Israel - BDS. Flickr/ Takver. Some rights reserved.The relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is a vexed and controversial question. My starting point is to elucidate an understanding of the meaning of Zionism; a term and a political concept which is rarely defined and frequently misunderstood. This is hardly surprising given that today in the 21st century, Zionism/ist is construed as an insult by some and is often equated with apartheid and even worse, Nazism. My understanding of Zionism seeks neither to exonerate, praise nor condemn. Rather we must seek to comprehend the Zionist movement and concomitant ideology in its historical, material and constantly evolving context.
A form of nationalism
Put simply Zionism is a form of nationalism which developed under two sets of linked influences in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond. The first was the European nationalist movements which led to the formation of such nation states as Germany and Italy in the 1870’s and the nationalist inspired impulses in many other countries. The second spur to Zionism was the ubiquitous antisemitism experienced by Jews in most of the countries in which they were domiciled. Such antisemitism was nothing new it had existed for centuries, but the prevalence of state supported nationalist ideologies influencing indigenous populations in the direction of patriotic flag waving fervour (what the late historian E.J.Hobsbawm called ‘the invention of tradition’), led to a renewal of the hatred of the ‘outsider’ (Jews) in a virulent form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in these linked contexts that a form of Jewish nationalism emerged - Zionism.
Later, of course, German Nazism expressed the ultimate form of antisemitism - culminating in the Holocaust in which upwards of six million Jews were murdered in the most brutal and shocking circumstances. It should be noted, however, that antisemitism was not confined to Europe; it emerged later in the Middle East and resulted in the mass expulsion of Jews from such countries as Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and others in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
