The Distinction We Keep Losing

The Distinction We Keep Losing

Most people I know who care about Israel and Palestine agree on more than they think they do. They believe Jewish people deserve safety after a history that gives that need real weight. They believe Palestinians deserve to live without occupation, blockade, or permanent statelessness. Almost no one I've ever talked to, across the political spectrum, disagrees with either of those sentences.

What they disagree about is a word: antisemitism. And I think the disagreement is mostly a misunderstanding worth clearing up.

Two Different Things

Antisemitism is hatred of Jewish people because they are Jewish - a prejudice with a long and murderous history, and one that is very much alive today, including on the political left. It deserves to be named and opposed everywhere it appears, without hedging.

Anti-Zionism is something else: a political position about a state, not a people. It's the view that the modern state of Israel, as a Jewish-majority ethnostate established in a land with an existing Arab population, was the wrong solution to a real problem - or that its current form and conduct have failed the people it governs. You can hold that view about Israel the way you can hold a critical view of any nation's founding or policies, without it implying anything about Jewish people as a group. Many people who hold this view are themselves Jewish.

The trouble is that these two things get treated as the same thing constantly, and I don't think that's always an honest mistake. Collapsing "I oppose this state's policies" into "I hate this people" is a very effective way to end a conversation before it starts. It lets serious criticism get waved away as bigotry, and it does something worse: it cheapens the word antisemitism itself, so that when real antisemitism shows up, people are primed to hear it as just another instance of the same tired conflation.

If you take nothing else from this piece, take that distinction. It's the whole hinge.