anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism before 1948

Early Jewish anti-Zionism

From the beginning, there was resistance to Zionism and Theodor Herzl's call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Opposition came from diverse sources: many Orthodox rabbis held that a Jewish state before the messiah was against divine will; assimilationist Jewish liberals feared Zionism threatened efforts at integration and citizenship in European states; and various left-wing Jewish movements, such as the Bund and Autonomists, promoted alternative forms of Jewish identity. In Western Europe, established Jewish communities often preferred loyalty to their nation-states over Jewish particularism. Some Reform rabbis removed references to Zion from liturgy, while others criticized Zionism as unrealistic. By contrast, the Mizrachi movement represented religious Zionist support, though more traditionalist groups like Agudat Yisrael opposed cooperation with secular Zionists. In the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya curtailed Zionist activity as part of its campaign against "Jewish bourgeois nationalism".

In regions outside Europe and North America, Zionism was often met with disinterest and regarded as a foreign ideology.

In Morocco, for example, it was met with skepticism by the local Sephardic populations, who regarded it as irreligious and not concerned with their interests. Later, some who were invested in the project of Westernization saw Zionism as an obstacle to achieving assimilation and integration with the Europeans; others saw Zionism as an obstacle to a favored Jewish-Muslim alliance and coexistence in Morocco. L'Union Marocaine, a francophone Jewish newspaper, spoke for the alliancistes associated with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, who saw Zionism as an obstacle to assimilation with the Europeans, and challenged L'Avenir Illustré, which published Zionist propaganda.

In Egypt in 1946, Jewish members of Iskra, an underground Communist movement, founded the Jewish Anti-Zionist League.

Early Ottoman, Arab, and Palestinian anti-Zionism

The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II, opposed Zionism because he believed in the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. In 1896, he told Zionist diplomatic agent Philip de Newlinski in Istanbul, that the land belonged to his people, who had defended it with their lives, and that he would not sell even a foot of it.

Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the Late Ottoman period. In 1899, compelled by a "holy duty of conscience", Yousef al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the Ottoman Parliament, wrote a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, to voice his concerns that Zionism, which he called a "natural, beautiful and just" idea, would jeopardize the friendly associations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. He wrote: "Who can deny the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!" But Khalidi suggested that "geographically, [it had] no hope of realisation"; since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should find another place for the implementation of their political goals: "in the name of God", he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone." According to Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Scholch, and Dominique Perrin, al-Khalidi was prescient in predicting that, regardless of Jewish historic rights, given the geopolitical context, Zionism could stir an awakening of Arab nationalism uniting Christians and Muslims.

The Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his 1905 The Awakening of the Arab Nation, warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland. Subsequently, the Palestinian Christian-owned and highly influential newspaper Falastin was founded in 1911 in the then Arab-majority city of Jaffa and soon became the area's fiercest and most consistent critic of Zionism. It helped shape Palestinian identity and nationalism.

Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the (Jewish) Secretary of State for India. Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish. The majority Muslim and Christian population constituting 94% of the citizenry only had their "religious rights" recognized.

Anti-Zionist reactions to the Balfour Declaration

American approval of the Balfour Declaration came about through the secret mediation of the antisemitic anti-Zionist Colonel House with President Woodrow Wilson, bypassing Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Wilson's recognition alarmed many American Jewish leaders who viewed the U.S. as their "new Zion." At the Paris Peace Conference, 299 rabbis voiced opposition to the notion of a Jewish Palestine, and Lansing thought that Zionism contradicted Wilson's principle of self-determination. This moment helped establish an anti-Zionist tradition in the US State Department.

Once the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) began to implement the Declaration, both sides had reason to accuse the authorities of bias. Several contemporary sources credit the notion that English administrators were sympathetic to Arabs and diffident about Jews. One Zionist complaint was that several of the British Mandatory administration's higher functionaries tolerated anti-Zionist and even antisemitic policies. Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionist figures such as Jacob Israël de Haan told the Mandate authorities that Zionists did not represent the entire Jewish community.

The 1920 Palin Commission investigation into the anti-Zionist riots at Nebi Musa found that there was a widespread perception among Arabs, reflected among British residents and officials, that Zionists are "arrogant, insolent and provocative".

In Britain itself, according to David Cesarani, the anti-Zionist movement emerged in 1921 with the arrival of a Palestinian Arab delegation.

The anti-Zionism of this period emanated almost wholly from the right wing of British politics, notably the so-called Die Hards of the Tory Party (the rump of Tory MPs who chose to stay outside the coalition government), and the mass-circulation right-wing press.

The British press was hightly critical of Zionism: the Northcliffe Press was openly anti-Zionist, Lord Beaverbrook opposed the Mandate, and complaints were made about the heavy burden of governing land with competing national interests. British anti-Zionism and antisemitism was also tinged with anti-communism, as Jews were accused of having played a major role in the Russian Revolution. Palestinians sought to discredit Zionism by associating it with communist infiltration, which the British took seriously.

Jewish anti-Zionism between the wars

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland promoted doykayt (hereness), and dismissed Zionism as "separatist, chauvinist, clerical and conservative". Many Jewish communal organizations in Germany and Italy advanced assimilationist anti-Zionism, emphasizing loyalty to their states.

Some leaders within Orthodox Judaism outside of the United States expressed opposition to political Zionism because the Zionist movement espoused nationalism in a secular fashion and used "Zion", "Jerusalem", "Land of Israel", "redemption", and "ingathering of exiles" as literal rather than sacred terms, endeavoring to achieve them in this world. According to Menachem Keren-Kratz, the situation in the United States differed, with "most Reform rabbis and laypeople repudiat[ing]" Zionism while most of the Orthodox supported it. Elaborating on the work of David N. Myers, Jewish historian Jonathan Judaken wrote in 2013 that "numerous Jewish traditions have insisted that preservation of what is most precious about Judaism and Jewishness 'demands' a principled anti-Zionism or post-Zionism." This tradition dwindled in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, but Judaken saw it as still alive in religious groups such as Neturei Karta and among many intellectuals of Jewish background in Israel and the diaspora, such as George Steiner, Tony Judt, and Baruch Kimmerling.

Left-wing anti-Zionism between the wars

The official Soviet ideological position on Zionism condemned the movement as akin to bourgeois nationalism. Vladimir Lenin rejected Zionism as a reactionary movement, "bourgeois nationalism", "socially retrogressive", and a backward force that deprecates class divisions among Jews. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) understood Zionism as a colonial project.

Anti-Zionism after World War II and the creation of Israel

There was a shift in the meaning of anti-Zionism after the events of the 1940s. Whereas pre-1948 anti-Zionism was against the hypothetical establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, post-1948 anti-Zionism had to contend with the existence of the State of Israel. This often meant taking a retaliatory position to the new reality of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The overriding impulse of post-1948 anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else.

1947–1948

On the eve of the foundation of Israel in 1948, Judah Magnes, the president of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, opposed the imminent establishment of a Jewish state, advocating binationalism instead. According to Charles Glass, his opposition was grounded in the view—anticipated in the 1930s by Arthur Ruppin—that a non-binational state would automatically entail continuous warfare with the Arab world, an inference Glass says Moshe Dayan later endorsed.

The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc

By 1948, Jewish institutional life within the Soviet Union's borders had been effectively dismantled. The Soviet Union nonetheless played an initial role in recognizing the state of Israel, maintaining this policy before becoming antagonistic to Israel in 1950. The Soviet Union was harshly critical of Arab states opposing Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and enabled Israel to procure substantial armaments in 1948–1949. But at roughly the same time, in early 1948, Ilya Ehrenburg had been co-opted to write an article for Pravda that set forth what later became the authoritative rationale for Soviet hostility to Zionism, as aspiring to create a dwarfish capitalist state, influenced by the "intrusion of Anglo-American capital".

Virulent antisemitism, particularly after the fabricated "doctors' plot" affair in 1953, and with clear parallels to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, came to the fore, conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. A deep-seated antisemitic strain within Russian culture influencing the Soviet state's approach to events in the Middle East emerged to intensify the Soviet leadership's anti-Zionist hostility to Israel as a major threat to the communist world, especially in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, when official documents and party connivance resuscitated antisemitic imagery related to Zionism. According to historian Åsmund Borgen Gjerde:Within higher Soviet echelons, a particular logic existed that fostered a view of "Zionism" as an immense, conspiratorial threat to the Soviet Union. In one sense, this logic grew out of a more general tendency to view nonconformity as conspiracy: the Soviets had established extremely narrow boundaries for what constituted acceptable Jewish identity; and, when some Soviet Jews began to voice nationalist sentiments after the Six-Day War, Soviet leaders saw this expression of nonconformity as essentially a hostile act, warranting severe counter-measures.

In 1952, Czechoslovakia, which had been one of the most pro-Zionist of the Eastern Bloc states, launched an antisemitic show trial against 14 Jewish members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), including many high-ranking officials, known as the Slánský trial. Most of those targeted were ardent anti-Zionists, but they were accused of participating in a Zionist conspiracy against the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. There were also anti-Zionist show trials in Hungary and Romania (such as that of Mișu Benvenisti) in the same period.

East Germany's government was passionately anti-Zionist. From the 1950s through the 1970s, East Germany supplied Israel's neighboring Arab states with weapons. Immediately after the Six-Day War in 1967, East German Communist Party chairman Walter Ulbricht claimed that Israel had not been threatened by its neighboring Arab states before the war. He continually compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Arab and Palestinian anti-Zionism

In his 1979 essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims", Edward Said wrote: Zionism has hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews... Today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the most consistent thread running through Zionism." Said opposed Zionism and instead proposed that a binational Israeli-Palestinian state would grant Jews (as well as Palestinians) the right to self-determination.

In a retrospective analysis of Arab anti-Zionism in 1978, Yehoshafat Harkabi argued, in a view reflected in the works of the anti-Zionist Russian-Jewish orientalist Maxime Rodinson, that Arab hostility to Zionism arose as a rational response in the historical context to a genuine threat, and, with the establishment of Israel, their anti-Zionism was shaped as much by Israeli policies and actions as by traditional antisemitic stereotypes, and only later degenerated into an irrational attitude. Anthropologist of conflict Anne de Jong asserts that direct resistance to Zionism from the inhabitants of historical Palestine "focused less on religious arguments and was instead centered on countering the experience of colonial dispossession and opposing the Zionist enforcement of ethnic division of the indigenous population."

Until 1948, according to Derek Penslar, antisemitism in Palestine "grew directly out of the conflict with the Zionist movement and its gradual yet purposeful settlement of the country", rather than the European model vision of Jews as the cause of all of humankind's ills. According to Anthony Julius, anti-Zionism, a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, and Palestinian nationalism are separate ideologies; one need not have an opinion on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to be an anti-Zionist.

One Arab criticism of Zionism is that Islamic–Jewish relations were entirely peaceful until Zionists conquered Arab lands. Arab delegates to the United Nations also claimed that Zionists had unethically enticed Arab Jews to come to Israel. According to Gil Troy, neither claim is historically accurate, as Jews did not have the same rights as Muslims in these lands and had periodically experienced violent riots.

According to Yousef Munayyer, "anti-Zionism, contrary to how many Zionists would like to mischaracterize it, does not necessitate a rejection of a Jewish connection to the land but rather of a Jewish claim to dominate and oppress non-Jews with a connection to the land."

"Zionism as racism" United Nations debate

In the 1960s and 1970s, Soviets and Americans interpreted the Arab–Israeli conflict as a proxy war between the Soviet–Arab alliance's totalitarianism and the Western world's democracies. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 necessitated a diplomatic response by the Soviet–Arab alliance. The result was resolutions in the Organization of African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s.

This culminated in November 1975 in the United Nations General Assembly's passage by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions) of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared, "Zionism is a form of racism, and racial discrimination". The passage elicited, in the words of American U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "long mocking applause". U.N. representatives from Libya, Syria, and the PLO made speeches claiming that the resolution negated previous resolutions calling for land-for-peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel's U.N. representative, Chaim Herzog, interpreted the resolution as an attack on Israel's legitimacy. African U.N. delegates from non-Arab countries also resented the resolution as a distraction from the fight against racism in places like South Africa and Rhodesia.

The decision was revoked on 16 December 1991, when the General Assembly passed UN General Assembly Resolution 4686, repealing Resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 delegations absent. Thirteen of the 19 Arab countries, including those engaged in negotiations with Israel, voted against the repeal, and another six were absent. All the ex-communist countries and most of the African countries that had supported Resolution 3379 voted to repeal it.

Islamic perspectives

Some Muslims believe the 1948 Palestinian expulsions justify jihad against Israel. Some view the State of Israel as an intrusion into what Sharia defines as Dar al-Islam, a domain they believe should be ruled by Muslims, reflecting its historical conquest in the name of Islam.

In his 1980 book Islam and the Problem of Israel, Palestinian-American philosopher Ismail al-Faruqi argues that from an Islamic perspective Zionism is incompatible with Judaism and has failed to provide security or dignity for Jews. He contends that life in Israel is defined by conflict, militarization, and dependence on international powers, making the state the "greatest failure" of Zionism. Al-Faruqi calls for the dismantling of Zionism, suggesting that Israeli Jews who renounce it could live as an "ummatic community" within the Muslim world, following Jewish law under rabbinic courts within an Islamic framework.

ISIS claims that we are living in the Islamic end times and that Jews in Israel are allies of the Dajjal, the Muslim counterpart to the Christian Antichrist. In its view, Muslims must take over historic Palestine before the Dajjal can be defeated.

Left-wing politics

According to New York University social and cultural theorist Susie Linfield, one of the most pressing questions facing the New Left after World War II was "How can we maintain our traditional universalist values in light of the nationalist movements sweeping the formerly colonized world?" During the late 1960s, anti-Zionism became part of a collection of sentiments within far-left politics, including anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism. In this environment, Zionism became a representation of Western power. Philosopher Jean Améry argued that this "Zionism" was merely a straw man redefinition of the term, used to mean world Jewry. The far-left Israeli politician Simha Flapan lamented in 1968, "The socialist world approved the 'Holy War' of the Arabs against Israel in the disguise of a struggle against imperialism. ... Having agreed to the devaluation of its own ideals, [it] was ready to enter an alliance with reactionary and chauvinist appeals to genocide."

The British historian James R. Vaughan traces the emergence of an anti-Zionist movement in Britain in the 1960s, involving the right-wing Labour Party MP Christopher Mayhew (the founder of the Labour Middle East Council) and Conservative allies in the Council for Arab-British Understanding, and growing in the 1970s with the newspaper Free Palestine], the Young Liberal 'Red Guard' faction, the Labour Herald newspaper, and Palestine Action (founded by Ghada Karmi in 1972):

In their press and publicity work, Mayhew, his allies in CAABU and LMEC, and their associates in groups like Palestine Action developed a campaigning language of anti-Zionism which proved to be both hugely influential and highly controversial.

This campaign language included the apartheid analogy, questioning Ashemazi Jewish origins in Israel, equating Zionism with Nazism, and claims of dual loyalty. Vaughan notes that this movement became more left-wing from the 1980s, when, as David Cesarani has suggested, "the mass-based left [in Britain] adopted anti-Zionism as a 'poster issue'".

In 1969, West German left-wing anti-Zionists placed a bomb in a Jewish Community Center. A series of anti-Zionist aircraft hijackings took place in the 1970s with left-wing groups' support. The most famous of these was the 1976 Air France hijacking perpetrated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in coordination with the Revolutionary Cells. The hijackers released all the non-Jewish hostages without Israeli citizenship, but kept all the Israeli citizens (including those with dual citizenship) and Jewish people for ransom. The separation of Jewish non-Israelis and Israelis from non-Israelis, which, in essence, meant separating out the Jewish passengers generally, shocked many on the German left. To Joschka Fischer, the way the hijackers treated Jews reflected the violent, Nazi-like implications of anti-Zionism. A few years later, the Revolutionary Cells and another anti-Zionist group attempted to firebomb two German movie theaters that were showing a movie based on the hijacking.

Far-right politics

Anti-Zionism has a long history of being supported by individuals and groups associated with Third Position, right-wing, and fascist (or "neo-fascist") political views. Several militantly racist groups and their leaders are anti-Zionist, such as David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and various other Aryan / white-supremacist groups. In these instances, anti-Zionism is usually also deeply antisemitic, and often revolves around conspiracy theories discussed below.

Conspiracy theories

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came to be exploited by Arab anti-Zionists, although some have tried to discourage its usage. The Protocols itself makes no reference to Zionism, but after World War I, claims that the book is a record of the Zionist Congress became routine. The first Arabic translation of The Protocols was published in 1925, contemporaneous with a major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

A similar conspiracy theory is the belief in a powerful, well-financed "Zionist lobby" that clamps down on criticism of Israel and conceals its crimes. For example, some advocates of this theory claim Zionists are in "control of our media" and "suborned Britain's civil structures, including government, parliament, and the press."

Anthony Julius argues that anti-Zionism is a major component of Holocaust denial. According to one strain of Holocaust denial, Zionists cooperated with the Nazis and are complicit in the crimes committed during the Holocaust. Deniers see Israel as having somehow benefited from what they call "the big lie" of the Holocaust. Some deniers say their ideology is motivated by concern for Palestinian rights.

Christian anti-Zionism

Although there is major Christian support for Zionism, Christian anti-Zionism has appeared in both Protestant and Catholic contexts, with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) criticizing Zionism in political terms and the Catholic Church opposing it on theological grounds.

Haredi Judaism

Most Orthodox religious groups have accepted and actively support the State of Israel, even if they have not adopted "Zionist" ideology. Most religious Zionists hold pro-Israel views from a right-wing viewpoint. The main exceptions are Hasidic groups such as Satmar Hasidim and smaller Hasidic groups. Many Hasidic rabbis oppose the creation of a Jewish state.

Several Haredi groups not only oppose Zionism but also do not recognize the State of Israel. In July 1947, Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, Chief Rabbi of the Jerusalem-based Edah HaChareidis, declared to the United Nations his "definite opposition to a Jewish state in any part of Palestine".

Among the anti-Zionist sects are Shomer Emunim (and its offshoots, Toldos Aharon, and Toldos Avrohom Yitzchok), Mishkenos HoRoim, and Dushinsky. The largest anti-Zionist Hasidic group is Satmar, which has around 100,000 adherents worldwide (as of 2026). The group's position was crystallized by its leader, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who authored comprehensive and polemic tracts detailing his opposition to Zionism. He encouraged his followers who live in Israel to form self-sufficient communities, rejecting social state benefits, and not to vote in Israeli elections. He instructed his people not to visit the Western Wall and other holy sites Israel captured in the 1967 war. In 1959, Teitelbaum published the book VaYoel Moshe, which expounds an Orthodox position for anti-Zionism based on a derivation of halacha from an aggadic passage in the Babylonian Talmud's tractate Ketubot 111a.

One of the most extreme anti-Zionist Haredi sects is the Neturei Karta. Formed in 1938 as a breakaway from Agudath Israel, its 5,000 members are based mainly in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Despite their shared opposition to Zionism, Satmar and other anti-Zionist Haredi groups often criticize the Neturei Karta and publicly distance themselves from it.

Shifting positions on Zionism

Before World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, the debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists was largely an internal Jewish affair; the questions it sought to answer involved Jewish self-definition and the proper use of political power in the Jewish diaspora. After the Holocaust, the debate largely subsided in the Jewish community. Most prewar Jewish anti-Zionists died in the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel, or became disillusioned by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, individual Jews have changed their position on Zionism:

Jacob Israël de Haan made aliyah to Palestine in 1919 as a convinced religious Zionist. Deeply troubled by Zionist attitudes toward Arabs, he began to champion Arab rights while also advocating on behalf of the Orthodox Ashkenazi Agudat Israel / Haredim communities, which maintained excellent relations with Arabs, and with which he felt more spiritually aligned. His effectiveness with the Mandatory authorities in protesting Zionist claims to represent all Jews while they ignored dissent from Jerusalem's anti-Zionist orthodox communities was resented. He was ridiculed by Zionists, who assassinated him in 1924.

Isaac Deutscher decidedly opposed Zionism, then changed his mind after the Holocaust, supporting the foundation of Israel, even at the Palestinians' expense. He then wavered between contempt for Arab states' antisemitic demagoguery and odium for Israelis' fanatical triumphalism. In "Prussians of the Middle East", at the end of the Six-Day War, he wrote that the victory would prove to be a disaster for Israel.

Noam Chomsky is often said to be an anti-Zionist. He has said that the word "Zionism" has changed connotations since his youth, with the boundaries of what are considered Zionist and anti-Zionist views shifting. The Zionist groups he led as a youth would now be called anti-Zionist because they mostly opposed the idea of a Jewish state. In 1947, in his youth, Chomsky's support for a socialist binational state, in conjunction with his opposition to any semblance of a theocratic system of governance in Israel, was considered well within the mainstream of secular Zionism; by 1987, it put him solidly in the anti-Zionist camp.

Some criticism of Israel by Zionists has led other Zionists to mistake them for anti-Zionists. One can oppose the formation of a Jewish national state and yet not be anti-Zionist. This was the case with the political heirs of the cultural Zionism tradition founded by Ahad Ha'am, such as Brit Shalom and, later, Ihud. Hannah Arendt, who worked for the Jewish Agency for Palestine in the 1930s and was active in facilitating Jewish migration to Palestine from France, devoted much of her thinking in the 1940s to a critique of political Zionism. The Zionism she advocated had a broader definition: Jewish political agency anywhere. When partition was imminent, she came out strongly against the concept of a Jewish, as opposed to binational, state. While writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, she clarified her views: "I am not against Israel on principle, I am against certain important Israeli policies." Arendt took Israel's side in the Arab–Israeli conflict and rejoiced at its victory in the Six-Day War.

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism

Anti-Zionism spans a range of political, social, and religious views. Shany Mor, an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, argues anti-Zionism is not the same as either antisemitism or criticism of Israel but that these phenonena overlap. He identifies three "clusters" of anti-Zionism: an older Jewish anti-Zionism exemplified by the Bund, and not antisemitic; the anti-Zionism of the Arab and Muslim world, which rejects any sovereign Jewish presence in the Middle East; and a contemporary, Christian-inflected Zionism that sees Zionism as an absolute evil, which draws on antisemitism for its power.

According to Dov Waxman, there is:an important difference in how many Jews and many Palestinians understand Zionism and anti-Zionism. Jews (for understandable reasons) tend to think of Zionism as a principle—namely, that Jews have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Palestinians (for understandable reasons) tend to think of Zionism as a practice—how it has actually been implemented and what it has entailed for Palestinians. Many Jews, therefore, view anti-Zionism as a rejection of a Jewish right to self-determination, which they regard as discriminatory. Many Palestinians (& their allies), by contrast, view anti-Zionism as opposition to the historical and current practices of Zionism. They oppose Zionism not because it is a Jewish national movement, but because it has resulted in Palestinian dispossession and the denial of Palestinian rights. These different understandings shape the current debate over whether anti-Zionism is or is not antisemitic.

Civil rights attorney Kenneth L. Marcus, a pro-Israel advocate and former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, identifies four main views on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, at least in North America:

that anti-Zionism is antisemitic in its essence and in most, if not all, of its manifestations. Marcus notes that "Relatively few commentators have taken the more extreme position that all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism", but gives the example of Irwin Cotler as someone who takes this position.

that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are both analytically and historically distinct, but the two ideologies have merged since 1948. Marcus attributes this view to Robert Wistrich.

The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently or almost always antisemitic

Jean Améry became convinced that anti-Zionism was an updated version of the antisemitism he experienced as a Holocaust survivor. In a 1969 essay, he argues that the anti-Zionists of his time may not have ill intentions against all Jews, but their intentions are irrelevant. Their philosophy has a centuries-old pedigree beginning with the false charge of deicide and culminating in Nazi propaganda. Améry did not expect anti-Zionists of his time to take an unbending pro-Israel stance in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; he merely beseeched them to think critically, use common sense, and judge Israel fairly.

In 1973, Abba Eban wrote that one of the chief tasks of dialogue with the gentile world "is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism." In 1975, he said: "Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to their lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination."

According to historian Ilan Pappé, after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—with AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen's support—sought to "portray certain 'anti-Israel' actions as anti-Semitic", especially with regard to international calls for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. In 1974, ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein published The New Anti-Semitism, which identified anti-Zionism as a "new antisemitism", an idea the ADL has sought to popularize since the early 1970s.

In the early 2000s, it became increasingly commonplace for Israel's defenders to regard criticism of Zionism and Israel as tantamount to, interchangeable with, or closely related to antisemitism. It was claimed that a "new antisemitism" had emerged that was rooted in anti-Zionism. Advocates of this notion argue that much of what purports to be criticism of Israel and Zionism is demonization, and has led to an international resurgence of attacks on Jews and Jewish symbols and an increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discourse. Critics of the concept argue that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is inaccurate, sometimes obscures valid criticism of Israel, and trivializes antisemitism.

The argument that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic but can be

Kenneth Marcus says that in the 2000s analyses and definitions emerged of exactly when anti-Zionism is antisemitic, saying that four conditions are often identified: (1) Using "classic anti-Semitic stereotypes" to characterize Israel, which may also include "demonization" of Israelis, similar to older characterizations of the Jewish people as the "embodiment of evil. (2) "Applying double standards[which may involve] requiring behavior of [Israel] not expected ... of any other" nations' or denying the Jewish people rights and legitimacy afforded other nations, including the right of self-determination." (3) "Drawing comparisons" between Israel and Nazi Germany. (4) "Holding Jews collectively responsible" for Israeli actions and policy, regardless of actual complicity.

For example, the 2003–04 European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) report aroused intense controversy over aspects of its provisory definition of antisemitism, which many regarded as ambiguous in blurring distinctions to the point that the boundary between the two concepts became porous. The IHRA definition of antisemitism (originally developmed by the EUMC) was an attempt to clarify this line. Critics of the definition say it has been used to classify opposition to Zionism as antisemitism.

In 2010, Oxford University Press published Anthony Julius's book Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. In it, Julius claims that the borders between anti-Zionism and antisemitism are porous. He concedes that it is possible to be in conflict with a Jewish ideology without discriminating against Jews, but argues that anti-Zionists cross the line so often as to make the distinction meaningless.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, drafted in 2021 by more than 200 scholars of Jewish studies, uses an overlapping but different set of criteria for determining when anti-Zionism is antisemitic. For example, it says that supporting a one-state solution or denying Jews the right to a state is not inherently antisemitic: "It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants 'between the river and the sea,' whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form." Similarly, the JDA doesn't identify Nazi comparisons as inherently antisemitic, while IHRA does.

The argument that the two are not correlated

In 1978, Fred Halliday, arguing against the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, wrote that disavowals were constantly required.

Two empirical studies published in the 2010s, focused on the US and Germany respectively, which explored anti-Israel sentiment rather than "anti-Zionism", did not find a statistical correlation between criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism:

Political scientist Peter Beattie conducted the survey of US adults to test the purported link between criticism of Israel and antisemitism and found no necessary empirical correlation, cautioning that assertions of such an inherent connection are calumnious. He concludes, "Most of those critical of Israeli policies are not anti-Semites. Only a fraction of the US population harbours anti-Semitic views, and while logically this fraction would be overrepresented among critics of Israel, the present and prior research indicate that they comprise only a small part."

The German sociologist Werner Bergmann's analysis of polling data from Germany concluded that whereas right-wing respondents critical of Israel tend to have views overlapping with classical antisemitism, left-wing interviewees' criticisms of Israel do not involve criticism of Jews.

Peter Beinart argues that "barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot".

Former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Antony Lerman argues: The anti-Zionism equals antisemitism argument drains the word antisemitism of any useful meaning. For it means that to count as an antisemite, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has the right to exist as a state, without having to subscribe to any of those things which historians have traditionally regarded as making up an antisemitic worldview: hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews generated communism and control capitalism, belief that Jews are racially inferior and so on. Moreover, while theoretically allowing that criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate, in practice, it virtually proscribes any such thing.