Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones
It’s been a century-long propaganda campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, despite the fact that anti-Zionist Jews exist and antisemitic Zionism exists. In fact, I suspect there are more antisemitic Zionists in the world than pro-semitic Zionists. There are a quite a lot of Americans with antisemitic sentiments who subscribe to Christian Zionism.
But if you call Israeli’s colonisers you get told you are antisemitic?
It’s been a century-long propaganda campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, despite the fact that anti-Zionist Jews exist and antisemitic Zionism exists. In fact, I suspect there are more antisemitic Zionists in the world than pro-semitic Zionists. There are a quite a lot of Americans with antisemitic sentiments who subscribe to Christian Zionism.
I suspect that the rebranding of Zionism to be ‘philosemitic’ started in the mid or late 1940s, shortly after the Shoah ceased. Then telling Jews to fuck off to Palestine was no longer seen as an act of hostility but of compassion instead, since they would supposedly be ‘safer’ there. It is similar to how some Zionists are trying to rebrand the expulsion of Gazans as an act of compassion.
It’s a recent development. The fact of the matter is that Zionists have always been unafraid of associating with antisemites, a trend that continues today albeit more subtly. On the other hand, not only are there plenty of anti‐Zionist Jews, but thanks to the black sheep effect anti‐Zionist Jews may well be the harshest critics of Zionism, which is part of the reason why I made an effort to exclusively quote Jews when looking at people comparing the Zionist enterprise to the Third Reich.