The language of intractability and the Gaza War: Conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is historically problematic and misses how much contemporary Israel has become a role model for ethno-nationalists worldwide

The Hamas attack from Gaza on southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and the military response of Israel's government by bombing Gaza have given rise to much popular talk in Israel, the United States, and Europe about the anti-Semitism of both those defending Hamas and those condemning Israel's subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza. The assertion is that these positions are entirely equivalent not just to hostility to the idea of a Jewish state (Anti-Zionism) but to the Jewish people tout court (Anti-Semitism). Indeed, something called the “new anti-Semitism” has been coined specifically to conflate the two (Klug, 2004). The Islamist Hamas frequently combines anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism in its public statements (e.g., Rosenberg, 2023) but any critic of Israeli policies is now burdened with the same charge. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is intractable in large part because of competing claims to the same territory: Israel versus Palestine. Using “better language” will not resolve it. But the language certainly makes resolution, such as effective partition or power sharing, more difficult. In particular, the confusion between the two terms turns the questioning of Israel's government's actions in Gaza into a collective guilt-trip for non-Jews about the long sad history of conspiracy theories about the Jewish people because of their existence as a discriminated-against minority scattered across places dominated by Christian and Muslim populations and governments. This situation is seen as having led from pogroms and expulsions, based on blood-libels and purported plots to undermine or overthrow existing regimes of rule, to the Holocaust. Now that the Jewish people have their own state, any criticism of Israel is then put down to anti-Semitism. Being Jewish and being Israeli are also thus fused.

Defining the terms

Yet, making the anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism linkage is inherently problematic (see, e.g., Beinart, 2023; Finkelstein, 2020; Neiss, 2021; Paul, 2023; Schneer, 2010; Serwer, 2023). It was not just that in Christian contexts Jews had “rejected Jesus” as the Messiah but that from the 1400s onwards, the very presence of Jews undermined the ethno-racial homogeneity of the developing European nation states. In this framing, it was the lack of their own real homeland that was always the primary stimulus to anti-Semitism, particularly once Jewish people were able to participate more openly in the countries in which they lived following the European Enlightenment (Finkelstein, 2020; Schneer, 2010). As the founders of the Zionist project in the late nineteenth century were well aware, it was European anti-Semitism that required the pursuit of a Jewish homeland (and not necessarily where it ended up) (Zonszein, 2019). Go somewhere else, anywhere but here. Modern anti-Semitism is not simply a social prejudice against Jews but a conspiracy theory about how the world operates (e.g., Rosenberg, 2022; Rothschild, 2023). Not only hatred of Jews as persons but their association with various liberal, cosmopolitan, and international political projects as an alien race was part of the original meaning of the term as coined in 1879 by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr who was himself a proud anti-Semite (Klug, 2004). This was how a term long associated with a language group (including Hebrew and Arabic) was attached to Jewish people more specifically. The historical record suggests that the sentiments the term now formalized had long preexisted its appearance. To the suspicion of how a widespread Diaspora could persist absent demonic powers was later added the dimension of a worldwide conspiracy in which Jews were indicted as agents against the interests of the particular nation states in which they lived. The Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s raised the specter of the disloyal Jew plotting with current enemies against the motherland. This was the anti-Semitism that eventually led to the gas chambers.

Today as in the past and worldwide, it is often populist-nationalists—and ironically those still with the most definite anti-Semitic proclivities—that are the most pro-Zionist. Their anti-Islam tendencies merely reinforce their pro-Zionism. Think of Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, and Salvini in Italy, just three leaders of contemporary populist-nationalist movements obsessed with how immigrants are destroying their ethnically homogeneous societies and who are known to speak of “the Jews” en bloc as a group with powers well beyond their numbers, including various “designs” to encourage immigration into their countries, and yet also claim to admire and support Israel. Not only, then, does associating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism miss this vital historical and continuing connection, it wrongly attributes all actions that can be construed as anti-Zionist to anti-Semitism. This is politically disabling because it makes any criticism of Israel's governments into claims about destroying all Jewish people everywhere (e.g. Confessore, 2023) This is not to say that anti-Zionism cannot sometimes stimulate anti-Semitism. This has been evident in some pro-Palestinian on-campus protests in the US and in the dramatic increase in incidents that seem incontrovertibly anti-Jewish in the United States and Europe such as swastikas painted on synagogues and other Jewish institutions (e.g., Chotiner, 2023a; Hortocollis and Saul, 2023; Schwabsky, 2023). The point is that the actual causal relationship historically is typically the reverse of that in this currently dominant interpretation.

After a brief discussion of contemporary ways in which the links between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism tend to be made, I turn to the overall intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I then focus on the history of linking the two phrases and make the argument for how much the dream of an entirely Jewish state and European anti-Semitism are related to one another. I conclude with the claim that shared political spaces are impossible when, as with much contemporary populist-nationalism, and not just in Israel, states are defined entirely in terms of the territorial sovereignty exercised by singular ethno-national groups.

The conflation

I begin with a strange and, at first sight, tangential story. Bear with me. In 2014, my friend and colleague James Anderson took me on a trip up the Falls Road in Belfast to visit a housing estate that had persisted as a Protestant enclave in a largely Catholic neighborhood. The most fascinating and surprising aspect about this to me was that the locals had placed Israeli flags on telephone poles around the edge of their enclave and that the surrounding neighborhood had responded with Palestinian flags. The sympathies of both sides were clear. They were stand-ins for their own conflict. Talking with the locals, the identification with Israel was down to their status as settlers who saw themselves as superior to the natives. But there was also a hint that they were also interlopers, as they certainly saw themselves in West Belfast: that their territorial claim was fragile. How could they reproduce their presence under challenging demographic and political conditions? The pro-Zionism was obvious. However, it was based on a dubious analogy. Some Ulster Protestants have defined themselves as one of God's Peoples, rather like the Jewish people and some other groups (including US Christian Nationalists) (e.g., Akenson, 1992). This claim allows a settler group to see itself as having a religiously mandated right to occupy a given territory whoever may be there already. Settler colonialism thus began inside Europe with the development of nation states, not just with colonies beyond its borders, and irrespective of to when the process is traced (e.g., Bartlett, 1993; Hobsbawm, 2012). Similar colonial histories are apparent elsewhere, as with China and Russia. It is in fact the sense of being embattled settlers identifying with a regime tough on its “natives” that really inspired the Belfast flag display. Beyond that, however, the history of discriminatory treatment and genocide in the Diaspora that has underpinned the purpose and legitimacy of Zionism is completely missing. Protestants did most of the discriminating in Belfast, at least until recently, not vice versa. Without the prior anti-Semitism (a history of discrimination of a geographically scattered as opposed to concentrated group), therefore, the direct analogy to pro-Zionism made by these settlers is nonsensical. It is the prior Jewish experience of discrimination and oppression based in the conspiratorial delusions of surrounding populations that justifies Zionism.

You would not know this from the ways in which the terminology has figured so overwhelmingly in popular reactions to the 2023 Gaza War. The dominant theme has been the interweaving of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism with the former causing the latter. So, on US university campuses, pro-Palestinian marches have been ascribed to anti-Semitism without much if any examination. Certainly the chanting of a phrase like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” can be construed as anti-Semitic, if it is interpreted to as an urge for the removal of the Jewish people living there. Alternatively, it can be viewed as simply an appeal for a political future for a group of people hitherto denied much of any sort of independent polity by its nearby Arab states as much as by Israeli governments. The first part of the slogan has also been used to claim a Greater Israel. And again, not far from where I live, a contretemps between two groups of competing demonstrators waving the two flags led to an elderly man's death as a result of a blow to the head. Whether this was intentional or a by-product of shoving remains unclear. But the local press and TV news interpreted this uniformly as an anti-Semitic incident. The elderly man, it turns out, was Jewish and he was waving an Israeli flag. Ipso facto, protesting against Israeli actions or in favor of the Palestinian “cause” is defined as anti-Semitic.

The presumed intractability of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is longstanding. Obviously, both sides lay claim to more or less the same territory that until 1948 had never been that of any recognizable state in the modern European sense of the word. Much of the population was Arab, both Muslim and Christian, but there were also other indigenous groups including Jews and Druze. The close association of the territory with major symbolic places of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, has made the conflict even more fraught because of the sacred overtones that can be ascribed to the conflict. Both sides bring not just competing territorial demands but competing rationales about territorial sovereignty and the right to rule over it (Kahn, 2008). The longer the conflict has endured, the greater the intractability has become. In the hands of recent Israeli governments, Zionism itself has increasingly changed from being a claim to a state for Jews to the claim to being a Jewish state (Trom, 2023). In other words, Israel has gone from being a refuge state to being an ethno-nationalist state. Some of this is probably down to the rising importance in Israeli politics of a messianic religious Zionism without roots in the original more secular Zionism of the late nineteenth century (Graubart, 2023). But it also reflects the efforts of Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians to weld together a Jewish population that has become increasingly diverse in terms of places of origin and religious practices (Iran, the Arab World, Ethiopia) by posing the Palestinians as fanatical opponents of Jewishness more than as of Israeli political domination. As a result, the Palestinian enclaves have become increasingly hollowed out by creeping colonization, as in the West Bank, or by penning people up into compounds, such as Gaza (Agnew, 1989; Chazan, 2023; Chotiner, 2023b; Filieu, 2014). Intractability, then, has an important ontological basis (see Gelvin, 2021). It cannot just be negotiated away. But how we discuss the conflict does matter. Israeli and Palestinian identities can change in response to political exhaustion and internal discord (between secular and ultra-orthodox Israelis and the Islamist Hamas and the secular PNA, for example). The language used also matters because it can encourage simplistic oppositions that then reify the “sides” to the conflict as fixed opponents rather than potential interlocutors. As much the more powerful actor, Israeli governments have been particularly culpable in keeping the conflict seething partly through their use of the anti-Semitism curse as an excuse for their failures in the face of obvious injustice (Shulman, 2023; Graubart, 2023).

The conflation of the terms versus their actual history

The conventional wisdom is that pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism are incompatible. The clear presumption is that Israel and the Jewish people wherever they are constitute an identity. Consequently, in terms of what has become the standard story, that it is simply beyond reason that anti-Semitism and Zionism are compatible one with the other. Recall that anti-Semitism is not just a social prejudice against Jewish people but a conspiratorial view of their worldwide political role. So, it is common in the mainstream media and in academic discussions in the United States and elsewhere, including in Israel, to line up anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Indeed, they are utterly conflated (Beinart, 2023). It is not that they cannot sometimes be related, as mentioned previously. What is most remarkable, however, is how much they are not.

Today and historically pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism have had a much stronger relationship. They are much more common than the presupposed identity between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Beinart (2023) notes a provocative example of their putative coexistence from recently in the United States: “Last November [2022], the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) awarded Donald Trump its highest honor, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion. Nine days later, the former president dined with two of America's most prominent anti-Semites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes. Noting the proximity of the two events, The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner asked ZOA president Morton Klein an uncomfortable question: Could Trump be among those ‘people who, for whatever reason, have sympathies with Israel but don’t like Jews?'” Klein dismissed the proposition. Then Beinart pushes the case further. Trump's support for Israel, well established during his term of office, and his clearly expressed hostility towards US Jews as a group, are not contradictory but stem from the same impulse: “He admires countries that ensure ethnic, racial, or religious dominance. He likes Israel because its political system upholds Jewish supremacy; he resents American Jews because most of them oppose the white Christian supremacy he's trying to fortify here.” Even with a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish-convert daughter, Trump sees no contradiction in supporting Israel more or less unconditionally and calling out American Jews as agents of “globalism” and of plots to encourage unrestricted immigration into the United States. When neo-Nazis at a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “The Jews will not replace us” (representing the idea that Jews are behind the “replacement” of “true” Americans of northwest European heritage with myriad immigrants) the message was as clear as day. Trump nodded and winked in their direction. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu remained silent (Field, 2017).

The lack of a contradiction between anti-Semitism and pro-Zionism is a deep-seated phenomenon. Henry Ford became a major spokesman for anti-Semitism in the US in the 1920s (Schulman, 2023), and this was not unimportant in subsequent decisions to keep Jewish refugees from Hitler's Nazi regime out of the United States and headed elsewhere. British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, who provided in his 1917 Declaration the promissory note for the future creation of the state once the Ottoman Empire was defeated, had at best conflicting stereotypes about Jews but pointedly “did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society” (Schneer, 2010). He is lauded these days in Israel as an heroic figure. Yet, his enthusiasm for Zionism was as the alternative solution to the “Jewish question.”

More importantly, and this is a point made by numerous commentators on the history of Zionism such as Finkelstein (2020) and Schneer (2010), this synthesis is not then simply that of Trump or other contemporary ethno-nationalist politicians. Zionism's birth in nineteenth-century Europe was the direct outcome of widespread anti-Semitism based on fears about Jewish cosmopolitanism undermining ethnic and religious purity and has since attracted support from exactly the same populist-nationalist quarters. So, Israel serves as an example of what they would like to be: ethno-national states without messy ethnic minorities like Jews, Muslims, assorted immigrants or others with identities that do not fit into a certain specific mold. If only we could expel them or pen them up like in Gaza (e.g., Savage et al., 2023).

Some examples of contemporary anti-Semitism-/pro-Zionism and populist-nationalism

Considerable recent empirical research across Europe and the United States shows convincingly that hostility to Israel and hostility to Jews as persons are actually inversely correlated (Hersh and Royden, 2023; Kovacs and Fischer, 2021). Xenophobia is what binds hostility to Jews and pro-Zionism together. It is the Jews around here versus the ones over there. If only they would only all go there. Typically this sentiment is much stronger on the right of the political spectrum that increasingly defines itself in nationalist-sovereigntist terms. If the left is often more openly anti-Zionist it is also much less anti-Semitic. In the United States in particular, however, with its relatively large Jewish population, any desire to make the country more like Israel also comes up against the fact that many Jews are among the most prominent opponents of the Christian nationalism that has taken over the Republican Party alongside Donald Trump (Pew Research Center, 2019; PPRI, 2023). “Our” Jews are then a problem. They are popularly taken to represent the “globalism” against which Trump and his minions such as Steve Bannon rage (e.g., Zimmer, 2018). In one of the final ads of his 2016 presidential election campaign, as Beinart (2023) notes: “Trump filled the screen with images of three Jews—[George] Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein—while the narrator warned of ‘global special interests’ that ‘don’t have your good in mind.’” Indeed, George Soros and his Open Society Foundations show up repeatedly from Hungary to the United States in populist-nationalist accountings of what threatens their heritage and values.

This is all part of a pattern in contemporary politics worldwide: “Dark conspiracies, once confined to the nutcase fringes of politics, are posited openly. ‘There's something going on’ provides a rhetorical vacuum into which listeners can give their own answer with whatever threat or fear of challenge or difference from immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Islamist terrorists, the European Union, Chinese economic competition, and so on that they care to choose. The collective memory of where this conspiratorial mindset took the world in the 1930s has been lost” (Agnew and Shin, 2020: 5). In the United States this can lead to some of the most rabidly anti-Semitic politicians, such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene, encouraging the censure of colleagues, such as Rashida Tlaib, for questioning US government support for the Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza (e.g., Luce, 2023). The burgeoning identification of the US Republican Party with Christian nationalism is based on a mythic history from which Jews and other non-conforming ethnic groups are excluded (Jones, 2023). Steve Bannon, one of the leading propagandists for this ideology, combines an anti-Semitism based in claims about a globalist conspiracy with a militantly pro-Israel position (Mackey, 2016; Zimmer, 2018). One of the invited speakers at the biggest US pro-Israel demonstration in Washington DC in the wake of the Gaza War on 14 November 2023 was a Christian nationalist pastor (John Hagee) who is also rabidly anti-Semitic but of the “Christian Zionist” variety: once the Land of Israel is completely Judaized, the Messiah will come again but for the “right” Christians, not for the Jews (Carnell and Van Pykeren, 2023). Many Israeli politicians, particularly on the settler colonial right, are happy to receive this support. As Buruma (2023) says: “Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the even more radical members of his cabinet have a great deal in common with the right-wing nationalist figures in Europe and the United States with whom they have aligned.”

Beyond American shores, and in France, the European country with the largest domestic Jewish and Muslim populations, the tendency in the media and among politicians is to blame anti-Semitic incidents on Muslim antipathy toward Jews rather than the fact that intense anti-Jewish sentiment correlates in the population at large, unlike for most Muslims, with a pro-Israel outlook (e.g., Piser, 2018; Porter and Alderman, 2023). Across Central and Eastern Europe a similar pattern prevails. Long before the Gaza War anti-Semitism was increasing and was accompanied by a growing affiliation with Israel. As explained by Krastev (2019), this is not just a superficial realpolitik, even though it has that aspect to it, for Israel benefits from “friends” inside the European Union and they from Israel's status as a dynamic economy with friends in Washington DC. Rather, populist leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary see in Israel a model for their own future: “Zionism in many respects was the mirror image of the nationalistic—and often anti-Semitic—politics that dominated Central and Eastern Europe between the two world wars. What attracts Eastern European populists to Israel today is their old dream realized: Israel is a democracy but an ethnic democracy; it defines itself as a state for Jews in the same way East Europeans imagine their countries as a state for Poles, Hungarians or Slovaks.” Now that Jews are nationalists, their historic cosmopolitanism no longer poses a threat. Shorn of their diffuse presence, in Israel they become a role model.

The tragedy of the nation state

Popular politics and political philosophy are heavily invested in a world divided up into nation-hyphen-states. Political legitimacy and democratic participation are said to rest on its dual foundations of nation and state: the first a self-evident social group with a common claimed identity and the second an apparatus of territorialized rule. Yet, worldwide, this combination has rarely occurred without massive ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, suppression of minority rights, and so on. Our political idol has clay feet (Agnew, 2021; Cocks, 2014). Nation statehood for some often requires its elimination for others. This has been the long history of the so-called United Kingdom, for example, but the story of settler colonialism and ethnic displacement is more pervasive worldwide. The creeping expropriation of Palestinian territory by Israeli settlers in the West Bank thus has a prehistory in the way in which British settlers incorporated parts of Ireland and British governments depopulated the Scottish Highlands. From this perspective, the Zionist state is a perfect replication of the idealized European form projected into the rest of the world. This is the tragedy of the nation state: Israel's nation statehood requires the systematic occlusion of a potential Palestinian one for its continuing claim to be a nation state (Amir, 2017). The tragedy of Israel and the Palestinians alike is the tragedy of the (ethno-) nation state. They are both the inheritors of its exclusionary territorialized logic.

It is in this context that the Gaza War is best understood. Hamas was, as Halevi (2023) says, “the weakest of our enemies—and because the [Israeli] army failed so miserably” thus, and as a consequence for the nation state, it is now better “to be condemned [for the massive reprisals in Gaza] than to be pitied.” Pity is for the losers in nation statehood, like the Palestinians. This is plausibly defensible in the framework of the miseries visited upon Jewish people during the Holocaust but now that there is a nation state claiming to represent all Jews it is inherently problematic. Yet, Netanyahu's government failed to protect Israel's borders and its citizens (e.g., Benn, 2023; Mazower, 2023; Yadlin and Evental, 2023). There is nothing special then about an Israeli nationalism based on the fear and loathing of others, however, awful and terrifying the agents of Hamas might be. Ultra-Sunni Hamas is indeed the nihilistic outcome of the catastrophic failures of Arab nationalism (why ally now with heretical Shia-Iran of all countries except because of abandonment by neighboring Arab states?) and for 14 years the policy of Israeli governments has been to keep Hamas in power in Gaza to divide the Palestinians as a whole and to keep Prime Minister Netanyahu in office (Raz, 2023). At the same time, Israel has itself become increasingly divided politically over the balance of authority within its institutions (particularly the role of the Supreme Court) amid a rising conflict between those Israelis who see it as at least potentially a multi-ethnic state or with a neighboring Palestinian one (e.g., Azizi, 2023; Shulman, 2023) and those, such as the current National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. He views national identity entirely in racial terms (Buruma, 2023). This “Jewish racism” borrows from right-wing nationalist figures in Europe and the United States (most of whom are also anti-Semitic) and feeds into the Hamas narrative about fighting to the death about who should control the same territory.

The Gaza War is unlikely to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict to anyone's satisfaction (e.g., Cook, 2023). As long as US governments underwrite Israeli “sovereignty” with massive arms transfers, its basic security is more or less guaranteed. Most tragically, though, and underlying the casual attitude towards killing so many people in Gaza, the racist thrust of Israel's current government is also entirely at odds with the Jewish cosmopolitan tradition from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also increasingly out of sync with a world that requires increased global governance if it is to survive the many physical and economic challenges it faces in the years to come. This does not require rejection of the territorial state as such (e.g., Boyarin, 2023) but it does require detaching the territorial apparatus of rule from identification with a singular ethnic-national group. For both sides the conflict is increasingly going to be about the draw of the past versus the call of the future—and not just in Israel-Palestine but also wherever Israel is now the role model for ethno-nationalists (Agnew, 2023).