Anti-Zionism

Early Jewish anti-Zionism , the only Jew then in a senior British government position, stating his opposition to the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration, which he described as "antisemitic in result" of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland wrote in 1938 that "the Zionists regard themselves as second class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second class citizens," and that "Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism." In Europe From the beginning, there was resistance to Zionism and Theodor Herzl's call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Opposition came from diverse sources: many Orthodox rabbis held that a Jewish state before the messiah was against divine will; assimilationist Jewish liberals feared Zionism threatened efforts at integration and citizenship in European states; and various left-wing Jewish movements, such as the Bund and Autonomists, promoted alternative forms of Jewish identity. In Western Europe, established Jewish communities often preferred loyalty to their nation-states over Jewish particularism. Some Reform rabbis removed references to Zion from liturgy, while others criticized Zionism as unrealistic. By contrast, the Mizrachi movement represented religious Zionist support, though more traditionalist groups like Agudat Yisrael opposed cooperation with secular Zionists. In the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya curtailed Zionist activity as part of its campaign against "Jewish bourgeois nationalism". Outside Europe lawyer, journalist, and poet Jacob Israël de Haan became active against Zionism after having migrated to Palestine. In 1924, Haganah member Avraham Tehomi assassinated de Haan in Jerusalem on the orders of leader Yitzhak Ben-Zvi before de Haan was due to go to London to advocate against Zionism. In regions outside Europe and North America, Zionism was often met with disinterest and regarded as a foreign ideology. In Morocco, for example, it was introduced by Europeans in port cities and met with skepticism by the local Sephardic populations, who regarded it as irreligious and not concerned with their interests. It was later actively promoted by envoys from the Zionist fundraising organizations Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod. ''L'Union Marocaine, a francophone Jewish newspaper, spoke for the associated with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, who saw Zionism as an obstacle to assimilation with the Europeans, and challenged L'Avenir Illustré'', which published Zionist propaganda. Rural Moroccan Jews lived in relative isolation in their villages and were not very involved with Zionism until the Jewish Agency and Mossad LeAliya actively recruited them for migration by in the 1950s and 60s. There was no significant migration of Moroccan Jews to Palestine before the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. According to Joel Beinin, "because most Egyptian Jews were relatively secure and comfortable during the 1930s, few saw the point of risking their position by ostentatious support for Zionism", and those who did express support for Zionism rarely migrated to Palestine themselves. Early non-Jewish Arab anti-Zionism who in 1899 wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl arguing against Zionism. "... in the name of God," he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone." Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the late Ottoman period. In 1899, compelled by a "holy duty of conscience", Yousef al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the Ottoman Parliament, wrote a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France to voice his concerns that Zionism, which he called a "natural, beautiful and just" idea, would jeopardize the friendly associations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. He wrote: "Who can deny the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!" But Khalidi suggested that "geographically, [it had] no hope of realisation"; since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should find another place for the implementation of their political goals: "in the name of God", he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone." According to Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Scholch and Dominique Perrin, Yousef Khalidi was prescient in predicting that, regardless of Jewish historic rights, given the geopolitical context, Zionism could stir an awakening of Arab nationalism uniting Christians and Muslims. Kahn showed the letter to Theodor Herzl, who on 19 March 1899 replied to Khalidi in French, arguing that both the Ottoman Empire and the non-Jewish population of Palestine would benefit from Jewish immigration. As to Khalidi's concerns about the non-Jewish majority population of Palestine, Herzl replied rhetorically: "who would think of sending them away?" Rashid Khalidi notes that this was penned four years after Herzl had confided to his diary the idea of spiriting the Arab population away to make way for Jews. The Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his 1905 The Awakening of the Arab Nation, warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland. Subsequently, the Palestinian Christian-owned and highly influential newspaper Falastin was founded in 1911 in the then Arab-majority city of Jaffa and soon became the area's fiercest and most consistent critic of Zionism. It helped shape Palestinian identity and nationalism. newspaper suggests Zionist insincerity is protected by British complicity, with Zionism as a crocodile under the protection of a British officer telling Palestinian Arabs: "don't be afraid!!! I will swallow you peacefully...". Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the (Jewish) Secretary of State for India. Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish. The majority Muslim and Christian population constituting 94% of the citizenry only had their "religious rights" recognized. Given that Arab notables were almost unanimous in repudiating Zionism, and incidents such as the Surafend massacre (perpetrated by Australian and New Zealand troops serving alongside the British) stirred deep resentment against Britain throughout the area, the British soon came to the conclusion, which they confided to the Americans during the King–Crane Commission, that the provisions for Zionism could only be implemented by military force. To this end, the British Army calculated that a garrison of at least 50,000 troops would be required to implement the Zionist project on Palestinian soil. According to Henry Laurens, uneasiness among British troops stationed in the region over the task of ostensibly supporting Zionism, something that clashed with their customary paternalistic treatment of colonial populations, accounted for much of the anti-Zionist sentiment that UK military personnel based in Palestine expressed. Anti-Zionist reactions to the Balfour Declaration American approval of the Balfour Declaration came about through the secret mediation of the antisemitic anti-Zionist Colonel House with President Woodrow Wilson, bypassing Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Wilson's recognition alarmed many American Jewish leaders who viewed the U.S. as their "new Zion." At the Paris Peace Conference, 299 rabbis voiced opposition to the notion of a Jewish Palestine, and Lansing thought that Zionism contradicted Wilson's principle of self-determination. This moment helped establish an anti-Zionist tradition in the US State Department. Once the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) began to implement the Declaration, both sides had reason to accuse the authorities of bias. Several contemporary sources credit the notion that English administrators were sympathetic to Arabs and diffident about Jews. One Zionist complaint was that several of the British Mandatory administration's higher functionaries tolerated anti-Zionist and even antisemitic policies. Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionist figures such as Jacob Israël de Haan told the Mandate authorities that Zionists did not represent the entire Jewish community. The British press was often critical: the Northcliffe Press was openly anti-Zionist, Lord Beaverbrook opposed the Mandate, and complaints were made about the heavy burden of governing land with competing national interests. British anti-Zionism and antisemitism was also tinged with anti-Bolshevism, as Jews were accused of having played a major role in the Russian Revolution. Palestinians sought to discredit Zionism by associating it with communist infiltration, which the British took seriously. The 1920 Palin Commission investigation into the anti-Zionist riots at Nebi Musa found that there was a widespread perception among Arabs, reflected among British residents and officials, that Zionists are "arrogant, insolent and provocative"., March 1920, during the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. The crowd of Muslim and Christian Palestinians are shown outside Damascus Gate, Old City of Jerusalem.The Marxist wing of the Zionist movement, Poale Zion, fractured in the 1920s when some members came to believe that Zionism would be discriminatory to Palestine's Arab majority. Some factions of Poale Zion gravitated toward communism. In 1924, the Comintern recognized the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which retained some Zionist traces, and Palestinian Arabs joined the party. The General Jewish Labor Union of Eastern Europe promoted doykayt (hereness), and dismissed Zionism as "separatist, chauvinist, clerical and conservative". The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) called Zionism "a colonial project". Many Jewish communal organizations in Germany and Italy advanced assimilationist anti-Zionism, emphasizing loyalty to their states. Religious anti-Zionism Some leaders within Orthodox Judaism outside of the United States expressed opposition to political Zionism because the Zionist movement espoused nationalism in a secular fashion and used "Zion", "Jerusalem", "Land of Israel", "redemption", and "ingathering of exiles" as literal rather than sacred terms, endeavoring to achieve them in this world. According to Menachem Keren-Kratz, the situation in the United States differed, with "most Reform rabbis and laypeople repudiat[ing]" Zionism while most of the Orthodox supported it. Elaborating on the work of David N. Myers, Jewish historian Jonathan Judaken wrote in 2013 that "numerous Jewish traditions have insisted that preservation of what is most precious about Judaism and Jewishness 'demands' a principled anti-Zionism or post-Zionism." This tradition dwindled in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, but Judaken saw it as still alive in religious groups such as Neturei Karta and among many intellectuals of Jewish background in Israel and the diaspora, such as George Steiner, Tony Judt, and Baruch Kimmerling. ==Anti-Zionism after World War II and the creation of Israel==

There was a shift in the meaning of anti-Zionism after the events of the 1940s. Whereas pre-1948 anti-Zionism was against the hypothetical establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, post-1948 anti-Zionism had to contend with the existence of the State of Israel. This often meant taking a retaliatory position to the new reality of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The overriding impulse of post-1948 anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else. show trial against 14 Jewish members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), including many high-ranking officials, known as the Slánský trial. Most of those targeted were ardent anti-Zionists, but they were accused of participating in a Zionist conspiracy against the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. There were also anti-Zionist show trials in Hungary and Romania (such as that of Mișu Benvenisti) in the same period. , 1960 East Germany's government was passionately anti-Zionist. From the 1950s through the 1970s, East Germany supplied Israel's neighboring Arab states with weapons. Immediately after the Six-Day War in 1967, East German Communist Party chairman Walter Ulbricht claimed that Israel had not been threatened by its neighboring Arab states before the war. He continually compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In 1967–68, Poland's Stalinist ruling party, the Polish United Workers' Party, launched an "anti-Zionist campaign", purging Jews from public life on the grounds that they were "Zionists". At least 13,000 Poles of Jewish origin emigrated in 1968–1972 after being fired from their positions and various other forms of harassment. The armed forces were also purged in the name of "anti-Zionism". Two waves of mass Russian-Jewish immigration to Israel, the Soviet Union aliyah and 1990s post-Soviet aliyah, took place from the 1970s onward. As late as 1983, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public was launched in the USSR to combat supposed Zionist propaganda. According to Anthony Julius, writing in 1989, "Soviet anti-Zionism was credibly considered the greatest threat to Israel and Jews generally... This 'anti-Zionism' survived the collapse of the Soviet system." In the 21st century, according to Izabella Tabarovsky, factions within American academia have supported boycotts of Israel using language that is Soviet in origin. Arab and Palestinian anti-Zionism , 2021 In a retrospective analysis of Arab anti-Zionism in 1978, Yehoshafat Harkabi argued, in a view reflected in the works of the anti-Zionist Russian-Jewish orientalist Maxime Rodinson, that Arab hostility to Zionism arose as a rational response in the historical context to a genuine threat, and, with the establishment of Israel, their anti-Zionism was shaped as much by Israeli policies and actions as by traditional antisemitic stereotypes, and only later degenerated into an irrational attitude. Anthropologist of conflict Anne de Jong asserts that direct resistance to Zionism from the inhabitants of historical Palestine "focused less on religious arguments and was instead centered on countering the experience of colonial dispossession and opposing the Zionist enforcement of ethnic division of the indigenous population." Until 1948, according to Derek Penslar, antisemitism in Palestine "grew directly out of the conflict with the Zionist movement and its gradual yet purposeful settlement of the country", rather than the European model vision of Jews as the cause of all of humankind's ills. According to Anthony Julius, anti-Zionism, a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, and Palestinian nationalism are separate ideologies; one need not have an opinion on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to be an anti-Zionist. One Arab criticism of Zionism is that Islamic–Jewish relations were entirely peaceful until Zionists conquered Arab lands. Arab delegates to the United Nations also claimed that Zionists had unethically enticed Arab Jews to come to Israel. According to Gil Troy, neither claim is historically accurate, as Jews did not have the same rights as Muslims in these lands and had periodically experienced violent riots. "Zionism as racism" United Nations debate In the 1960s and 1970s, Soviets and Americans interpreted the Arab–Israeli conflict as a proxy war between the Soviet–Arab alliance's totalitarianism and the Western world's democracies. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 necessitated a diplomatic response by the Soviet–Arab alliance. The result was resolutions in the Organization of African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s. This culminated in November 1975 in the United Nations General Assembly's passage by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions) of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared, "Zionism is a form of racism, and racial discrimination". The passage elicited, in the words of American U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "long mocking applause". U.N. representatives from Libya, Syria, and the PLO made speeches claiming that the resolution negated previous resolutions calling for land-for-peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel's U.N. representative, Chaim Herzog, interpreted the resolution as an attack on Israel's legitimacy. African U.N. delegates from non-Arab countries also resented the resolution as a distraction from the fight against racism in places like South Africa and Rhodesia. The decision was revoked on 16 December 1991, when the General Assembly passed UN General Assembly Resolution 4686, repealing Resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 delegations absent. Thirteen of the 19 Arab countries, including those engaged in negotiations with Israel, voted against the repeal, and another six were absent. All the ex-communist countries and most of the African countries that had supported Resolution 3379 voted to repeal it. Islamic perspectives demonstration in Qom, Iran Some Muslims believe the 1948 Palestinian expulsions justify jihad against Israel. Some view the State of Israel as an intrusion into what Sharia defines as Dar al-Islam, a domain they believe should be ruled by Muslims, reflecting its historical conquest in the name of Islam. In his 1980 book Islam and the Problem of Israel, Palestinian-American philosopher Ismail al-Faruqi argues that from an Islamic perspective Zionism is incompatible with Judaism and has failed to provide security or dignity for Jews. He contends that life in Israel is defined by conflict, militarization, and dependence on international powers, making the state the "greatest failure" of Zionism. Al-Faruqi calls for the dismantling of Zionism, suggesting that Israeli Jews who renounce it could live as an "ummatic community" within the Muslim world, following Jewish law under rabbinic courts within an Islamic framework. Left-wing politics , Palestine will be free," displayed at an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians during the Gaza war at Harvard University, May 2024. According to New York University social and cultural theorist Susie Linfield, one of the most pressing questions facing the New Left after World War II was "How can we maintain our traditional universalist values in light of the nationalist movements sweeping the formerly colonized world?" During the late 1960s, anti-Zionism became part of a collection of sentiments within far-left politics, including anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism. In this environment, Zionism became a representation of Western power. Philosopher Jean Améry argued that this "Zionism" was merely a straw man redefinition of the term, used to mean world Jewry. The far-left Israeli politician Simha Flapan lamented in 1968, "The socialist world approved the 'Holy War' of the Arabs against Israel in the disguise of a struggle against imperialism. ... Having agreed to the devaluation of its own ideals, [it] was ready to enter an alliance with reactionary and chauvinist appeals to genocide." In 1969, West German left-wing anti-Zionists placed a bomb in a Jewish Community Center. A series of anti-Zionist aircraft hijackings took place in the 1970s with left-wing groups' support. The most famous of these was the 1976 Air France hijacking perpetrated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in coordination with the Revolutionary Cells. The hijackers released all the non-Jewish hostages without Israeli citizenship, but kept all the Israeli citizens (including those with dual citizenship) and Jewish people for ransom. The separation of Jewish non-Israelis and Israelis from non-Israelis, which, in essence, meant separating out the Jewish passengers generally, shocked many on the German left. To Joschka Fischer, the way the hijackers treated Jews opened his eyes to the violent, Nazi-like implications of anti-Zionism. A few years later, the Revolutionary Cells and another anti-Zionist group attempted to firebomb two German movie theaters that were showing a movie based on the hijacking. , 2017 Several advocacy groups that explicitly support Palestinian solidarity also oppose Zionism, viewing it as a form of colonialism. These include organizations from within the Jewish community, including Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States and Jews for Justice for Palestinians in the United Kingdom, as well as broader activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Some secular Jews, particularly socialists and Marxists, continue to oppose the State of Israel on anti-imperialist and human rights grounds. Left-wing Jewish organizations that have opposed Zionism include NION in Canada and Jews Against Zionism in the UK. Some oppose it as a form of nationalism, which they argue is a product of capitalism. The First National Jewish Anti-Zionist Gathering in the US in 2010 and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) see anti-Zionism as an integral part of their anti-imperialism. IJAN describes itself as a socialist, antiwar, anti-imperialist organization, and calls for "the dismantling of Israeli apartheid, return of Palestinian refugees, and the ending of the Israeli colonization of historic Palestine". In the 2000s, leaders of the Respect Party and the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom met with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah at the Cairo Anti-war Conference. The result of the 2003 conference was a call to oppose "normalization with the Zionist entity". During the 2010s and 2020s, left-wing politics in Western countries saw a significant increase in anti-Zionist sentiment as it became a more mainstream position. This was partially driven by a shift from seeing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a conflict between states to seeing it as a struggle against settler colonialism and apartheid. According to Pew polling, views of Israel deteriorated among U.S. Democrats after the Gaza war, with unfavorable views increasing from 53% to 69% between 2022 and 2025. Christian anti-Zionism Although there is major Christian support for Zionism, Christian anti-Zionism has appeared in both Protestant and Catholic contexts, with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) criticizing Zionism in political terms and the Catholic Church opposing it on theological grounds. Haredi Judaism Most Orthodox religious groups have accepted and actively support the State of Israel, even if they have not adopted "Zionist" ideology. Most religious Zionists hold pro-Israel views from a right-wing viewpoint. The main exceptions are Hasidic groups such as Satmar Hasidim and smaller Hasidic groups. Many Hasidic rabbis oppose the creation of a Jewish state. In 1959, the Satmar Hasidic group's leader, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, published the book VaYoel Moshe, which expounds an Orthodox position for anti-Zionism based on a derivation of halacha from an aggadic passage in the Babylonian Talmud's tractate Ketubot 111a. ==Allegations of antisemitism==

, Scotland on January 10, 2009 Anti-Zionism spans a range of political, social, and religious views. According to Rony Brauman, a French physician, former president of Médecins sans frontières (Doctors without Borders), and the director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester, there are three kinds of perspectives on Zionism, pro and contra: a non-antisemitic anti-Zionism, an antisemitic anti-Zionism, and an antisemitic Zionism. Shany Mor writes that before 1948, anti-Zionism was not antisemitic, but since 1948, some amount of antisemitism has been at work. Critics of the concept argue that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is inaccurate, sometimes obscures valid criticism of Israel, and trivializes antisemitism. Jewish right to a state Scholars such as Dina Porat and Emanuele Ottolenghi have said that anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it denies Jews the right to national self-determination. By contrast, Peter Beinart argues that "barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot". The 1970 UN Friendly Relations Declaration upheld all people's right to self-determination, but cautioned that did not necessarily imply the creation of independent states. Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt conceived Jewish self-determination in the form of a binational state that would give Palestinians and Jews equal rights. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, drafted in 2021 by more than 200 scholars of Jewish studies, says that supporting a one-state solution or denying Jews the right to a state is not inherently antisemitic: "It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants 'between the river and the sea,' whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form." The American Jewish Committee has said that denying Jews the right to a state is antisemitic, but also that it is not antisemitic for Palestinians to seek a single binational state. Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt told The New Yorker that denying Jews a state is discriminatory and therefore antisemitic, but when asked whether it is antisemitic for Palestinians to want a one-state solution, he said he was "not talking about that". Equating and correlating anti-Zionism with antisemitism Jewish supporters of Zionism and Israeli personalities have repeatedly cited a 1966 entry in ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary'' that gave anti-Zionism as one of the core meanings of antisemitism as well as an apocryphal statement by Martin Luther King Jr. making the same claim in a letter that has not been found. In 1973, Abba Eban wrote that one of the chief tasks of dialogue with the gentile world "is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism." In 1978, Fred Halliday, arguing against the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, wrote that disavowals were constantly required. In the early 2000s, it became increasingly commonplace for Israel's defenders to regard criticism of Zionism and Israel as tantamount to, interchangeable with, or closely related to antisemitism. In 2007, Tony Judt considered the merging of the two categories in polemics relatively new. A 2003–04 European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia report aroused intense controversy over aspects of its provisory definition of antisemitism, which many regarded as ambiguous in blurring distinctions to the point that the boundary between the two concepts became porous. Scholars who equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism include Robert S. Wistrich, former head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who argues that since 1948, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have merged and that much contemporary anti-Zionism, particularly forms that compare Zionism and Jews with Hitler and Nazi Germany, has become a form of antisemitism. In 2016, Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) brought together 70 scholars from 16 countries to discuss the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: For instance, publicly voiced calls for the end of Israel are becoming more prevalent at a time when antisemitism is on the upsurge in Europe and elsewhere. How, if at all, are these phenomena related? What does Zionism signify to its present-day opponents? What motivates them to fixate, often passionately, on what they see as the singular "injustices" and even "evil" of Zionism and Israel? Of what irredeemable sin do they find Israel uniquely guilty? Why, alone among all the world's countries, is Israel judged to be unacceptable as a state and unworthy of a future? No other nation, after all, is targeted for elimination. Why is Israel? In a 1969 essay, he argues that the anti-Zionists of his time may not have ill intentions against all Jews, but their intentions are irrelevant. Their philosophy has a centuries-old pedigree beginning with the false charge of deicide and culminating in Nazi propaganda. Améry did not expect anti-Zionists of his time to take an unbending pro-Israel stance in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; he merely beseeched them to think critically, use common sense, and judge Israel fairly. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a Working Definition of Antisemitism, one that was subsequently officially recognized by various governments, foremost among them the U.S. and France, which endorsed the equation of certain manifestations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Civil rights attorney Kenneth L. Marcus, a pro-Israel advocate and former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, identifies four main views on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, at least in North America.(p. 845–846) Marcus also cites a 2006 study of 5,000 Europeans that concluded that antisemitic views correlate among respondents with hostility to Israel, a result that nevertheless does not mean one cannot be critical of Israeli policies without being antisemitic. In 2010, Oxford University Press published Anthony Julius's book Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. In it, Julius claims that the borders between anti-Zionism and antisemitism are porous. He concedes that it is possible to be in conflict with a Jewish ideology without discriminating against Jews, but argues that anti-Zionists cross the line so often as to make the distinction meaningless. Professor Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, College Park wrote: "One distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel ... was its indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel's enemies spread lies about Zionism's racist nature and were willing to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of antisemitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel's victory in June 1967." Anti-Zionists responded to the war's outcome by describing Israel in terms familiar from antisemitic stereotypes. In December 2023, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Palestinian rights advocates called the resolution a "dangerous" move aimed at limiting freedom of expression and diverting attention from the Gaza war. French President Emmanuel Macron has said on multiple occasions that anti-Zionism is equivalent to antisemitism. He has opposed unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, while affirming France's responsibility for the Holocaust and commitment to combating antisemitism. View that the two are not interlinked Several comparative surveys in Europe and the U.S. have failed to find a statistical correlation between criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism: • Political scientist Peter Beattie, in an analytical overview of the specialist literature that used polling data in several countries to test the purported link between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, found no necessary empirical correlation, cautioning that assertions of such an inherent connection are calumnious. He concludes, "Most of those critical of Israeli policies are not anti-Semites. Only a fraction of the US population harbours anti-Semitic views, and while logically this fraction would be overrepresented among critics of Israel, the present and prior research indicate that they comprise only a small part. Inaccurate charges of anti-Semitism are not merely calumny, but threaten to debase the term itself and weaken its connection to a very real, and very dangerous, form of prejudice." • The German sociologist Werner Bergmann's analysis of empirical polling data from Germany concluded that whereas right-wing respondents critical of Israel tend to have views overlapping with classical antisemitism, left-wing interviewees' criticisms of Israel do not involve criticism of Jews. Former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Antony Lerman argues: The anti-Zionism equals antisemitism argument drains the word antisemitism of any useful meaning. For it means that to count as an antisemite, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has the right to exist as a state, without having to subscribe to any of those things which historians have traditionally regarded as making up an antisemitic worldview: hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews generated communism and control capitalism, belief that Jews are racially inferior and so on. Moreover, while theoretically allowing that criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate, in practice, it virtually proscribes any such thing. Shifting positions on the Zionist / Anti-Zionist spectrum Before World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, the debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists was largely an internal Jewish affair; the questions it sought to answer involved Jewish self-definition and the proper use of political power in the Jewish diaspora. Once it became clear to most Jews that all of Zionism's alternatives failed to prevent the Holocaust, the debate largely subsided in the Jewish community. Most prewar Jewish anti-Zionists died in the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel, or became disillusioned by the Soviet Union. Arendt took Israel's side in the Arab–Israeli conflict and rejoiced at its victory in the Six-Day War. Far-right politics Anti-Zionism has a long history of being supported by individuals and groups associated with Third Position, right-wing, and fascist (or "neo-fascist") political views. A number of militantly racist groups and their leaders are anti-Zionist, such as David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and various other Aryan / White-supremacist groups. In these instances, anti-Zionism is usually also deeply antisemitic, and often revolves around conspiracy theories discussed below. Conspiracy theories '' The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came to be exploited by Arab anti-Zionists, although some have tried to discourage its usage. The Protocols itself makes no reference to Zionism, but after World War I, claims that the book is a record of the Zionist Congress became routine. The first Arabic translation of The Protocols was published in 1925, contemporaneous with a major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. A similar conspiracy theory is the belief in a powerful, well-financed "Zionist lobby" that clamps down on criticism of Israel and conceals its crimes. Zionists are able to do this in the United Kingdom, according to Shelby Tucker and Tim Llewellyn, because they are in "control of our media" and "suborned Britain's civil structures, including government, parliament, and the press." Anti-Zionism is a major component of Holocaust denial. According to one strain of Holocaust denial, Zionists cooperated with the Nazis and are guilty of the crimes committed during the Holocaust. Deniers see Israel as having somehow benefited from what they call "the big lie" that is the Holocaust. Some Holocaust deniers claim that their ideology is motivated by concern for Palestinian rights. ==See also==