How pro-Zionism became the only respectable form of antisemitism Submitted by Joseph Massad on Wed, 12/17/2025 - 13:49 By conflating Israel with Jews, antisemitism is legitimised by rendering Jewish people as a whole responsibility for the state's actions Members of the anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish group Neturei Karta rally against the genocide in Gaza outside the US consulate in Tel Aviv on 29 July 2025 (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP) Off Pro-Zionism is today's respectable form of antisemitism . It is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionists everywhere as a boon to the self-declared Jewish state. By contrast, anti-Zionism, long espoused by most Jews and gentiles until the end of the Second World War, and by many leftist Jews and gentiles since, is depicted by pro-Zionists as antisemitism incarnate. Indeed, any position critical of Israel or its ongoing genocide in Gaza , or that even mildly supports internationally recognised Palestinian rights, is now equated with antisemitism. In the wake of the Sunday massacre in Sydney, which killed at least 15 people during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach , Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, for the bloodbath, citing his government's decision to recognise a non-existent Palestinian state last September. Instead of holding himself and his own government responsible for rising global antisemitism - as they consistently portray Israeli war crimes against Palestinians as a defence of Jews worldwide rather than as acts aimed at safeguarding Israeli settler-colonialism - Netanyahu insists that the recognition of a Palestinian state "pours fuel on the antisemitic fire ... emboldens those who menace Australian Jews and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets". Because Israel claims authority over Jews everywhere, despite never having been elected to represent or speak for them, antisemites accept this claim and attack non-Israeli Jews as complicit in crimes for which the Israeli government alone is responsible. Most anti-Zionists, on the other hand, reject Israel's claim to represent all Jews. They insist that Israel does not speak for Jews as a collective, and that its crimes and achievements belong to Israel and its government, not the Jewish people. It is precisely this distinction that pro-Zionist discourse seeks to obscure. Selective outrage When pro-Zionists celebrate Israeli invasions and war crimes as "Jewish" achievements, Israel and its supporters cheer them on. When anti-Zionists, however, denounce those same invasions and crimes as the actions of the Israeli government, and decidedly not of the Jewish people, Israel and its pro-Zionist supporters label them "antisemites". US President Donald Trump, despite a record of remarks widely condemned as antisemitic, continues to be celebrated by Israel's leadership The selective application of this charge is evident in the recent condemnations of right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens , whose previous pro-Israel positions were celebrated as a form of philosemitism. Their subsequent about-face in condemning Israel's genocide in Gaza, however, is labelled "antisemitism". Whatever the merits or demerits of these accusations, the fact remains that neither Carlson nor Owens has radically changed their views on Jews - what changed was their position on Israel. By the same token, actual antisemitism expressed by those who are unwaveringly pro-Zionist is not merely tolerated but actively indulged. US President Donald Trump , despite a record of remarks widely condemned as antisemitic, continues to be celebrated by Israel's leadership and its most powerful supporters . He was hailed in the Israeli parliament as a "colossus", a "giant of Jewish history" and the leader "most deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize in history". But there is perhaps no clearer illustration of how antisemitism is ignored when aligned with Israel than Netanyahu's public congratulations to Chile's new far-right, pro-Israel president-elect, Jose Antonio Kast, an admirer of the Pinochet dictatorship and the son of a former Nazi official who fled to South America after World War Two. Zionism's roots No matter how much the anti-Jewish arguments that underpinned Protestant Zionism since the 16th century, and Jewish Zionism since the 19th century, are exposed, along with the alliances and cooperation that the Zionist Organization (ZO) has fostered with antisemites since its founding in 1897, pro-Zionists never tire of falsely asserting that it is anti-Zionism, not pro-Zionism, that is motivated by antisemitism. While most anti-Zionists , Jews and gentiles alike, have historically been motivated by anti-colonialism, support for democracy, and time-honoured Orthodox Jewish beliefs, some anti-Zionists have indeed espoused antisemitism. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza Yet it remains unequivocally true today, as throughout the entire history of Protestant and Jewish Zionism, that the principal promoters of pro-Zionist ideology - unlike proponents of anti-Zionism - have consistently been antisemites. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the ZO, was accused of antisemitism before and after he established it at the end of the 19th century. His antisemitism is not contested by serious academic scholarship, except by pro-Zionist ideologues. Herzl himself explained in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State  (Der Judenstaat) that the Zionist project shared with antisemites the desire to empty Europe of its Jews and send them to a colonial territory outside Europe. He identified Jews in explicitly antisemitic terms as a " bourgeois people ", and insisted that Hebrew should not be the language of "the State of the Jews", nor should Yiddish , which he derided as "a ghetto language and a miserable, stunted jargon", or as the "stealthy tongues of prisoners". He preferred German. In his diaries, Herzl wrote that antisemitism was more than understandable: it was "salutary" and "useful to the Jewish character", constituting an "education of a group by the masses". He added that through "hard knocks", "a Darwinian mimicry will set in". Herzl's plays, written before he founded the ZO, were criticised by Jewish contemporaries for their Christian portrayals of Jews. He also frequently deployed antisemitic epithets, referring to Jewish critics as "Jewish vermin" or " Jewish Mauschel ". Herzl famously declared in The Jewish State that "the governments of all countries scourged by antisemitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want". He later noted in his diaries: "The antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies." It was for this reason that Lucien Wolf , the British Jewish advocate for Jewish civil rights, described Zionism as early as 1904 not as a response to antisemitism, as some of its proponents depicted it, but as "the natural and abiding ally of antisemitism and its most powerful justification". If, on the basis of this record, judging Herzl as antisemitic is deemed "tendentious", then surely those making such a judgment must be operating with a definition of antisemitism entirely different from that employed by most scholars. Acceptable antisemitism Unlike the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has never been accused of making anti-Jewish remarks, the US president makes them constantly , reflecting a long tradition of antisemitic pro-Zionism. Trump's condemnation of unscrupulous bankers last July as "Shylocks and bad people" was dismissed as a slip based on his alleged ignorance about the antisemitic nature of the reference to Shakespeare's Shylock. This was hardly an isolated lapse by the self-described "least antisemitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life". Speaking in 2019 at the Israeli American Council in Florida to what he described as "a room full of Jewish people", Trump complained about American Jews who "don't love Israel enough", adding: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all ... But you have to vote for me - you have no choice." When Trump told US Jews at a White House Hanukkah party in December 2018 that his vice president had great affection for 'your country', Israel did not object Jewish groups were appalled by his antisemitic remarks. Moreover, when Trump told US Jews at a White House Hanukkah party in December 2018 that his vice president had great affection for "your country", Israel did not object. Nor did it object to Trump telling a group of American Jews in 2019 that Netanyahu is "your prime minister". The cry of pro-Trump white supremacists at the 2017 rally in Charlottesville was "Jews will not replace us". Trump notoriously defended the rally, declaring that there were "very fine people on both sides". It was a white supremacist antisemite who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, murdering 11 Jews. While members of Pittsburgh's Jewish community blamed Trump for spreading hatred and objected that his planned visit to their city would further inflame tensions, Netanyahu made no such accusations against the president. Unlike Albanese, whose government's broadly pro-Israel stance has nevertheless been delegitimised by Israel because it recognised a future Palestinian state to be administered by Israel's Palestinian Authority collaborators , Trump is regarded as Israel's most powerful supporter globally and, of course, by his own account, "the least antisemitic" person in the world. Anti-Jewish racism Netanyahu, like Zionist leaders since Herzl, has never flinched from allying with veritable antisemites, provided they are firmly pro-Israel. Curiously, when the European Union adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 's working definition of antisemitism in 2016, which included "manifestations...targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity", and effectively folded anti-Zionist positions and criticism of Israel into its definition, it was the right-wing Austrian government - which included members of a neo-Nazi party - that strongly pushed for its adoption. In Hungary, Netanyahu went so far as to rebuke Israel's ambassador in Budapest for issuing a statement expressing mild concern over Prime Minister Viktor Orban's anti-Jewish racism. Acting on Netanyahu's orders, the Israeli foreign ministry promptly retracted the statement. Orban, for his part, later refused to arrest Netanyahu, a wanted man by the International Criminal Court, during his more recent visit to Hungary. Germany's support for Israel's far-right alliance shatters its 'denazified' facade Read More » In Ukraine , Israel has armed and supported neo-Nazi militias, most notably the Azov Battalion. Its leader, Andriy Biletsky, declared in 2010 that "the historic mission of our nation...is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led untermenschen". In Germany, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), currently leading in the polls , has alarmed the country's Jewish community. Critics have accused AfD of promoting neo-Nazi ideas, describing it as "a home for antisemites and right-wing extremists". At the same time, the party strongly supports Israel. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler's last finance minister, told The Jerusalem Report in 2017 that "Israel could be a role model for Germany" as a country that "makes efforts to preserve its unique culture and traditions". This admiration echoes the rhetoric of US neo-Nazi demagogue Richard Spencer, who has referred to his mission as a "sort of white Zionism". Israel, he added , is "the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, and it's one that I turn to for guidance". Israeli leaders have never condemned such declarations. Displaced blame The ongoing pro-Zionist adoption of antisemitic arguments, echoing the positions of successive Israeli governments since 1948 and conflating Israel with Jews, is a deplorable antisemitic move. By identifying Israel as the representative of all Jews, responsibility for the Israeli state's crimes is displaced onto the Jewish people as a whole. Bondi Beach attack: How western allies are enabling Netanyahu's grotesque logic Jonathan Cook Read More » As of this writing, responsibility for the murderous attack in Sydney appears to lie with supporters of the Islamic State - a proscribed terror organisation that has overwhelmingly targeted and killed Muslims. The perpetrators have been identified as an Indian national and his Australian son. Seemingly unaware that the man who disarmed one of the shooters and saved many Jewish lives while being shot several times in the process was a Syrian Muslim Australian man named Ahmed al-Ahmed , Netanyahu described his actions as an example of " Jewish heroism ". In Netanyahu's worldview, a Syrian man whose own country is being pounded by Israel almost daily, killing many Syrian civilians, including children, and stealing their lands, would be an unlikely candidate for "Jewish heroism". That Ahmed clearly distinguishes between Australian Jews and the Israeli government is the one thing Netanyahu is incapable of understanding. This is why he has placed the blame on Australia's prime minister, who, unlike the pantheon of Christian and Jewish Zionist leaders and the self-described "least antisemitic person that you've ever seen", has reportedly never made an anti-Jewish remark in his life. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Antisemitism Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0