A Safety of Nationalism? Antisemitism and the History of Zionism

Over seven months since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel’s defenders are increasingly desperate to delegitimize the growing movement for justice in Palestine, especially on college campuses. When anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews are targeted by their rhetoric, we often notice something surprising — much of the slander directed at us is deeply antisemitic. MAGA politicians, Christian nationalists and even many Jewish establishment leaders call Jewish dissenters “fake” Jews or “traitors.” We are called “weak,” and we are told we would have sold our people out to the Nazis. Right-wing Zionists ally with white Christian nationalists to attack protests, and claim that student encampments are controlled by George Soros or “outside agitators” — mobilizing the very antisemitism they claim to oppose! Meanwhile, Zionists insist that “we are not the Jews of trembling knees,” as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt put it in early May. “We will not flee — we will fight.” Beneath the hypermasculine bravado in statements like this, one senses a deep internalized shame — Jewish victims of antisemitism in the past, they seem to say, weren’t “manly” enough to fight back.

What we’re seeing today isn’t new. From the beginning, the Zionist movement inherited deep strains of antisemitism, misogyny and nationalism from its European milieu, and today, those tendencies burst to the surface as the movement goes on the offensive. A movement like this can’t keep Jews safe — only solidarity can.

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