Spellcheck has not kept up with the times, it keeps putting the hyphen in antizionism.
Before 1948, “anti-Zionism” was an idea Jews of different persuasions debated. This idea of having a Jewish state is no longer relevant – Israel exists.
To behave as though Israel is an idea to be debated as if there is an argument to be had, betrays a serious abandonment of our senses.
Antizionism is a genocidal hate movement. It is the Jew hate of our times, the Farhud my mother survived in Baghdad, the Holocaust six million of my people did not survive.
Antizionism celebrates, rationalizes, or simply ignores the October 7th massacres, rapes, horror the terrorists so proudly recorded and shared with the world on social media as they terrorized and murdered families in their homes. The terrified faces of young men and women being tortured at the Nova killing fields are seared in my brain.
Antizionism demands Israel cease to exist by not fighting back. Antizionism demands Jews disavow Israel. Antizionism feeds on anti-West “Zionism is racism” and “white colonial enterprise” Soviet propaganda slogans that keep spreading over all our universities and now high schools.
Skin color obsessed progressives in the West keep eating up the simplistic slogan, ignoring Israel’s demography which is anything but “white.” But Jew hatred has never been rational.
At a recent workshop for Jewish women, as the organizer expressed her sense of alienation as a zionist in the queer community, she was attacked by an avowed antizionist for being “divisive” and using the space as a “bully pulpit,” making her feel “unsafe.”
No one was ready for this, no one knew what to do. We have put up with this nonsense in progressive spaces for decades. We don’t know how to call out antizionism as a shameful, immoral, unacceptable position in Jewish circles.
I was first publicly attacked for supporting Israel at a Jewish Feminist Conference in the early 1980’s. A woman in the audience screamed at me how “If one Palestinian has to die for Israel to exist it must not (exist).”
Although it was and remains an insane statement, this line of thinking has persisted and grown into an acceptable position. Israel is not supposed to defend itself, no matter what.
My response at the time, forty-five years ago, was to create a “Zionist Support group.” We even had a theme song, Bob Dylan’s 1983 “Neighborhood Bully,” where Dylan exposes the hypocrisy of calling Israel the bully.
It doesn’t matter to progressives and a bizarre cadre on the Right, that the Islamic Regime of Iran and its proxies, like Hamas, have vowed the destruction of Israel and Jews at all cost.
Iranians have been paying the cost for forty years. Palestinians are paying the price as Hamas counts on the cost, the more dead Palestinians the better. They are not shy about saying so –the more their own people suffer and die the better for the so-called “Palestinian” cause.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamism Hamas embraces is devoted to sacrificing every single Palestinian for the eradication of Israel. Children are indoctrinated, raised to be human ammunition. Antizionists on campuses loudly accept, rationalize, amplify, and elevate their tactics, their terrorism is romanticized as resistance.
The October 7th barbaric massacres energized more, not less, hatred towards Jews. We witnessed the Washington D.C murders, the continuing attacks on Jews all over Europe, Canada, the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia. It’s a terrifying long list.
Antizionism propels the murders of Jews in our synagogues, schools, streets, Jews at Jewish gatherings, and of course anything that has to do with Israel.
Before we demand the rest of the world to understand and stigmatize antizionism, we Jews have to stop behaving as though antizionists within our Jewish communities mean well. Be it indoctrination, societal pressures, needing to feel cool, internalized antisemitism or just ignorance, antizionism is not benign.
We have to call out our own communities that have failed to address this very Jew hatred of our times. We have to stop tolerating antizionist spiritual leaders in synagogues and leaders in Jewish organizations. We have to understand antizionism is deadly to every single one of us. It is a poison to be rejected at all levels.
We have no choice but to reject what is being projected onto Israel and every individual Jew–That we are the bullies for supporting Israel and Israel is the bully for fighting terrorism, for refusing to be annihilated.
There is no separation between Israel the Jew and you and I the Jew – we are a People, and antizionism projects hatred of not only Israel, but each and everyone of us who identifies as a Jew.
For years I have tried to explain how Israel hatred is not “criticism” – it is so clearly a single obsession in circles that have no interest to “criticize” human rights abuses in China or Russia or Iran and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Where is the shame for such obvious racism?
For years I posted on social media “Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism.” For years I tried to explain. But it’s really not that hard to understand this call for our genocide. It is racism. It is immoral. It is sickening. It is unacceptable.
There is a world that wants to get rid of Jews. We have to mean “never again.” Antizionism is a genocidal hate movement and we are not giving it any more space. We have to step up to what is in front of us today.
Antizionism is a deadly call for the genocide of Jews in our time. Today it isn’t Auschwitz, Israel is the target.
Israel exists and half of the world’s Jews most of us refugees from lands that forced us out are Israelis today. Antizionism, the call to destroy Israel, is not some sort of “opinion.”
As with any cancer we cannot wait for antizionism to go away – It will not be eradicated unless we expose it as a totally unacceptable genocidal hate movement within and without the Jewish world.
Rachel Wahba is a San Francisco Bay Area based writer, psychotherapist and the co-founder of Olivia Travel. An Egyptian-Iraqi Jew, Rachel was born in India and grew up stateless in Japan. The many dimensions of her exile and displacement are a constant theme in her professional work as well as her activism as an advisory board member for JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa).