Anti-Zionism Is Worse than Anti-Semitism

When New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg offered idiotic rationalizations for why anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitism, I duly reported on it. Links here and here. When a supposedly distinguished writer blames Israel for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel and seems willing to lay down predicates that would justify Palestinian terrorism, it is worth underscoring.

A few days ago Goldberg’s fellow Times columnist Bret Stephens answered her ignorant screed. Back in the day Stephens edited the Jerusalem Post. He lived in Israel and is very well informed about the Israeli war against Islamist terrorism. He is well placed to respond to Goldberg, though he never mentioned her name in his Saturday column. In so doing, he was observing proper journalistic decorum… which I, for one, find acceptable. You do not denounce your fellow columnists by name in the newspaper that prints their ideas.

Examine Stephens’ argument. He emphasizes Hezbollah, a murderous terrorist organization operating out of Southern Lebanon. It’s explicit goal is to exterminate all the world’s Jews, beginning with those who live in Israel. One notes that Hezbollah is supported by Iran and that Iranian terrorism received a serious boost when Barack Obama decided to remove all economic sanctions against it and to give it a plane load of cash.

Anyway, Stephens writes:

In 2002, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, was said to have given a speech noting that the creation of the state of Israel had spared his followers the trouble of hunting down Jews at “the ends of the world.” The Lebanese terrorist group has prominent apologists in the West, and some of them rushed to claim that Nasrallah had uttered no such thing.

Except he had. Tony Badran of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tracked down the original recording of the speech, in which Nasrallah carries on about “occupied Palestine” as the place appointed by Allah for the “final and decisive battle” with the Jews. By “occupied Palestine,” he wasn’t talking about the West Bank.

Sometimes anti-Zionists are — surprise! — homicidal anti-Semites, too.

Among the prominent apologists for Palestinian terrorism in the west is British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Given the ineptitude of current Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, the advent of a Corbyn government becomes more threatening by the day.

Stephens then suggests that while readers of the New York Review of Books-- which is obviously code for the New York Times-- have an abstract theoretical view of anti-Zionism, Israelis understand it to be a threat to exterminate them and their home state:

All this is to say that Israelis experience anti-Zionism in a different way than, say, readers of The New York Review of Books: not as a bold sally in the world of ideas, but as a looming menace to their earthly existence, held at bay only through force of arms. It’s somewhat like the difference between discussing the effects of Marxism-Leninism in an undergraduate seminar at Reed College, circa 2018 — and experiencing them at closer range in West Berlin, circa 1961.

Actually, it’s worse than that, since the Soviets merely wanted to dominate or conquer their enemies and seize their property, not wipe them off the map and end their lives. Anti-Zionism might have been a respectable point of view before 1948, when the question of Israel’s existence was in the future and up for debate. Today, anti-Zionism is a call for the elimination of a state — details to follow regarding the fate befalling those who currently live in it.

When you try to empathize with anti-Zionists you are empathizing with people who hold eliminationist views of Jews and of Israel. Stephens is showing that his colleague Goldberg does not know how to think.

Anti-Zionism is ideologically unique in insisting that one state, and one state only, doesn’t just have to change. It has to go. By a coincidence that its adherents insist is entirely innocent, this happens to be the Jewish state, making anti-Zionists either the most disingenuous of ideologues or the most obtuse. When then-CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill called last month for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and later claimed to be ignorant of what the slogan really meant, it was hard to tell in which category he fell.

To be denied membership in a country club because you’re Jewish, or driven from your ancestral homeland and sovereign state for the same reason? If anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are meaningfully distinct (I think they are not), the human consequences of the latter are direr.

The same can’t be said for that class of scolds who excel in making excuses for the wicked and finding fault with the good. When you find yourself on the same side as Hassan Nasrallah, Louis Farrakhan and David Duke on the question of a country’s right to exist, it’s time to re-examine every opinion you hold.

The last sentence is obviously directed at Michelle Goldberg. Strangely, at a time when a Louis Farrakhan is legitimizing anti-Semitism in the United States, Stephens respects the sensitivities of Times readers and adds the name of a no account like David Duke.

Surely, Duke is a bad actor. And yet, he has nothing like the following of a Farrakhan or even of a Jeremiah Wright. Keep in mind, Farrakhan is closely allied with his Chicago buddy, Wright. They have shared the stage at rallies. They have a great deal in common. Their influence far outpaces that of the pathetic David Duke, a man whose national prominence only rises when leftists tell themselves that the real problem is the radical right.