Allegations of antisemitism within Zionism
According to the anti-imperialist Jewish-American academic Amy Kaplan, Jewish history "shows that anti-Semitism and pro-Zionism have never been mutually exclusive." Kaplan believes that Zionist advocates "for a Jewish state enlisted stereotypes of Jews –wittingly or not–to further their cause." She lists Theodor Herzl as an early Zionist who appealed to antisemitic European leaders who believed that the "Jewish Question" would be solved by sending European Jews to Palestine. Edwin Montagu, an ardent anti-Zionist and the sole Jewish member of the British Cabinet, was "passionately opposed to the [Balfour] declaration on the grounds that...it was a capitulation to anti-Semitic bigotry, with its suggestion that Palestine was the natural destination of the Jews..." Writing for International Socialist Review, Annie Levin argues that the writings of Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and other European Zionists were "littered with descriptions of European Jews as parasites, social diseases, germs, aliens"...and she also argues that these antisemitic views "flowed quite logically from Zionism’s basic assumptions about Jews. Zionists accepted the 19th century view that anti-Semitism–in fact all racial difference–was a permanent feature of human nature. For this reason it was pointless to struggle against it." Levin claims that Jews have often been "hostile to Zionism" because the movement "called for a retreat from the struggle against anti-Semitism." Writing for Jacobin, Sarah Levy claimed that early Zionists "partnered with a rabidly antisemitic British ruling class to secure funding for their colonial project in Palestine" while they also aided British attempts to "defeat left-wing “International Jews” (such as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, among others)" because "Churchill understood that revolutionary socialists, organizing against racist pogroms in their own countries, posed a threat to the ruling class’s need to divide and rule its population, and so understood the benefit to supporting a “Jewish movement” that could counter this logic of antiracism and internationalism."
According to the political theorist Michael Walzer, early Jewish anti-Zionists in the 19th-century were often Orthodox Jews who believed that Zionism was a heretical ideology. These Orthodox Jews believed that the return of Jews to Eretz Israel and the establishment of a state would only occur after the Messiah came. Until the arrival of the Messiah, Orthodox Jews believed that Jews must accept living in diaspora and defer to non-Jewish rulers while waiting for redemption. Zionists, who were usually secular, despised the perceived passivity of Orthodox Jews to the point that they were often referred to as antisemites by Orthodox anti-Zionists.
The Austrian-Jewish anti-Zionist writer Karl Kraus attacked Zionism in general and in his book Eine Krone für Zion (A Crown for Zion), he attacked Herzl in particular, making the claim that antisemitism is the essence of the Zionist movement. Kraus referred to Zionist aims as antisemitic and he also called Zionists "Jewish antisemites", asserting that "Aryan antisemites" and Zionist Jewish antisemites share the same goal of expelling Jews from European culture.
Richard S. Levy, a scholar of antisemitism, has written that "Antisemites certainly found Zionism useful" because Zionism provided "antisemitic Zionists" with a justification as to why Jewish people who were living in the diaspora should be expelled from the societies which they had lived in for centuries. Coerced emigration to Palestine appealed to antisemites because it provided them with a "solution to the Jewish question".
The Zionist writer Bari Weiss has stated that there is a history of antisemites endorsing Zionism, listing Arthur Balfour as an example of an antisemitic Zionist.
In 1988, the Middle East Solidarity group published Why Zionism is Anti-Semitic: Jewish Socialist Critiques of Zionism.
In an article titled Anti-Semitic Zionists, the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote that the "avowed aim of Zionism is to ingather all the Jews in the world in the Jewish State. The avowed aim of the anti-Semites is to expel the Jews from all their countries. Both sides want the same." Avnery wrote that Zionism has been antisemitic since its foundation, citing Herzl's cooperation with the antisemitic Czarist regime in Russia. Far from a "unique chapter", Avnery asserts that "many attempts have been made to enlist anti-Semites to help in the implementation of the Zionist project" throughout history.
Steven M. Cohen, sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has written that antisemitism is found among right-wing Zionists. Cohen believes that "Many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews." Todd Gitlin, sociologist at Columbia University, believes that right-wing Zionism and antisemitism "have the same soul...they rhyme" because both are variants of ultra-nationalism.
Joseph Massad, a Palestinian academic at Columbia University, has stated that "It is Israel's claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all." Massad states that "Jewish opponents of Zionism" understood that gentile Europeans "shared the precepts of anti-Semitism" and that Zionists and antisemites held a shared belief in "the expulsion of Jews from Europe." Massad believes that most pre-War European Jews resisted the "anti-Semitic basis of Zionism", while European countries typically supported "the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism".
Europe
France
The French-Jewish journalist Alain Gresh has stated that he has "always been convinced that some pro-Zionists are anti-Semitic." Gresh noted that the antisemitic right-wing politician and Nazi collaborator Xavier Vallat believed that "Jews would never integrate into France and that they had to go to Israel." Gresh also notes that the European far right "consider Israel an ally", as demonstrated by the "case of the anti-Soros anti-Semitic billboard campaign in Hungary."
In 2018, the Jewish French Union for Peace (UJFP), a pro-BDS Jewish anti-Zionist organization, was denied funding from the French government after producing video clips that claimed that Zionism is antisemitic. One member claimed that "it’s a form of anti-Semitism" for the Israeli government to claim to speak on behalf of all Jews, while another member said they were "revolted by the fact that an Israeli leader can come to France and tell French Jews: ‘you have a second country.'"
Germany and Austria
The philosemitic, Zionist Antideutsche movement in Germany and Austria has been accused of targeting left-wing German Jews and Austrian Jews. According to Haaretz writer Ofri Ilany, "Incensed Germans, some of them descendants of Nazis, don't hesitate to attack Jewish and Israeli left-wingers" and "besmirch Jews" and violate their freedom of expression "under the banner of the struggle against anti-Semitism." The left-wing Austrian-Jewish activist Isabel Frey believes that "Jews are fetishized in this pseudo-tolerant way and assumed to have unified interests" by the political mainstream in Austria and Germany. According to Frey, "Jewish leftists are being accused of antisemitism by non-Jewish leftists. To me, these accusations are a way of denigrating our Jewish identities, of saying that we’re the “wrong kind” of Jew. I keep asking myself, are these accusations themselves a kind of antisemitism?" Michael Sappir, an Israeli-born German-Jewish anti-Zionist activist affiliated with Jewish-Israeli Dissent Leipzig, has said that the experience of being an anti-Zionist Jewish leftist in Germany can be disempowering and "very isolating" because the German left is often associated with the Antideutsch movement. According to Sapir, Jewish leftists and other pro-Palestinian voices are marginalized in part because "Antideutsch groups have managed to bully them into silence" and that Jewish leftists "felt very insulted by the idea of calling this struggle “antisemitic.”
Poland
During the 1920s and 1930s, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland was vocally critical of antisemitic Zionism. The Polish government during this period was a staunch supporter of the Zionist movement, while also adopting increasingly antisemitic domestic policies. The Polish government actively encouraged emigration to Mandatory Palestine because it decreased the population of Polish Jews. The Bund produced election campaign materials including the terms "antisemitic Zionists" and "Zionist antisemites", arguing that the Zionist promotion of emigration and cooperation with the Polish government strengthened antisemitic forces within Polish society. The historian Emanuel Melzer believes that the Polish government's attitudes towards Zionism and Jewish emigration "implied that Jews were superfluous, alien, and even a destructive element" and that this attitude "might have had its repercussions on a part of the Polish population's attitude towards the Jews during the war", but acknowledges that the Shoah itself was not caused by the intensification of Polish antisemitism between 1936 and 1939.
In 1925, Polish Zionist members of the Sejm capitalized on governmental support for Zionism by negotiating an agreement with the government known as the Ugoda. The Ugoda was an agreement between the Polish prime minister Władysław Grabski and Zionist leaders in eastern Galicia, including Leon Reich. The agreement granted certain cultural and religious rights to Jews in exchange for Jewish support for Polish nationalist interests; however, the Galician Zionists had little to show for their compromise because the Polish government later refused to honor many aspects of the agreement. During the 1930s, Revisionist Zionists viewed the Polish government as an ally and promoted cooperation between Polish Zionists and Polish nationalists, despite the antisemitism of the Polish government.
Norway
The Norwegian far-right domestic terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is both an antisemitic neo-Nazi and a strong supporter of the State of Israel. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has described Breivik's ideology as an "extreme version" of "Zionist anti-Semitism", writing that Breivik is "antisemitic, but pro-Israel" because in Breivik's view the Israeli state is a "first line of defense against Muslim expansion". Žižek notes that Breivik believes that France and the United Kingdom have a "Jewish problem" due to their large Jewish populations, whereas the rest of Western Europe doesn't, describing this as Breivik's belief that "Jews are OK as long as there aren't too many of them" living in diaspora. The journalist Michelle Goldberg has referred to Breivik as an "ardent Zionist" who "has nothing but contempt for the majority of Jewish people", arguing that his "embrace of Israel...far from being unique, is just the latest sign" that "in European politics, fascism and an aggressive sort of Zionism increasingly go together." Goldberg cites Islamophobia as a commonality between the State of Israel and "European white nationalists".
Israel
Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionists in Mandatory Palestine sometimes criticized secular Jewish Zionists as "antisemitic Zionists" for interfering with Orthodox practice. Rabbi Baruch Meir Klein, President of the New York Board of Rabbis, claimed that the "Goyyim in America let us be Jews. They do not ruin our Talmud Torah. They do not reform our schools...They do not ridicule Jews who go to Mikveh or Kloppen Hoyshaness...It is enough for me to be in Galuth with Goyyim. I have no need to be [in Eretz Israel], in Galuth under Jews who are antisemitic Zionists."
Atalia Omer has written that in Israel "young activists increasingly recognize that their safety depends on linking the fight against antisemitism to other social justice struggles", mentioning the Israeli activists who have "taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s regime and many others such as B'Tselem for years have decried the weaponization of antisemitism." Omer believes that these "critical voices are silenced within the entrenched ideological regime that the IHRA represents as it coalesces with white nationalist and Christian Zionist antisemitism."
Paraguay
According to the Palestinian academic Joseph Massad, the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner launched antisemitic campaigns against Paraguayan Jews who criticized his regime while also supporting the State of Israel, which provided his regime with weapons.
United States
After World War II, during the second Red Scare, some members of Congress called for the British government to open Mandatory Palestine to Jewish emigration, hoping that Jewish refugees (suspected to be Communists) would migrate to Palestine rather than to the United States.
The historian David N. Myers has written that "Leading white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor liken their movement to Zionism, seeing it as a model for the kind of monoethnic purity they favor in [the United States]." Myers states that the "combination of pro-Israel and antisemitic sensibilities" is common within American politics due to the combined influences of the "Christian evangelical Right with its end-game theology", "archly conservative" Catholics, and the political ideology of Donald Trump. Atalia Omer has noted "convergences between white supremacist violence and exclusionary politics which often comes in the form of Zionist antisemitism", citing Richard Spencer's "white Zionism" as an example.
Right-wing evangelical Christians in the United States are often vocally Zionist while also holding antisemitic attitudes towards Jews. Conservative Christians are amongst the strongest supporters of the State of Israel in the United States. With 7.1 million members, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is the largest Zionist organization in the United States. Many Christian Zionists believe that the Gathering of Israel is a prerequisite for the final coming of the Christian messiah, after which a portion of Jews will convert and the majority of Jews will be killed and condemned to Hell. Ben Lorber and Aidan Orly, writing in Religion Dispatches, have described Christian Zionism as "one of the largest antisemitic movements in the world today". Ha'aretz writer Joshua Shanes condemned CUFI founder John Hagee for promoting an "apocalyptic and deeply antisemitic worldview" and promoting some of the "most dangerous myths of the modern era." Hagee has promoted financial conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family controlling the federal reserve, claimed that Hitler was sent by God to murder Jews who refused to emigrate to Israel, and described the Antichrist as a "half-Jew homosexual." Slavoj Žižek has also described John Hagee, as well as Glenn Beck, as examples of Christian fundamentalist "anti-Semitic Zionists." Žižek believes that Zionism itself has "paradoxically become anti-Semitic" because the movement promotes hatred of anti-Zionist Jews by constructing a figure of Jewish anti-Zionism "along anti-Semitic lines." Žižek describes the way that Jewish anti-Zionists are maligned as "Self-hating Jews" by Zionists as an example of Zionist antisemitism.
Zionist leaders and organizations in the United States have been widely criticized, particularly by the Jewish left, for allegedly downplaying the severity of antisemitism in the United States and for alleged complicity with the Trump administration in order to pursue pro-Israel, Zionist causes. Atalia Omer, a professor of religion at the University of Notre Dame, has written that "Israel's silence on white nationalism and its implicit or explicit condoning of antisemitic Zionists" has decisively convinced many American Jews that the Israeli government is not keeping Jews safe and is actively endangering Jews living in the diaspora. Omer cites the "moral shock" of Israeli silence on white nationalist antisemitism for discrediting the "Zionist monopoly over the narrative of Jewish survival." Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), has been criticized for being "notably silent" about antisemitism during the Trump era. ZOA was deluged by messages from outraged supporters following ZOA's support for Steve Bannon and Klein's statement that he could not be an antisemite because "He's the opposite of an antisemite. He's a philo-semite." +972 Magazine's Natasha Roth-Rowland believes that a "rise of Zionist antisemitism as a standard behavior among large swaths of the GOP and its ecosystem has become a defining feature of the American far right’s worldview and modus operandi."
In 2017, Judith Butler denounced antisemitic manifestations of Zionism within the Trump administration. Butler named Breitbart and Steve Bannon as purveyors of "antisemitic Zionism", writing that Bannon is both a "strong Zionist" and that "his antisemitism apparently does not get in the way of his support for the Israeli state, and that his supporters in the Israeli government do not seem to mind." Butler argued that right-wing antisemitic Zionism is a manifestation of white supremacy, whereby the white Ashkenazi ruling class in Israel makes alliances with right-wing politicians in other countries on the basis of shared anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinianism, and Islamophobia.
In 2019, the Russian-born Jewish-American journalist Masha Gessen described Donald Trump as a "pro-Zionist anti-Semite". Gessen noted that Trump's administration had pursued pro-Israel policies while also spreading Jewish stereotypes, such as the speech Trump delivered at the Israeli American Council National Summit where he declared that "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." Calling Trump's comments "plain, easily recognizable anti-Semitism", Gessen believes Trump views American Jews as "alien beings whom he associates with the state of Israel."
The liberal journalist Peter Beinart believes that Zionist antisemitism is likely on the rise in the United States and that it is unclear that Zionists are less likely to harbor antisemitic sentiments compared to anti-Zionists. According to Beinart, "It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it."
During the Summer of 2020, the Palestine Solidarity Collective (PSC) at York University published comments on social media claiming that Zionism is an antisemitic political movement.
During the January 6 United States Capitol attack, several insurrectionists waved Israeli flags, sparking commentary from multiple organizations that described a link between Zionist ideology and antisemitic right-wing extremism. The Adalah Justice Project tweeted that "the forces in the US who seek to maintain white supremacy are inspired by Israel's racism and vice versa", which was retweeted by Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The SJP chapter at the University of Illinois at Chicago also tweeted that the presence of Israeli flags "shouldn’t be surprising, as far right ideologies all stem from the same form of racist hatred." These comments were condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as "anti-Israel". Jewish Voice for Peace maintained that "Antisemitic Zionists are common in right-wing movements", that "Many white nationalists both hate Jews and love Israel", and alleged that both Zionist organizations and the Israeli government have failed to condemn antisemitic white nationalists. Ben Lorber, writing for +972 Magazine, argued that American white nationalism support for the "Jewish state's supremacist values fits comfortably with its deep antisemitism" and that "philosemitic Christian Zionism carries deep undercurrents of anti-Judaism." Lorber refers to the phenomenon of right-Zionism fitting "comfortably alongside simmering currents of antisemitism" as "Antisemitic Zionism".
The Zionist organization Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) was accused of antisemitism by Jewish progressives during the 2020 election, after DMFI released attack ads against the progressive Jewish California politician Sara Jacobs. The ads emphasized Jacobs' wealthy background, portraying her "fortune and privileged life" as making her out of touch with ordinary Americans. The Intercept claimed that the "imagery and language employed by many of the ads are reminiscent of common antisemitic tropes", noting that DMFI had previously endorsed wealthy non-Jewish candidates. Rachel Rosen, a DMFI spokesperson, denied accusations that the ads were antisemitic.
In August 2022, the left-wing Jewish organization IfNotNow condemned AIPAC for antisemitism after AIPAC claimed that "George Soros has a long history of backing anti-Israel groups" and that "J Street & Soros work to undermine" pro-Israel Democrats. IfNotNow asserted that AIPAC was not a Jewish organization, did not represent Jews, and in allegedly promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about Soros, AIPAC had become part of the "antisemitic far right."
