In the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 2023, an explosion of Jew-hatred swept the globe. Across the world’s major cities, including here in Australia, we continue to see acts of hostility towards Jews—from attacks on synagogues, to property damage, online abuse, and, ultimately, mass murder at a Chanukah event in December on Bondi Beach.
The scenes in front of the Sydney Opera House on Oct. 9, 2023, of so-called demonstrators celebrating the murder of 1,200 people in Israel while yelling “F**k the Jews!” remain some of the darkest images in Australian history.
Despite these obvious expressions of hatred, a common defense is deployed across protest movements, cultural institutions, academic circles and even religious spaces: “We have nothing against Jews, only Israel and Zionists. We are anti-Zionist, not antisemitic.”
This is not the result of ignorance. It is a deliberate strategy. They use language designed to wound, treating Zionism—a movement for Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland—as if it were entirely divorced from Jewish identity. Through purposefully provocative slogans and slurs painting Zionism as inherently “colonialist,” “racist,” “terrorist” and “evil,” they thus cloak themselves as fighters for peace and justice while attempting to “delegitimize” Jewish history itself.
Those directing these movements understand precisely how this language functions, which is why their whole argument is a Trojan horse—a tactic to attack Jews and their basic rights by other means, rather than targeting them directly for simply being Jews.
By substituting “Israelis” for “Jews” and maintaining that they’re “only” against the Zionist ideology, it gives them a type of moral immunity.
It’s time that cover is removed and revealed for what it really is.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once remarked, antisemitism is a “mutating virus” that shapeshifts every generation. Once, Jews were targeted for their religion, and when that became untenable, they were targeted for their race, and when that wasn’t acceptable anymore, they were targeted for having their own state.
That shift began long before Oct. 7, but the sheer toxicity of the demonstrations since then has taken many people by surprise.
Is it merely the actions of Israel they’re demonstrating against, as is often claimed when they are challenged? That question can be answered by observing how every other conflict in the world failed to elicit a response even remotely similar.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t lead to mass demonstrations filling the world’s capitals. While Russia was sanctioned by many world bodies, Russians themselves weren’t attacked on the streets, neither were their houses of worship or community centers targeted.
In Sudan, Christians and non-Arab minorities have been subjected to genocide, cruelly targeted in horrific scenes of mass murder by various militias, including alleged complicity by the Sudanese Armed Forces. More than 12 million people have been displaced and the death toll in El Fasher in western Sudan, just for last November, was estimated at 60,000. Yet the streets of Melbourne and London remain completely silent about Sudan.
In Iran, security forces have massacred protesters in their thousands over repeated uprisings, including, allegedly, tens of thousands over the past few weeks, according to human-rights groups. Sustained global solidarity remains strikingly absent. No Greta Thunberg-led flotilla heads their way.
These cases have seen far more brutality and lives lost than Israel’s current conflict, yet no one is filling the streets in moral outrage. Certainly, no one is demonstrating against the very existence of Russia, Sudan and Iran.
No other nation on earth is subjected to a global mass movement demanding its abolition, except for the one sole Jewish state.
These actions are calculated, driven less by concern for humanity than by an obsession with a single people.
Criticizing Israel, and the policies of its government, is obviously legitimate. The biggest critics of Israeli policies are Israelis themselves; just look at the Knesset.
But anti-Zionism is not a critique of Israeli policy. In fact, policy is largely irrelevant to it. This is why it is fair to say that anti-Zionism is a hate movement, just like racism, just like antisemitism.
Its goals are the eradication of the Jewish state. When Israel’s defenses were effectively absent on Oct. 7, we did not see “political liberation,” but wholesale slaughter. Yet many “anti-Zionists” openly seek to deny Israel the right to defend itself from such murderous attacks.
At its core, anti-Zionism today is just another iteration of Jew-hatred, no different to what we have seen throughout the ages. Its logic strips Jews of every form of collective protection—national, religious and physical—with consequences history has made tragically clear. The participation of a small minority of Jews in that movement does not alter its nature or its aims.
After the Bondi attack, there were social-media posts claiming that the attack wasn’t antisemitic because the attackers were attacking Zionists, not Jews. This illustrates clearly how the word has been successfully weaponized to dehumanize the victims, even in the aftermath of a massacre on Australian soil directed at a religious festival.
Treating anti-Zionism as anything other than another form of Jew-hatred serves to excuse it and its intentions. Doing that will only open the door to more of the terrible scenes we’ve already witnessed these past few years.
