An Open Letter to Antizionist Jews

An Open Letter to Antizionist Jews - by Matthew Feinberg

Dear Antizionist Jews,

You know our history. That is what makes this letter harder to write.

You know what happened when Jewish safety depended on rulers, governments, majorities, movements, and neighbors who promised that this time would be different. You know how often Jews were told that acceptance was available so long as we were the right kind of Jews, sufficiently assimilated, sufficiently quiet, sufficiently willing to distance ourselves from whatever aspect of Jewish life had become inconvenient to the surrounding society. You know how quickly tolerance could become suspicion, how suspicion could become accusation, and how accusation could become permission.

And yet you have chosen to participate in a movement that increasingly repeats some of the oldest accusations against Jews while insisting that the target is something entirely different.

You call yourselves antizionists. You insist that your opposition is political rather than antisemitic, and you often describe it in the language of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, human rights, or universal justice. You point to your Jewishness as evidence that the movement cannot possibly be hostile to Jews. After all, how could antizionism be Jew-hate if Jews themselves participate in it?

But Jewish participation proves only Jewish participation.

Jews can be wrong about Jews. Jews can repeat libels about Jews. Jews can lend legitimacy to movements that are hostile to other Jews. Being Jewish does not make an ideology harmless, and it does not give any one Jew the authority to dismiss what other Jews are experiencing.

That matters because antizionism is not simply disagreement with Israeli policy. It is not opposition to a prime minister, a government, a war, a settlement, or a military decision. Jews can and do argue fiercely about all of those things. Antizionism makes a much larger claim: that Jewish collective sovereignty itself is illegitimate.

Once you make that claim, you are no longer arguing only about what Israel does. You are arguing about what Jews are allowed to be.

Zionism is an expression of Jewish peoplehood. It begins with the proposition that Jews are not merely adherents of a religion scattered randomly across the world, but a people with a history, language, homeland, collective memory, and political will. It holds that Jews possess the same right other peoples claim for themselves: the right to organize politically, defend themselves collectively, and determine their own future in their ancestral homeland.

Once you declare that Jewish collective political existence is illegitimate, you have decided that Jews, uniquely, may not exercise a right you recognize in other peoples.

That is the singularity of the demand.

Your role inside the antizionist movement is therefore not incidental. Your Jewishness carries special value there. You are quoted, elevated, invited onto panels, circulated on social media, and held up as proof that hostility toward Zionism cannot possibly be hostility toward Jews. When Jewish students say they feel targeted, when synagogues are protested because of their relationship with Israel, or when Jewish institutions are treated as legitimate political targets, someone can point to you and say, "Look, Jews agree with us."

That should make you uncomfortable, because your presence is often used not simply to express dissent but to invalidate the Jews warning that something is wrong.

Selecting the Jews who agree with a movement while dismissing the Jews who do not is not evidence of respect for Jewish voices. It is evidence that some Jewish voices are more useful than others.

And this is not a new dynamic in Jewish history. There have always been Jews who believed the hostility surrounding them was caused not by Jew-hate but by the behavior of other Jews.

Sometimes the supposedly unacceptable Jews were too religious. Sometimes they were too visible, too separate, too national, too unwilling to assimilate, or too insistent on remaining a people rather than becoming merely private practitioners of a faith. The condition changes. The bargain does not.

Today, one of those conditions is Zionism.

You can be welcomed, praised, and held up as courageous, but often only so long as you are willing to condemn the Jewish collective loudly enough. You may be accepted as a Jew, but not as a Jew who believes Jewish peoplehood includes national rights. You may speak as a Jew, but your Jewishness becomes especially valuable when it can be used to reassure others that their hostility toward Zionists has nothing to do with hostility toward Jews.

I would ask you to examine that role more carefully.

Jew-hate has never remained frozen in one vocabulary. Jews were once accused of controlling governments, manipulating money, possessing divided loyalties, conspiring through hidden networks, and exhibiting a particular cruelty toward non-Jews. Today, remarkably similar accusations circulate about "Zionists." The Jew who supposedly controlled governments becomes the Zionist lobby controlling governments.

Jewish money becomes Zionist money. Divided Jewish loyalty becomes suspicious allegiance to Israel. The secret Jewish conspiracy becomes the Zionist network manipulating media, universities, and foreign policy. Old accusations about Jewish cruelty reappear as claims that the Jewish state is uniquely bloodthirsty.

The nouns changed. The accusation did not.

You should recognize this pattern. You know what a blood libel is. You know what conspiracy theories about Jewish power look like. You know why accusations that Jews secretly manipulate political institutions carry historical weight. Your Jewishness should make you more alert to those patterns, not less willing to see them simply because the word "Zionist" has replaced the word "Jew."

Libels also have consequences. They make mistreatment feel justified. Once Jews, or Zionists, are portrayed as uniquely dangerous, conspiratorial, or cruel, excluding them can be presented as self-defense, harassing them as activism, and violence against them as resistance.

Demonization changes what people believe they are permitted to do to the person or group being demonized.

That is one reason Zionism matters so deeply to so many Jews. Zionism was the Jewish decision that Jewish survival should no longer depend entirely upon someone else's goodwill. It emerged not from paranoia but from experience. Jews received rights in Europe that later disappeared. Jews became citizens in Middle Eastern and North African countries from which many later fled or were driven. Jews participated in universalist movements that promised old ethnic hatreds would become irrelevant, only to discover that Jews could still become the exception.

You may believe that history no longer requires Jewish sovereignty. You may believe Jews would be safer or morally better off if Israel were dismantled and replaced by another political arrangement. You are entitled to make that argument. But you cannot reasonably ask the rest of us to forget why Jewish sovereignty was built in the first place, or treat our refusal to surrender it as evidence of moral failure.

You know what it means that there is a Jewish state capable of taking in Jews who are threatened elsewhere. You know what it means that Hebrew is again a living national language. You know what it means that Jews have an army whose purpose includes defending Jewish lives rather than waiting for another government to decide whether Jewish lives are worth defending. You may reject the political conclusions other Jews draw from those facts, but you cannot pretend they are meaningless.

Nor should you ignore the asymmetry in what antizionism asks of Jews. Many nations have governments that behave badly. Many have disputed borders, histories of war, minority conflicts, military abuses, or policies worthy of condemnation. Yet the proposed remedy is generally to change governments, policies, borders, or institutions. With Israel, the demand so often becomes something more fundamental: the state itself must cease to be Jewish, and Jewish sovereignty must end.

That is the singularity of the demand, and your participation does not make it less singular.

I am not asking you to stop criticizing Israel. I am asking you to distinguish criticism from a movement that treats Jewish collective existence as the problem. I am asking you to look closely at the language used around you, the accusations being repeated, the institutions being targeted, and the role your Jewishness plays in making those things appear respectable.

Ask yourself whether the people applauding your Jewish voice would value it as highly if you defended Jewish sovereignty. Ask whether you would still be considered brave if you challenged a conspiracy theory about Zionist money or power instead of endorsing it. Ask whether your Jewish identity would remain equally welcome if you told the room that antizionism can function as Jew-hate.

Most of all, ask why your Jewishness becomes most useful at precisely the moment it can be deployed against other Jews.
There is a difference between dissent and providing cover. There is a difference between arguing with your people and helping others deny your people's rights. There is a difference between criticizing Israel and lending Jewish legitimacy to a movement that increasingly treats Jewish sovereignty, Jewish institutions, and Jews who refuse to renounce Zionism as morally suspect.

You know our history. You know how Jew-hate changes language while preserving old accusations. You know how often Jews have been told that they could earn acceptance by separating themselves from other Jews.

That is why I am asking you to look again at the movement you have joined and the role you are being asked to play inside it.

Not because you must agree with me.

Because you should know what to look for.

Sincerely,
A Zionist Jew