Anti-Zionism Is a More Malevolent Form of Anti-Semitism
It not only butchers Jews but consigns Palestinian civilians to the role of cannon fodder.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Oct. 16, 2023 4:51 pm ET
Israeli army soldiers patrol an area in northern Israel bordering Lebanon, Oct. 15. PHOTO: AFP CONTRIBUTOR#AFP/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Anti-Semitism has scored its flashiest victory since 1945. While many commentators have called the attack by Palestinian terrorists the Jewish 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, Israelis recognized a more disturbing precedent: the Holocaust.
Comparison of the Palestinian slaughter of Israelis in 2023 with the annihilation of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s doesn’t hinge on the comparable helplessness of Jewish victims. Those gunned down and tortured by Hamas terrorists were equally innocent, yet the next day’s mobilization of 150% of Israel Defense Force reservists confirms a difference. Zionism won for the Jews the ability to inhabit and defend their homeland. There is little doubt that this time Israel will prevail.
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The equation of the Hamas attacks to the Nazi murders lies rather in once-normal societies that turned monstrous while trying to annihilate the Jews. Anti-Semitism transformed Germans, among the most cultured people, into Nazis. Anti-Zionism has twisted Arabs and Muslims into something that in a way is even worse. Hamas advertises its butchery as a recruiting tool for followers (including in America).
But Hamas is merely the latest stage of an ideological movement that was launched when the Arab League organized against Israel in 1948. The Arab-Muslim refusal to coexist with Israel was never a war in any normal sense. Just as anti-Judaism once condemned the Jews for killing Christ, and anti-Semitism then accused Jews of polluting the nations where they lived, anti-Zionism was an ideology that defined the Jewish state as the illegitimate occupier of Arab land.
This anti-Zionist ideology is arguably the most potent coalition builder in the modern world. When Arab and Muslim countries emerged from colonial oversight after World War II, their leaders united nationalists, Islamists and other rivals with the common goal of destroying Israel. As they joined in successive wars, some of these constituencies competed over who could damage the Jewish state the most. Hamas has emerged victorious in that contest, proving that it can kill more Jews in a day than the combined Arab armies ever did and that it can torment Jews as brutally as the Nazis ever did.
This presents a problem for Middle Eastern leaders who want to normalize their relations with Western democracies, since they can’t do it without repudiating the ideology that they previously embraced and generously nourished. The brutality of Hamas is the logical culmination of their aggression, and they fear it could be redirected against them.
Arab and Muslim leaders weren’t alone in promoting anti-Zionism. The Soviet bloc joined in passing the 1975 United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism, which forged the anti-Israel coalitions now prominent on every major American college campus. Soviet anti-Zionism, directed against Jewish religion and nationality, helped unite socialist internationalists with every other kind of anti-Semite. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, shares the goals of Hamas even as he competes with it for governance, and he was educated in anti-Zionism at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Palestinian West Bank celebrants of the Hamas massacre tell us what they would do given the chance.
This is how anti-Zionism has grown to exceed anti-Semitism in malevolence. To blame Israel for occupying Arab land, it was necessary to keep the Palestinian population permanently displaced. That is why the Arab League never accepted the partition of Palestine and why the Palestinians have never built their state in the West Bank or Gaza. Anti-Zionism demands the continuing sacrifice of the Palestinians. The destruction of Gaza is the real object of the Hamas attack on Israel. Butchering Jews to prove Arab bravery was the minor goal, but the main goal was to ensure that Jews are blamed for killing Palestinians.
Anti-Zionism misdirects attention from its carriers to its target, and even those of us who stand with Israel are inclined to follow their pointing finger. Will Israel overreact? How long can it expect American and Western support? How could Israel have allowed such a failure of intelligence? All such focus ought instead to be trained on the perpetrators—who will multiply unless they are contained.
Obvious questions reveal the corrupters of Arab societies. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, why didn’t the Palestinians create the infrastructure for an independent state? Did Western funding for permanent refugees create terrorists in waiting? How could so many Palestinians, once among the most advanced Arabs in the Middle East, have turned into purveyors of what President Biden correctly called “sheer evil”?
A second line of inquiry must open here. How did this depraved ideology penetrate America’s universities, its elites, and even the U.S. Congress to a degree that the German Bund in the 1930s never found possible? How did the idea of eliminating Israel galvanize the intersectional coalition of our disaffected minorities?
Middle Eastern studies and political scientists should have been investigating how this pathological behavior developed, and they must do so now. Late-stage anti-Zionism has reached a point of universal destruction. There is no time to lose.
Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”
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