Is Anti-Zionism, Anti Semitism?

Ok, it’s time to cut the bullshit and get down and dirty here. Focusing on hating Israel as a separate entity from hating Jews is the Anti-Israel Marketing Machine’s biggest ploy. It is a continuation of left-leaning tradition to provide a more self-righteous way to discriminate against the Jews.

So let’s tackle the question is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? Let me try to feed you the answer on multiple levels that way, if one of the arguments doesn’t resonate with you, at least another one will.

If you agree that Jews are simply Diaspora Israeli, then being against Israel is being against Jews- in the same way that if you criticized Italy all day long, no one would doubt that you are anti-Italian.

But I can appreciate that for many of us, this is a technical argument, and after years of propaganda, not everyone would be on the same page that Jews are Diaspora Israelis. So let’s get back to the question: Without being too technical, are all anti-Zionists really anti-Semites? I think it’s fair to say that no, not all of them are. The anti-Zionist movement itself is no doubt anti-Semitic, but not every anti-Zionist is aware of that.

So, here’s the catch: Once we prove to those people that anti-Zionism is based on anti-Semitism and they still choose to be an anti-Zionist, they lose their “get out of the Jail” card. They officially will become part of the haters club. So why is the anti-Zionist movement anti-Semitic? Referring back to our previous definition of Zionism, it means that Jews want a piece of land to call their own. Someone who calls themselves an anti-Zionist declares that Jews as an ethnicity do not deserve a land of their own. I hope anyone can agree that is pretty shitty.

But I hear you. I might be getting too technical again (even if it doesn’t hurt to point these technicalities out). People who don’t like Israel and unconditionally criticize Israel are not necessarily anti-Zionists by this definition. They may not be against Jews having their own country, but they are against all perceived Human Rights violations that Israel is committing against Palestinians in the name of getting their own land.

Now here’s the million-dollar question: In a world where China has detained more than one million Muslims and committed genocide against that same population; North Korea is stripping its people of all rights; Myanmar is pushing out an entire population of refugees; Mauritania is trading one-fifth of its population as slaves; and the majority of the Middle East still treats women, gays, and minorities as third-class citizens – why are we scapegoating the only Jewish country in the world? Why are so many so-called Human rRights advocates only raising objections about Israel?

Anyone who has invested time debating people on this topic has seen that some of the most outspoken people on the other side tend to originate from the Middle East. I don’t know how many times I have spoken to people from Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and had them bash Israel’s human rights record with a straight face as if that’s the one and only issue worth discussing in the Middle East. Meanwhile, they totally ignore many other much larger problems, such as the many human rights atrocities in their own countries. If that’s not enough to convince you that some serious scapegoating is going on, how about the insane bias of the UN and many international NGOs? Just recently, the UN exclusively targeted Israel as a violator of Women’s Rights. Can anyone say…seriously??!?!?!?

This is part of the UN’s disproportionate anti-Israel campaign, one that completely ignores the cruel and backward countries that have enacted laws forbidding women from driving and even made so-called honor killings of women legal. Even Ban Ki-moon, the previous Secretary-General of the UN, admitted when he retired that Israel had been targeted disproportionately. The former Secretary-General’s comment was a massive understatement, considering that during his leadership between 2007 and 2016, there were 223 resolutions condemning Israel and only eight resolutions condemning the Syrian regime during a genocide of nearly a million casualties that resulted in 7 million refugees. Can anyone say, Whhhhhhaaaaaatttt!!!!!????

Some opponents might claim that this entire argument is a deflection. In order to avoid taking responsibility for Israel’s alleged crimes, I’m deflecting the problem by saying that other countries are committing crimes too. They call this Whataboutism. The objection is that just because the leaders of Hamas and other Middle East parties are committing acts of violence does not mean that criticism of Israel is unjust. But in reality, it is. Look, it’s one thing when someone criticizes your group, and you deflect that criticism onto your opponents. It’s quite another when your group gets criticized more than all the groups in the world combined, something we see regarding Israel in the UN, the mainstream media, and even daily interactions with people in our social circles.

Eventually, it stops being deflection and instead becomes systematic scapegoating and discrimination. If you or your influencers are so entirely blind to the world that all you can see is what Israel is doing wrong, eventually, you lose credibility. At that point, you become guilty of what’s called confirmation bias, which is when you take conversations out of context and cherry-pick any little point that confirms your argument while ignoring any points that say something different.

So yes, if you ignore all the genocides, the slavery, the beheadings, and the discrimination going on in the world and only fixate on Israel, you prove that you no longer care about human rights or the rights of Palestinians specifically. You only care about what’s wrong with Israel, which means that you are approaching this topic with an agenda.

Now that brings us to another objection: That condemnations of Israel are a natural result of the U.S. giving the most military foreign aid to Israel. I call bullshit on that theory. It only holds water if you ignore that most military and foreign aid contributions come in the form of infrastructure such as military bases and soldiers. A professor named Hillel Frisch tallied the cost of all that infrastructure and found that the U.S. gives the equivalent of $27 billion to Japan, $21 billion to Germany, and $17 billion to South Korea in military aid per year. That includes tens of thousands of soldiers in each of those countries, which is the biggest sacrifice of all. If you are only concerned with raw dollars, then you need to ask why Egypt – which gets about half as much military aid from the U.S. as Israel does, provides a similar blockade to Palestinians and far surpasses the kind of human rights violations often blamed on Israel – is not even in the same ballpark as Israel in terms of criticism?

Some will argue that even these figures don’t tell the whole story. They’ll claim that in non-Israel countries, most of the U.S. military aid budget goes to defend American interests, whereas the aid given to Israel is some kind of lobbyist-driven donation.

Well, military aid for Israel is far from a donation. First of all, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Israel served as America’s buffer against Russian-influenced Arab countries. That relationship provided the added benefit of testing a lot of U.S.-provided weapons in real combat situations, providing proof of concept while also boosting the fortunes of American defense companies and their workers. Funding Israel’s military has always benefited the U.S., in the same way, that funding other countries’ armed forces benefits the U.S.

In a last-ditch effort to defend their argument, some critics of Israel will say that because there is so much attention focused on Israeli policy, it cannot be ignored. These people are right, in a sense. But that attention has been brought on by the genocidal anti-Israel marketing machine and not by Zionists.

Coming soon…

Coming soon…