged as a political movement in the late 19th century, formally organized with the First Zionist Congress in 1897 led by Theodor Herzl. It developed as a response to persistent antisemitism in Europe and the failure of Jewish emancipation to fully protect Jewish communities.

7. Israeli society itself has robust internal critique. Major Israeli newspapers like Haaretz regularly publish opinions critical of government policies. Organizations like B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Peace Now—all Israeli—actively criticize and document issues related to the occupation and settlement policy.

8. Groups like Neturei Karta and Satmar Hasidim reject Zionism on religious grounds, believing that only the Messiah can re-establish Jewish sovereignty. Secular anti-Zionist Jewish organizations include Jewish Voice for Peace and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which oppose Zionism on political rather than religious grounds.

9. This position is held primarily by certain ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) communities. The Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, was one of the most vocal rabbinic opponents of Zionism, articulating this view in his 1961 work “Vayoel Moshe” which argued that the establishment of a Jewish state before the messianic age violated religious oaths.

10. This is known as the “double standard” test. When Israel is condemned for actions that similar or worse actions by other nations draw little or no criticism, this asymmetry may indicate antisemitism rather than principled opposition to specific policies.

11. Archaeological and historical evidence confirms continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel/Palestine from ancient times through the modern era, though the size of this population varied greatly over time. DNA studies also show genetic links between modern Jewish populations and ancient Middle Eastern populations.

12. Modern conspiracy theories about Jewish control often recycle tropes from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated antisemitic text from the early 20th century that claimed to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. Despite being thoroughly debunked, its themes continue to appear in contemporary antisemitic discourse.

13. The phrase "from the river to the sea" refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, encompassing all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. While some use it as a call for equal rights in a single democratic state, others use it as a call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, without addressing what would happen to the roughly 7 million Jews currently living there.

14. Jewish liturgy and literature have expressed yearning for return to Zion for millennia. The Passover Seder concludes with "Next year in Jerusalem," and the daily Amidah prayer includes requests for the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple. Archaeological finds like the Bar Kokhba letters demonstrate that ancient Jews saw themselves as exiles from their homeland.

15. Aroian, Karen J., Theresa L. Norris, and Thomas Templin. “Arab American Persons’ Reported Experiences of Discrimination and Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Personal Control.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 51, no. 4 (October 2004): 418–428. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.51.4.418.

16. Reports from organizations like Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) document cases of Palestinian and Muslim students facing harassment, discrimination, and surveillance for peaceful advocacy activities, particularly during periods of heightened tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

17. The term “self-hating Jew” has been used to delegitimize Jewish critics of Israel since at least the 1970s. However, Jewish criticism of Zionism dates back to Zionism’s origins, with figures like philosopher Hermann Cohen arguing that Judaism’s universal ethics were incompatible with nationalism.

18. Numerous initiatives like Combatants for Peace, Standing Together, and the Parents Circle-Families Forum bring together Israelis and Palestinians who work for mutual recognition, security, and dignity, demonstrating that advocacy for both peoples is not only possible but essential for lasting peace.