Rage Against The Antizionists! |
World Jewry is besieged by a campaign of Islamist antisemitism designed to bolster the islamists’ “dream of a world without Jews.” Tactically, as with the Soviets before them, the Islamists draw support from postmodern Western intellectuals and cultural Marxists susceptible to their propaganda and psychological manipulation. To them, the Islamists package raw antisemitism as principled antizionism to gain legitimacy, dodge accusations of bigotry, and subvert the West from within. Coming with unprecedented scale and scope, the new wave of antisemitism clothed as antizionism is both fearsome and daunting. But this ominous assault was anticipated some 3,000 years ago in a similarly hostile socio-political environment with the same locus: Iran. The Tanakh sends a message to the Jews from across millenia to not despair, and instead to rally, unite, and act defiantly to overcome the threat.
Antizionism seeks to deny Jewish indigeneity and sever Jews from the land of Israel. It’s fueled by contrivances ranging from genocide libel, deicide themes, and false tropes. In essence, antizionism is the coding of the State of Israel, its people, and all those associated with them, as inherently evil. It’s an “innovative” restructuring of antisemitism originally developed by the Soviet KBG. Says author Kathleen Hayes, it’s “the latest chilling form of supersecessionism — the impulse to eliminate Jews to redeem the world.”
Antizionism emerged as the most sophisticated form of Jew-hatred by masquerading as political criticism. It framed Israel as a “colonial apartheid project,” which “effectively tainted Israel with the sins of the West for Western leftists, making it an effigy against which leftists could redirect their self-hate for the West.” The Soviets–who worked to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world”– separated antizionism from antisemitism with the help of a small number of token Jews to lend it legitimacy. But, says former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky,
“In Russia there was no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Soviet Jews knew that [the] anti-Zionist campaigns were campaigns against Jews.”
Today’s antizionists launder their ideology with semantic distortions that elide their libels of Israel with historical internal Jewish debates about Zionism. But none of these internal debates suggested that Jews lacked indigeneity in the Land of Israel. Jewish opposition to Zionism arose in liberal Jewish communities that opposed Jewish nationhood in order to assimilate and acquire full civil equality in the Diaspora, and posited Judaism as a universal ethical religion. This train of thought recalls the ideology of the Jewish General Jewish Labor Bund, which believed that Jews should work to alleviate social injustices where they lived (grounded on a philosophy of doikayt or “hereness”), rather than focus their energies on a country elsewhere (Israel). On the other end of the Jewish spectrum, there are Ultra-Orthodox Jews who don’t accept the State of Israel because they believe the secular state is a theological error that should not exist until the arrival of the Messiah (e.g., Ketubot 111a). That said, the Orthodox halakhic tradition posits Eretz Yisrael as the eternal, divinely ordained home of the Jewish People. Even the non-Zionists at the extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy believe they fulfill a religious obligation by residing in Eretz Yisrael.
Historically, Jews vulnerable to anti-Jewish propaganda and psychological manipulation—who can be exploited for political ends—have been termed “pocket Jews” (or “useful idiots”). They enable antizionists to launder and normalize the lies and ideology they peddle to an ignorant global audience with a false luster of Jewish endorsement. This grants these token Jews a pernicious influence far exceeding their numbers (7% of American Jews, and roughly 14% of 18–34 year olds).
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which insists that “Zionism” is opposed to “Judaism”, is frequently highlighted as a leader of token antizionism on American campuses–nominal heirs of the Yevsektsiya (Jewish Sections of Communist Party branches in the Soviet Union). JVP works closely with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to promote anti-Israel initiatives. As “Not In Our Name” activists, JVP cultivates the canard that Zionism is equivalent to support for Israeli policies. JVP also indulges in socio-analytic mumbo jumbo about settler colonialism (which is basically the simple nefarious assertion that Jews are alien to their indigenous homeland). It works to remove agency from individual Jews by promoting a concocted falsehood that Jews who identify even tangentially with Israel are motivated by white supremacy, Jewish racial chauvinism, and religious supremacism.
Token antizionist ideology demands not only relinquishment of self-determination for the Jewish people but also moral surrender–an admission that Jewish sovereignty itself is a sin. It is closely bolstered by a concept of “neo-diasporism”, which reframes the assimilationist maxim of 18th century Jewish Enlightenment, “Be a man on the street and a Jew at home”. It betrays an ideology of anti-Israeli racism and antisemitism.
Having rejected the Jewish diaspora as the linkage of a single people, world Jewry, the token Jews could only strive to downplay the causal connection between the 10/7 Hamas attack and the immediately ensuing unparalleled wave of hatred for Israel and spike in antisemitic violence and murder instrumented by Islamists and other actors targeting Jews globally. They could not comprehend—more precisely, they refused to understand–that October 7 was an act of mass antisemitic terror that embodies the Islamist “dream of a world without Jews.”
The existential threat to world Jewry posed by Islamists is bolstered by the sheer number of Muslims they hope to enlist (1.5 billion). The Islamists market their Jew-hatred in a narrative of social justice, falsely tarring Zionists as colonialists and imperialists. They set moral traps, so that when confronted by their antisemitism, they deflect by calling the criticism Islamophobic, but all the while unabashedly pursuing Judeophobic genocidal goals. As confessed by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of Sunni Islam’s most influential scholars and unofficial chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood:
”Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. [. . .] He managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”
These annihilationist desires are shared by, and have common cause with, the Shiite theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Yet, the antizionists cling to the trope that Jews are responsible for their own persecution and detach the violence against Jews from its genocidal ideological sources.
On Purim, we recall the attempted extermination of Jews in Persia (now known as Iran) 3,000 years ago. When Mordecai, uncle of the Jewish Queen of Persia, heard of the planned genocide, he retreated in despair, tearing his clothes and putting on sackcloth and ashes. He then asked Queen Esther to intervene with King Ahasuerus (often identified as Persian Emperor Xerxes I) to spare her people, telling her (Esther 4:13), “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace”. In response, Esther implored Mordecai to discard the symbols of despair and called for Jewish unity (Esther 4:16). Then, she went forward and took action, resulting in the King’s decree permitting Jews to take up arms and defend themselves (Esther 8:11).
The rabbinical decision to include the Book of Esther in the biblical canon came during the century when Christianity started to become truly antisemitic in a theological sense. The rabbis chose it to show how Jews must muster all their ingenuity to avoid destruction, especially when they occupy a position of relative social and political vulnerability.
Modern assimilationist Jews recoil from the culmination of the Purim story (Esther 9:5): “Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” But why should Jews not feel or act violently toward those who would persecute or destroy them? Are they to be shamed as lambs led to slaughter if they fail to act (Isaiah 53:7)? Are they to submit and give permission to those who despise them, hold them of no account, and seek to destroy them? Our forbearers tell us, no! Jews are obliged to remember for all time (Esther 9:28; Hilkhot Megillah 2:18) that overcoming potential disaster requires unity and human action to defend each other.
As for the pocket Jews, the time has come to “unmask their imposture.” Action is needed to expose their unhinged ideological apparatus and fortify Jewish resolve and resilience. Doing so will dispel the self‑doubt nurtured among Jews by their relentless falsehoods and provide us and our children with the tools to counter them. On this there is no benefit in having thick skin. We are obliged to fight back and rage against their dreck.