How "Anti-Zionism" Is Creating Zionists
If being Jewish makes one a "Zio," then one must oppose Anti-Zionism if one opposes Anti-Semitism
Joseph Bottum in the Wall Street Journal explains how "Anti-Zionism" turned him into a Zionist.
I am a Zionist because on the ground, activist anti-Zionism is becoming indistinguishable from antisemitism. Whatever linguistic differences exist, whatever distinctions activists say they hold, the metonymy that glides from shouting against Israel to violence against Jews is too easy, too well-greased, for public figures to refuse blame for the rhetoric that allows it. Jews who own restaurants labeled "zio" and "disgusting humans" in Philadelphia, a Jewish center's mural painted over with "Zionism is not welcome" in California, a synagogue's signs defaced with initials for the slogan "All Zionists Are Bastards" in Maryland—the tropes of anti-Zionism slip quickly into the tropes of antisemitism. . . .
I have come to full-blown Zionism—because that is the most coherent way to oppose the activists, left and right, who aim at something profoundly antithetical to the American spirit. "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights," George Washington wrote in 1790 to a Jewish congregation. "For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."
This doesn't mean uncritical agreement with everything the government of Israel does. It means that our current forms of activist anti-Zionism would make the U.S. a place wildly different from the one Washington envisioned. . . .
As long as we have a social politics in which antisemitism wears the cloak of anti-Zionism, the duty of Americans is clear: When Jews are targeted as Jews, the solidarity the moment requires from the rest of us is standing up as Zionists.