Israel-haters’ incendiary rebranding of Zionism

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Thursday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Around the Birmingham, England, stadium where Aston Villa played a European soccer match against Maccabi Tel Aviv last week, anti-Israel activists had plastered posters branding Zionism illicit, murderous and terrorist in its nature and essence.

Various placards proclaimed “Zionists not welcome,” accused Israel of “shooting babies in Gaza,” demanded “Give Zionism the red card” — soccer parlance for removal from the field of play for illicit behavior — and, perhaps most pernicious of all, instructed: “If you see a Zionist, call the anti-terror hotline.”

Maccabi’s fans were not present. They had been banned from the game for purported security reasons (which rather makes one wonder why 700 police were required to secure an event from which the ostensibly threatening presence had been excluded). Now, the Israel-haters were stepping up their longstanding campaign to globally demonize, delegitimize and ultimately deny the world’s only Jewish-majority state the means to defend itself against aggressors in the Middle East avowedly seeking to wipe it out.

“If you see a Zionist, call the anti-terror hotline,” a placard worded in the tone of official security announcements intended to protect the public from murderous killers, sought, at the very least, to equate those who support the right of the Jews to a homeland safe from murderous persecution with the dismal array of terrorist organizations that seek to take innocent lives without compunction, notably including those Islamic extremist terror groups bent on eliminating Israel.

Some of those who hung such placards from the lampposts around the Villa Park stadium would protest that they are not antisemites but “merely” anti-Zionists — not hostile to Jews in general, but “only” to Israelis and those who care about the well-being of that small patch of Middle Eastern territory that marks the only place where the Jewish nation has ever been sovereign, and where Jewish sovereignty was revived by UN mandate in 1947, unfortunately too late to save 6 million European Jews from Nazi genocide.

The mayor-elect of New York, the world’s most populous Jewish city, might say much the same. Zohran Mamdani insists he is thoroughly supportive of Jews, inside and outside his city, but he has backed Hamas supporters, has equivocated on whether Hamas should lay down its arms, was disinclined to condemn the call to “globalize the intifada,” and supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims not only to isolate Israel but also to prevent it from obtaining the arms it needs to protect itself against the likes of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The fact is, however, that if the prime, or in most cases the only, focus of your human rights activism is to target Israel — if you don’t take to the streets in support, for instance, of Gazans being murdered by Hamas, or masses being slaughtered in Sudan or any other of the world’s innumerable combat zones, and, needless to say, would not dream of taking a placard onto the streets in support of Jews and other Israelis being slaughtered by Hamas — then, that’s antisemitism.

Terribly, Israel has lately been making it easier for the dyed-in-the-wool Israel-haters to recruit, thanks to a governing coalition that includes far-right Jewish supremacists seeking the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and encouraging the “voluntary transfer” of their Palestinian residents. And that government has instituted obviously harmful policies such as imposing an 11-week bar on aid entering Gaza earlier this year, in the futile hope that this would pressure Hamas into releasing hostages and with the complacent caveat that there was sufficient food and other aid already available in the Strip.

Furthermore, we are currently witnessing a surge in violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank — notably surrounding their olive harvest — by extremist settlers and their supporters, sometimes with IDF forces at best turning a blind eye, and with the indulgence of law enforcement, which fails to prosecute offenders in the vast majority of cases.

The effect of these developments is not only to boost the Israel-haters but also to alienate Israel-lovers, including a widening swath of the Jewish Diaspora. For some of them, too, Zionism is becoming a cause with which they do not wish to identify.

But that is not authentic Zionism; that is not what most Israelis and supporters of Israel regard as Zionism.

Authentic Zionism is, broadly, support for the Jewish people’s right to statehood in its ancestral homeland, and its ongoing right to exist in security in the modern State of Israel.

And that state, in turn, as specified in its Declaration of Independence, “will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

A Jewish majority state, in other words, with equal rights for all its inhabitants — a unique entity in the widely despotic, undemocratic Middle East.

The “If you see a Zionist, call the anti-terror hotline” slogan does more than equate Zionism with terrorism; it seeks to legitimize the targeting of all who live in and love Israel, by branding us all terrorists.

Its dissemination, largely unremarked upon, its malevolent, incendiary rebranding of Zionism as a force of evil, crosses yet another red line in the international effort to achieve Israel’s demise. And it will doubtless reappear along with ever more vicious anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and, yes, antisemitic words. And deeds.