Anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism. Zionism is a political ideology like any other, and opposing it is normal politics.

The fuller answer

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Nobody has to authorise you to have this argument. It turns up in seminar rooms, on phone-ins and at family dinners. You can hold your end of it without a title or an organisation behind you.

Before you open your mouth. Delivered as an accusation, everything below fails. You are arguing about where a position lands, never about what is inside somebody’s head. Keep those apart and the conversation survives.

Concede the true part, then stop

It is possible to oppose Zionism with no hostility towards Jews, and Jews have done it since the movement began. The Bund argued that Jews would win their rights where they already lived. Satmar and other haredi communities opposed Jewish sovereignty on theological grounds. The people holding those positions were Jews, so hostility to Jews cannot explain them.

That is your first sentence, and now use it. Every one of those traditions was an argument among Jews about how Jews should be safe. None was a demand that this people alone give up what every other people has. Ask which of the two is in front of you, because only one has Jewish ancestors.

Swap the country

This is the move that does the most work in the least time, and it costs you nothing to make.

“You’ve got no problem with Pakistanis. You think Pakistan has no right to exist. Would you say that out loud?”

They would not. Pakistan was founded in 1947 on an explicitly religious national claim, by a movement organised in 1906, at a cost in displacement and death far beyond 1948, and it has an official state religion. Nobody outside a fringe proposes dissolving it, and nobody who attacks its government thinks that commits them to ending the country.

That is the whole force of the test. The objection is not that they are wrong about Israel. It is that professing no hostility to a people while denying their state the right to exist is a position nobody applies anywhere else on earth, and a standard that exists in one place is not a standard.

Substitute freely: Bangladesh in 1971, Slovenia in 1991, South Sudan in 2011. Pakistan is sharpest because the parallel is closest and almost nobody has a prepared answer for it.

“Swap the country and say it back to me. If it sounds wrong with Pakistan in it, tell me what’s different.”

“So what does your plan look like?”

Somebody who says the state should not exist is proposing something. Make them describe it. This is the question that ends the exchange, because the honest answers are all bad and the dishonest ones collapse under one follow-up.

“Say you got what you wanted tomorrow. Walk me through it. Who governs, from when, and what happens to the 7.7 million Jews who live there?”

Then stop talking and let it sit.

One state for everybody. Fair enough, so ask the follow-up. What happens the first time the new majority votes to end Jewish immigration, and what is the guarantee for the minority when it does? Then ask them to name the multi-ethnic state in that region whose treatment of minorities they would like this modelled on.

They can go back to Europe. The Jewish communities of Baghdad, Sana’a, Tripoli and the rest of the region stood at 851,000 in 1948 and are under 4,000 now, and Israel is where those people were absorbed, which is set out in the entry on the other refugees. Ask which country is taking their grandchildren back.

It would be worked out afterwards. Say back exactly what that means: dismantle a state first, design the safety of 7.7 million people later.

No answer at all. That is the answer, and everybody listening heard it.

None of this accuses anybody of anything. You asked a procedural question about their own proposal, and the discomfort in the room belongs to them.

It is a national liberation movement, and it is older than they think

Most people on our side reach straight for a test that catches the other person out. Reach for the positive claim instead. It is stronger ground and it is almost always standing empty.

Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Since 1948 it carries one more thing: that the state which resulted has a right to exist. Not that everything it does is right, which no Zionist has ever been asked to hold about any other country. Simply that it gets to exist. That is the proposition being opposed, and on the chronology it is no latecomer. Hovevei Zion societies organised from 1881, Leon Pinsker published Auto-Emancipation in 1882, Katowice gave the movement a centre in 1884, and the First Zionist Congress met at Basel in August 1897. The All-India Muslim League, which produced Pakistan, was founded in 1906. Sinn Fein dates from 1905. The first Arab Congress met in Paris in 1913. Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all became states later still. Zionism belongs to the wave that produced most of the map, and it started before most of it.

The movement is nineteenth century. The attachment is not. Make this correction whenever somebody implies the connection was invented at Basel, because it is documented rather than asserted.

The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, already takes it as settled that a Jew anywhere must face the Temple to pray, and rules on what to do when you cannot: turn your face if you cannot dismount, and fix your heart on the Holy of Holies if you cannot turn your face. The weekday Amidah, said three times a day ever since, asks God to “raise a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the earth”, and to “return in mercy to Jerusalem, Your city, and dwell therein”. The same Mishnah fixes an annual fast for the Temple’s destruction, kept from then to now.

And people acted on it. Nachmanides reached Acre in the summer of 1267 and went up to Jerusalem, where he found two Jewish brothers, dyers, with about ten Jews joining them for Sabbath prayers. He organised what was left and put a synagogue in a derelict house. It still stands and it carries his name.

The political movement is the last chapter of that, not the first.

“Jews have faced Jerusalem to pray since before Islam existed, and asked to be gathered back three times a day for two thousand years. The politics is Victorian. The longing is not.”

Put the burden where it belongs

Self-determination is not granted case by case. The UN Charter lists respect for the equal rights and self-determination of peoples among its purposes, and around 190 states now exist on that footing.

States with a defining national or religious character are ordinary furniture. Pew studied 199 countries and found 43 with an official state religion: 27 Islam, 13 Christianity, two Buddhism, one Judaism. So the position asking for a defence is not ours. Ask them to justify the exception and let them do the work.

And know where this argument stops. Everything above is about the double standard: they apply to one state a rule they apply nowhere else. Some people answer that they apply it everywhere and that all such states are illegitimate. That is a different argument, it is not answered by the exception test, and it is answered in the entry on Jewish and democratic.

Then check which proposition is at issue. In March 2025 the Jewish Federations of North America asked more than 1,800 American Jews. Thirty-seven per cent accepted the word Zionist. Eighty-eight per cent said Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Those are two different questions, fifty points apart. Argue with the second if the second is what you mean.

Where the line actually sits

One anti-Zionism criticises. Another wants the state gone. Carry that distinction into the room, because it lets you agree with somebody about the West Bank while refusing what they do with it.

The version that goes after the state’s existence rather than its conduct reaches for older material about Jews to get there, which is why it lands where it does on people who had nothing to do with any of it. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed almost 8,000 Jews across 13 countries in 2023. Seventy-five per cent said people hold them responsible for the Israeli government’s actions because they are Jewish.

The IHRA working definition sits at that point. It is non-legally binding, and one of its contemporary examples is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. The same document says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. Quote both halves or you have misquoted it. And know that the Jerusalem Declaration, signed by more than 400 scholars in March 2021, disagrees on exactly this point.

Where this backfires. Used as a lie detector, the argument costs you. Nobody can see inside anybody’s head, and a listener who suspects you are diagnosing rather than arguing stops hearing the content. There is a warning from inside our own side worth taking seriously: stretch the word far enough and you spend it. If everything is antisemitism then nothing is. Ask the question and wait for the answer instead of supplying it.

“But the Palestinians have a claim too”

This is the honest reply, and an answer that cannot handle it is worth nothing.

Recognising a competing national claim does not require abandoning your own. Israel’s founding involved the displacement of another population, and somebody can point at that and say the case differs on its facts rather than on who the people are. Meet that, then ask what follows from it. Displacement attended the founding of Pakistan, of India, of Cyprus and of Poland’s western border. In those cases the remedy people argue for is redress. Here alone it is that the state ought not to exist, and that does not follow from the fact conceded.

A claim that resolves into partition is a national claim. A claim that requires the other side to have none is something else.

The lines

“You can oppose Zionism without hating Jews. People have for over a century, including plenty of Jews. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“You’ve no problem with Pakistanis, but Pakistan has no right to exist? Nobody says that about anywhere else. Why here?”

“Say you got what you wanted. Who governs, from when, and what happens to the seven million Jews who live there?”

“About 190 peoples have self-determination. You’re asking one of them to give it up. Tell me why that one.”

“Palestinians have a claim. I’ve never said otherwise. Does your position leave room for mine, or does it need mine to disappear?”

Practise the two questions

Write two lines with a real day in them.

Action. “On Sunday evening after the washing up, I will practise the Pakistan swap and the what-happens-to-the-Jews question out loud, until both come out in under fifteen seconds.”

Coping. “If somebody tells me their Jewish friend is an anti-Zionist, I will agree that such Jews exist and have for a century, then ask whether their friend’s position leaves room for a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one.”