To be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is to accept the existence of the Jews as long as we are dependent on non-Jews for our very lives. By opposing Jewish self-determination, anti-Zionists demand that Jews return to a diaspora condition in which we are minorities everywhere and are entirely subject to the whims of our temporary hosts. Jewish life before the state of Israel, in much of the world, was characterized by humiliation, subjugation, and massacres whenever such atrocities were in the interests of our host communities, and there is no reason to believe that the same situation would not arise again if we were to return to the pre-Israel global dynamic. Essentially, anti-Zionists who denounce anti-Semitism imply that Jews may live as long as non-Jews permit us to live, but no longer.

To be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is to accept the existence of the Jews as long as we cannot mobilize politically. It is to say that we can participate as individuals in political systems built by and for non-Jewish populations, but we may not build our own political institutions or represent ourselves. We may vote in French elections, for example, but we may not establish a state in which we are the majority so that our communal needs are consistently met; in France, Jews have legal equality but not basic security. Anti-Zionism thus forever constrains our religion, culture, peoplehood, and safety to the limits that non-Jews set for us.

To be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is to accept the existence of the Jews as long as we know our place. The millennia of Jew-hatred and oppression in Europe have left a deeply engrained conception of Jews as beneath non-Jews, as somehow backward and doomed to exist among and between other, more powerful peoples. Zionism is revolutionary in that it asserts a Jewish claim to equality – Jews will no longer accept an eternally degrading status, but rather will demand to function as a group with the same rights as all others, including representation on the international stage and the ability to choose our own leaders. All revolutions are met with conservative backlash, and in the case of Zionism that opposition includes Jews who are content with a diaspora existence, but that backlash does not make the Jewish claim to equality any less legitimate.

To be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is to accept the existence of the Jews as long as we fit into the boxes that others have prescribed for us. Jewish identities have long been diverse, some based in religious doctrine and others based in other social, legal, ethical, cultural, or historical codes. Judaism was labeled a “religion” by a Church-dominated Europe. Anti-Zionism tends to enforce the Christian European notion of Jews as constituting solely a religious group in competition with the Church, or the anti-Jewish Enlightenment notion of Jews as constituting solely a religious group in competition with rationality and secularism. It denies Jews the right to decide for ourselves how we identify – more often than not, among other things, as part of a nation.

Finally, to be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic is to accept the existence of the Jews in theory but not in practice. As other states across Southwest Asia have disintegrated, groups like Daesh have massacred Shi’a Muslims, Christians, and Kurds of various religious backgrounds (especially Yazidis), while groups like the Iran-backed “Popular Mobilization Units” in Iraq or Hezbollah militants in Syria massacre Sunni Muslims. If the Jewish state were to voluntarily dissolve itself, as seems to be the suggestion of many American and European anti-Zionists, or if it were to merge with other states to become an unstable anarchy of rival groups like Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon, it would be inviting a similar wave of massacres against Jews by those who have promised to destroy us, from Hamas to Daesh and many more. I find it strange that American college students who know what happened when Europe drew borders around countries like Syria still suggest that American and European powers pressure Israel into merging with Palestine. If, as my anti-Zionist peers suggest, Israel were to stop defending its borders and cease to exist as a state, the (approximately) half of the global Jewish population that lives there would be immediately vulnerable.