Attempts to conflate the state of Israel, as well as Zionism, with Judaism has a long and sordid history. Consequently, even the mildest criticisms of Israeli policy can be twisted by bad-faith actors into having racist and even genocidal intent.

There is no doubt that antisemitism has been an incredibly destructive force throughout history, and that the Jewish people have been persecuted and put through pogrom after pogrom, as well as endured attempts at systematic annihilation. This is what makes it more tragic when we see that sometimes this very real history of persecution can be cynically weaponized to legitimize or deny the reality which Palestinians suffer under.

The recent rise to prominence of a distorted and shallow understanding of identity politics has been a boon to this kind of conflation. Suddenly we see Zionism being detached from its material history and presented as an integral part of Jewish identity. This is especially popular in the West, where young Zionists who are raised on propaganda and myths of the Zionist project come to treat it as inseparable from themselves. Here, we see the cynical twisting of social justice language to declare that only Zionists may define what Zionism is -As if it was a subjective phenomenon, with no material reality, founders, history, effects or victims- and that it was an attack on the Jewish people to oppose it or describe it as colonial.

Questioning the legitimacy of criticism of Israel has a long history shrouded in many ambiguities. For his part, Natan Sharansky came up with a test to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. He dubbed this approach the “3D test“. According to this test, the criticisms are evaluated based on the following criteria:

1) Demonization. Which he described as when “Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”.

I imagine this point is left vague on purpose. How do we quantify “sensible”? Who is qualified to mete out judgment on what constitutes “sensibility”? For example, most Jewish Israelis don’t even view the West Bank as militarily occupied. Surely what’s sensible to them would go against the norms of international law and the very obvious and very well documented facts on the ground. Note that here the issue becomes not that Israel has not committed these alleged actions, but rather that the response is not to his liking.

2) Double standards. Which he described as Israel being “singled out” or that criticism is “applied selectively”.

The idea that Israel is being singled out and treated differently is ubiquitous. However, it should be noted that although Israel is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to violating the Geneva conventions and ignoring UNSC resolutions, it is still afforded a special place among the nations and considered a democratic civilized first world country and has access to special privileges, trade offers and partnerships not available to any other serial violator of human rights. If Israel is being singled out for anything, it is for its impunity to any real consequences for its violations. Nonetheless, once again, we see that the focus is not on denying the charges against Israel, but rather with quantifying how we should respond to them.

3) Delegitimization. Which he described as questioning “Israel’s fundamental right to exist”.

To begin with, no state has a “fundamental right to exist”, not Israel nor any other in the world. [You can read more about this here]. But beyond that, what does this mean in practice?

It means that the Palestinians, whose entire society and way of life was destroyed, whose villages were dynamited, whose people were ethnically cleansed, must embrace the state that now exists only due to their suffering.

Could you imagine asking any indigenous nation on Turtle Island whether the United States or Canada have a right to exist? Who would demand that these nations rubber-stamp their own dispossession with approval, and lend it legitimacy?

If we naturalize the idea that nation states are inherently legitimate, and champion the false notion that they have a right to exist anchored in international law, then this restricts our ability to critique any country’s foundations. Suddenly, acknowledging the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the attempted ethnocide of the Palestinians people in any meaningful way becomes an infringement upon Israel’s fabled right to exist. I am not speaking of mere empty acknowledgment that functions to signal a superficial settler regret while continuing to profit off the dispossession of the natives, but an acknowledgment that aims to be the first step in righting historical wrongs.

The more you research what constitutes “legitimate” criticism of Israel, the more obvious it becomes that it is a cynical attempt to control the discussion. It really is quite convenient for advocates of Israel, as it diverts attention away from the charges at hand to quibbles about the proper way to criticize Israel. Once again, the speech of colonized peoples is policed and relegated to secondary importance after the comfort of the colonist.

A different, but related argument, claims that by denying the Jewish people the only Jewish state in the world, you are denying them self-determination, which is undoubtedly antisemitic.

This is quite the intellectually dishonest argument, so rife with critical omissions, that it cannot but be classified as a lie when the full context is taken into account.

Let’s try and apply this argument to another prominent settler colonial context: The colonization of Turtle Island.

When somebody today describes American “Manifest destiny” as pilgrims seeking a better life for themselves, or claims that the United States was founded on liberty, equality and justice for all, you instantly know that they are omitting crucial elements. How could they possibly leave out details such as the genocide of the indigenous nations or slavery from the story?

When they say liberty, equality and justice for all, you ask, liberty for who? Equality for who? Justice for who?

In the American case, the answer was white male landowners. Everybody else’s oppression -to different degrees- was necessary to build the privileges and power of this class. But you absolutely cannot gain an accurate understanding of American history without mentioning this foundational and continuing oppression.

So, when Zionists claim that living in Israel is just Jewish self-determination, what are they leaving out of their story? At what cost was Israel established? What happened to the society that already existed when the first Zionist settlers arrived? Is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the colonization of their lands not worth mentioning in this context?

Furthermore, is it intellectually honest to frame an objection to these atrocities as an objection to Jewish self-determination as a concept?

When it came to Palestinians, the issue was never with the abstract idea of Jewish self-determination. Everybody should be able to determine their own destiny, but not at the expense of the oppression of others. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence -recorded by the Zionist pioneers themselves- that the native Palestinian population was welcoming of the first Zionist settlers. They worked side by side, they taught them how to work the land, even when they showed arrogance and saw them as inferior. Only after it became clear that these settlers did not come to live in Palestine, but to become its landlords as Jewish National Fund Chairman Menachem Usishkin said, did resistance to Zionism begin.

Palestine has always been home to countless refugee populations, and the idea that the Jewish people fleeing persecution could find a safe home in Palestine was never the issue. The issue is that these sentiments were never reciprocated by the Zionist movement, which showed disdain towards Palestinians from the very beginning and sought to take over the land to build an exclusivist ethnic state. For example, it sanctioned settlers employing or working with Palestinians, even calling Arab labor an “illness”.

A further point of content, is that there is no reason that the self-determination of the Jewish people can only be realized through a colonial ethnocracy, sustained purely by the fact that the original inhabitants of land are in refugee camps all over the world. Israelis have long been brought up on the idea that Israel is the only thing keeping them safe, and that there can be no possible alternative other than the state as it currently stands. They are taught that any challenge to this system is tantamount to calling for the mass ethnic cleansing or genocide of Jewish Israelis between the river and the sea, or even worse, the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole.

These anxieties are hardly unique to Jewish Israelis, settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments.

For example, in an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!”

Sound familiar?

As Fred Moten once said:

“Settlers always think they’re defending themselves. That’s why they build forts on other people’s land. And then they freak out over the fact that they are surrounded. And they’re still surrounded.“

Underlying the logic of both of these assumptions are racist prejudices that the colonized are barbaric, bloodthirsty and ruthless. It is a deeply dehumanizing logic, steeped in every colonial and Orientalist trope. The idea that a free, decolonized Palestine would inevitably lead to genocide comes from this same logic. As a matter of fact, for all the claims of the Palestinians wanting to push Israelis into the sea, only the opposite has occurred in reality [You can read more about this here].

Naturally, as with all Israeli talking points, the standards do not apply consistently. For example, the same people who suggest criticizing Israel is antisemitic often use the incredibly racist and dehumanizing language of “demographic threats” to describe Palestinian children.

Israel is a state, like any other settler state, with policies, an army and a long history of crimes against the natives, and all of that should be open for the harshest of criticism. From the get-go, Israel was intended to be a settler colony [You can read more about this here]. Judaism preceded it, and Judaism will still be there after its inevitable dismantling. Only then can we move forward towards real peace, not as it is currently where the welfare of one people is predicated on the diaspora of another.

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• Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
• Khalidi, Walid, Sharif S. Elmusa, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institution for Palestine Studies, 1992.
• Masalha, Nur. “Expulsion of the Palestinians.” Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies (1992).
• Pappe, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster, 2007.
• Shohat, Ella, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements, Pluto Press, 2017.