The Israeli government’s campaign equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has achieved considerable success. In May 2016, the International Alliance for Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA) decided to add “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” to its definition of anti-Semitism.
French President Emmanuel Macron made similar comments in 2017 and again on Feb. 21 of this year during a meeting with the leadership of CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France), the umbrella organization of the French Jewish community, as reported in Al-Monitor by Rina Bassist. Macron reiterated the identification of anti-Zionism with modern-day anti-Semitism and pledged that his government would define anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbin, leader of the Labor Party in the United Kingdom, came in for sharp criticism when his party initially refused to adopt the IHRA's definition, criticism that eventually led to a change in Labor’s position and adoption of the definition in September 2018.
Israel wants anyone seeking its friendship to identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. I am not sure, however, that this is the right battle for Israel to wage, and I have a hard time understanding how this formula benefits the country. The Zionist idea envisioned all the Jews of the world gathering in Israel, but not everyone who rejects this idea is an anti-Semite.
In historical terms, the determination equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is wrong. Anti-Semitism was the driving force for the creation of the Zionist movement in the second half of the 19th century by European Jews who felt they were being stifled, driven out of various professions or relegated to quotas in other fields, put on trial for crimes they did not commit and subjected to vitriol by the political right and left. The anti-Semites of the 19th century were not (necessarily) enemies of Zionism, and to some extent, they even found a common denominator with the new movement: They wanted Europe cleansed of Jews, while Zionism urged Jews to leave Europe. Thus, the haters and the hated cooperated on occasion.
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