It is not antisemitic to criticize Israel, nor is it antisemitic to oppose particular Israeli policies, nor is it antisemitic to condemn settlement expansion, question military strategy, or argue for a different approach to Palestinian statehood. I have written articles myself sharply criticizing decisions made by Israeli governments. Democracies invite criticism; indeed, they require it. Israel, like any democracy, is strengthened, not weakened, by rigorous debate about the use of power, the protection of minorities, and the moral hazards of prolonged conflict.
But something very different is happening in much of what today calls itself “anti-Zionism.” And it is time to say so plainly and unambiguously
There is a categorical difference between criticizing a government and singling out the world’s only Jewish state for obsessive denunciation while displaying indifference toward, or even apologetics for, far graver abuses elsewhere. That pattern is not merely suspicious; it is probative and outcome determinative.
Consider the global landscape of repression and mass violence over the past decade. The Iranian regime has executed hundreds of people annually, including political dissidents and individuals accused of vaguely defined security crime; recent developments indicate that the Iranian regime, in order to clamp down on unarmed protesters, has suppressed and executed tens of thousands of its own citizens, while countless others have been arrested and tortured. In China’s Xinjiang region, credible reporting from journalists, human rights groups, and governmental investigations has detailed mass detention, forced labor, coercive birth prevention policies, and the suppression of religious life targeting Uyghur Muslims. Myanmar’s military campaign against the Rohingya forced more than 700,000 people to flee into Bangladesh amid killings, arson, and widespread sexual violence. Sudan’s renewed civil war has involved ethnically targeted massacres and famine conditions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure, forced deportations, and countless documented war crimes.
The reaction to these slaughters from the anti-Zionists who espouse liberal principles and care oh-so-deeply about the welfare of their fellow man? Crickets; stone-cold silence. Even when there is a perfunctory condemnation, the scale and intensity of activism directed at Israel is of a different order. There are no global boycott movements targeting Chinese academics because of Xinjiang; there are no sustained campus encampments demanding the dismantling of Iran’s political system; there are no widespread calls to dissolve Syria as a state; there are no chants calling for the eradication of Russia “from the river to the sea;” there are no calls for mass public protests. Yet, when it comes to Israel, the vocabulary escalates quickly from criticism to criminalization to delegitimization to “genocide” to, perhaps the most disgusting characterization of all in context, a “Holocaust.”
It is certainly true that moral concern need not be mathematically distributed, but when a small state of fewer than ten million people becomes the gravitational center of global protest culture, when it is framed not merely as flawed but as uniquely malignant, then the asymmetry calls out for explanation.
One attempt at rationalization often offered is that Israel receives Western support and therefore merits heightened scrutiny, but scrutiny is not the same as singularization. The United States provides extensive military aid to Egypt, a country whose government has imprisoned tens of thousands of political prisoners and sharply curtailed civil society. Western governments trade heavily with China despite credible allegations of mass repression, yet no comparable cultural boycott movement seeks to isolate Egyptian or Chinese scholars from international academic life as such. The logic of accountability somehow narrows to one particular state – which, purely coincidentally, of course, happens to be the only Jewish nation on earth.
The charge of “genocide” starkly illustrates the moral dissonance. Genocide is defined in international law as specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such; intent is not incidental, it is central. The term was coined to describe the deliberate attempt to eradicate a people, and to apply it casually – to transform it into a slogan untethered from demonstrable genocidal intent – is to drain it of all meaning. To assert that Israel’s objective is the destruction of the Palestinian people, a truly extraordinary claim, requires proof of a state policy aimed at annihilation.
When the word “genocide” becomes a chant, it ceases to be a legal conclusion and becomes a moral cudgel. It also creates a grotesque inversion: the descendants of a people that endured a paradigmatic genocide are accused, without rigorous evidentiary grounding, of pursuing one. When such inversion is accompanied by indifference to explicit calls for Israel’s destruction from armed groups in the region, it raises legitimate questions about selective moral vision.
Moreover, consider how the demographic record undermines the claim that Israel is intentionally pursuing genocide and why this matters for any serious analysis of “anti-Zionism” and its rhetoric: the population of Palestinians in the territories at the heart of the conflict has not collapsed; it has grown dramatically! On the eve of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, what Palestinians love to call “the Nakba,” there were roughly 1.4 million Palestinians living in what became the State of Israel and Judea and Samaria (aka, West Bank)/Gaza area. By the mid-2020s, the Palestinian population in Judea/Samaria and Gaza alone reached well over 5 million. Thus, Palestinians are roughly equal in number to Israelis in the territory of historic Palestine itself today.
Specifically in Gaza, where accusations of genocide are most often focused, roughly 2.2 million Palestinians lived in the densely crowded strip before the October 7, 2023 conflict. Even with devastating casualties, reported deaths in the tens of thousands and displacement of hundreds of thousands, the population – even according to the U.N. and the most anti-Israel estimates, which surely understate the population – is still at 2.15 million. Moreover, the Palestinian population has increased almost tenfold since 1948 despite recurring wars, blockade, and humanitarian crises.
Some genocide. The sheer increase in the Palestinian population, born of high fertility and sustained community life in multiple geographies, stands in stark contrast to historical genocides, where the targeted group’s numbers were drastically reduced or extinguished over time; for example, the near-destruction of the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey or the attempted annihilation of European Jews during the Holocaust.
Another deep irony that must be part of serious analysis is: has there ever been a conquering nation intent on eradicating a people who grants full civil rights to the very population that some accuse it of seeking to destroy? Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise over 20 percent of the Israeli population and enjoy the franchise: they vote in national elections, run for office, and serve in the Knesset. In contrast to the genocidal regimes of the twentieth century, where targeted peoples were stripped of rights, barred from public life, or placed outside the law, Israel’s constitutional framework enshrines equal civil rights irrespective of religion or ethnicity, making the claim of intentional, systematic extermination as fundamentally at odds with the lived political reality. The regimes responsible for genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Europe systematically marginalized and then eliminated the populations they targeted; they did not elevate them to citizenship and political enfranchisement. To suggest that Israel seeks the physical destruction of the Palestinian people is to ignore demography, political rights, and comparative historical context.
The very demographic vitality of Palestinians, whether in Gaza, the Judea and Samaria, within Israel itself, or in diaspora, contradicts the genocidal narrative. When discussions about suffering and justice must grapple with raw human numbers, political structures, and the full arc of history, they demand both moral seriousness and empirical honesty. A rhetoric that ignores these facts in favor of sensational accusations does not strengthen human rights advocacy; it weakens it by undermining credibility and obscuring genuine grievances that deserve clear-eyed, principled engagement.
The issue of selective moral vision also appears in how anti-Zionist discourse treats violence against Israeli civilians. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants carried out a massacre that included the killing of civilians in their homes, joyfully murdering babies and raping women, and hostage-taking. When such mass murder is reframed primarily as “resistance,” when its victims are immediately subsumed into a narrative of deserved blowback, the universal principles of human rights appear not to apply to murdering Jews. The same activists who insist that Palestinian civilian lives are inviolable somehow struggle to articulate the same clarity about Jews. That is antisemitism, not anti-Zionism.
This asymmetry extends beyond the Middle East. When antisemitic incidents spike in diaspora communities during periods of conflict, anti-Zionists respond by insisting that criticism of Israel is being conflated with antisemitism. But hostility toward Israel invariably bleeds into hostility toward Jews as Jews. Thus, Jewish students have reported being asked to denounce Israel as a condition of social acceptance; synagogues have been vandalized with anti-Israel slogans that echo older antisemitic imagery. This is not anti-Zionism; it is cold-blooded antisemitism.
Another revealing element is the treatment of Jewish historical connection to the land. To describe Jewish presence in the region solely as “colonial,” erasing millennia of continuous Jewish attachment and the fact that many Israeli Jews are themselves descended from Middle Eastern and North African communities expelled or pressured to leave Arab countries, is not merely to simplify history beyond recognition; it is an almost laughable attempt to eradicate the presence of Jews in the land. When allegedly anti-colonialism is applied in a way that strips one people of historical rootedness while affirming the indigeneity of all others, the selectivity is antisemitism, not anti-Zionism.
It is also worth noting that Zionism itself has never been monolithic. There have been secular, religious, socialist, revisionist, and liberal strands and, from the beginning of modern Zionism until today, there have been fierce internal disputes about borders, minority rights, and the role of religion in public life. To collapse this complexity into a caricature of racial supremacism is intellectually unserious, and it mirrors the flattening of Jewish identity that antisemitism has long perpetrated: reducing a diverse people to a single malevolent essence.
Although motives are varied, with some rooted in universalist ideology and others in anger at real injustices, public movements are judged by patterns, rhetoric, and consequences, not by the often-false private assurances of their participants. If one opposes all ethno-national self-determination movements on principle, one must say so explicitly and consistently; if one believes that nation-states should give way to post-national frameworks everywhere, from France to Japan to Ireland, then the argument is at least coherent, even if controversial. But when the Jewish state alone is deemed illegitimate, when its very existence is treated as a moral stain, the claim that this is simply policy disagreement strains credulity.
There is a good reason why antisemitism has historically expressed itself through double standards. Jews have often been cast as uniquely powerful, uniquely malevolent, uniquely responsible for the world’s ills. Today, that narrative can manifest not in explicit racial language but in the insistence that the Jewish collective, alone among nations, forfeits the normal presumptions of legitimacy and self-defense. When Israel is denied the right to defend itself that other states exercise, when any use of force is pre-labeled criminal regardless of context, that is antisemitism, not antizionism.
This does not mean Israel’s conduct should escape scrutiny. It means that scrutiny must be principled, not preordained; it means that it must be attentive to facts, to law, and to comparative perspective; it means that it must condemn incitement and violence on all sides; and it means that it must recognize that Israelis possess national aspirations and human dignity.
The line between criticism and bigotry is real, but it lies in consistency, in proportionality, and in the willingness to apply one’s stated principles universally. When activists who proclaim themselves “anti-Zionist but not antisemitic” focus their moral energy almost exclusively on the Jewish state, recycle maximalist legal accusations without rigorous substantiation, ignore or minimize atrocities elsewhere, and tolerate rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at any other minority, they demonstrate their true antisemitic motives.
At best, this posture reflects a failure of moral imagination, blindness to how patterns of selective outrage echo older prejudices. At worst, it is a rebranding of antisemitism in the language of human rights. Either way, the burden rests not on Jews to prove their innocence of collective wrongdoing, but on those who single out the Jewish state to demonstrate that their standards are genuinely universal. And as we say at the United Nations, “Good luck with that.”