In the words of philosopher Martin Gak, the task for anti-Zionist Jews is to “wrench from Israel the voice of our conscience and the voice of our identity, ending the Israeli occupation of Judaism, and finally burying the Zionist consensus within the Jewish community.” This gesture is not symbolic; it is urgent, vital, and deeply political. While Zionism drags Judaism into complicity with genocide, occupation, and apartheid, Judeophobia also grows as a blind and painful reaction to this horror. Breaking with this logic is a historical responsibility.
Zionism did not arise from traditional Judaism, nor was it a direct consequence of the persecutions suffered by Jews in Europe. Its origins are deeply rooted in 19th-century European imperialism and the racist, nationalist, and colonial ideas that dominated that era. It was not a collective response by Jewish communities but rather a colonial project based on a modern, secular, elitist, and Eurocentric ideology.
Even before Theodor Herzl, Christian Zionism had laid the ideological foundations for the colonial project in Palestine. Since the 17th century, currents of British imperial Protestantism, especially Anglicanism and later American evangelism, promoted the “restoration” of the Jews to the Holy Land as a condition for the Second Coming of Christ. The 1917 Balfour Declaration is a concrete expression of this convergence between geostrategic interests and theological millenarianism.
Zionism, therefore, was from its inception a colonial project that aspired to establish a European colony in the Middle East. Herzl himself spoke of founding a “bulwark of Europe against Asia,” unambiguously anticipating the geopolitical function of the future State of Israel. Far from being an ideology of liberation, Zionism became a tool of global neocolonialism.
Jewish resistance to this appropriation existed from the outset. Anti-Zionism is not a recent reaction nor is it a strategy to “clean up” the image of Jews in the face of Israel’s crimes. It is a political, ethical, and philosophical tradition that has run through the entire 20th century — and today it is gaining renewed strength in the shadow of the escalating crisis of the Israeli state.
One of the most significant examples was the Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, founded in 1897. The Bund was a socialist, secular, and anti-Zionist labor movement that fought for the rights of Jews in their places of origin, promoted Yiddish as a cultural and political language, and opposed forced emigration to Palestine. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Bund militants participated in the armed resistance alongside other Jewish groups. Marek Edelman, its best-known leader and second-in-command of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), survived and remained a radical critic of Zionism throughout his life.
Yet history also reveals alliances that seem inconceivable but actually occurred, such as the collaboration between Zionism and Nazism. In the name of the Jewish national project, the Zionist movement established agreements with the Third Reich. The best known is the Haavara Agreement (1933), which allowed German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for breaking the international economic boycott against Nazi Germany.
While thousands of Jews were being persecuted, deported, or murdered, part of the Zionist leadership cut deals with the enemy, prioritizing the project of a “Jewish state” over solidarity with their own communities.
This history is painful, but we have to confront it. Because while some fought the Nazis in the streets and forests of Europe, others sought to exploit terror to pursue their colonial plans.
In this context, it is understandable that some might seek an image, a metaphor, or something that allows us to grasp the horror of what is happening in Gaza today. But we have to be careful in constructing these historical parallels; otherwise, we risk falling into dangerous simplifications or even into the antisemitic frameworks that Zionism itself has promoted to shield itself from criticism.
For instance, it is often repeated that what Israel is doing today is a tragedy perpetrated by the survivors and descendants of the Holocaust, as if there were a natural continuity between the trauma of the Jews and the oppression of the Palestinian people. It is a powerful statement in terms of its symbolic impact, but it is weak from a historical and political point of view.
The truth is that most of those who colonized Palestine and founded the State of Israel were not Holocaust survivors. The main waves of Jewish migration to Palestine began in the late 19th century and intensified from 1882 to 1939, long before the Nazi genocide. By 1939, there were already more than 450,000 Jews living in Palestine under the British Mandate. In other words, a significant proportion of the Zionist settlement predated the Holocaust and was motivated by nationalist, economic, or ideological reasons, not Nazi persecution.
After the war, survivors did migrate, but not all of them went to Palestine. Many settled in the United States, Latin America, or western Europe. Furthermore, the vast majority of poor, left-wing, or anti-fascist Jews remained in Europe and were precisely those who ended up in the extermination camps. Zionism, far from representing all Jewish communities, was a colonialist movement of European origin that was often criticized — or even repudiated — by whole segments of the Jewish population, especially internationalists, socialists, and religious Jews.
We Must Separate Judaism from Zionism
What Israel is doing today is not “revenge” for the Holocaust. It is not the transmutation of pain into violence. It is a colonial project supported by Western powers, one that instrumentalizes the trauma of genocide to justify contemporary crimes. There is no historical justice in that. There is no redemption. There is only an occupation that uses the collective memory of the Jews as a weapon.
And that is why it is so dangerous to repeat phrases such as “the victims became executioners” without nuance. While they may sound shocking, they also reinforce the false premise that Jews as a whole are represented by the State of Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Today, more than ever, when Gaza is burning and the horror seems endless, we need ethical and historical precision. Not only to denounce the ongoing genocide but also to ensure that our words do not reinforce — even unintentionally — the same hate speech that, in other times, led us into the abyss.
The weaponization of collective suffering did more than steer large segments of the Jewish community off course; it also laid the foundations for an enduring ideological confusion that persists to this day, in which Judaism, Zionism, and antisemitism blur together, deliberately and dangerously intertwined.
Antisemitism is not a neutral or eternal concept. The word was coined in the 19th century by the anti-Jewish German journalist Wilhelm Marr, using the false racial concept of “Semite.” In reality, there is no Semitic race or ethnicity; it is a linguistic classification that includes Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages.
The exclusive use of the term “antisemitism” to refer to hatred against Jews has sought to erase other forms of racism that affect people designated as “Semites” (because of the language they speak), such as the Palestinian people.
That is why some of us propose using the term “Judeophobia” to accurately name hatred and discrimination against Jews without reproducing a category invented by European racism or accepting the conceptual framework imposed by Zionism, which identifies Jews with Israel and thus disqualifies any criticism of Israel as an expression of hatred or “antisemitism.”
In this context, not only has the meaning of “antisemitism” been distorted, but all forms of anti-colonial resistance that criticize the State of Israel have been criminalized, even when coming from Jewish voices.
In countries such as Germany, France, the United States, and Argentina, pro-Palestinian activists face legal proceedings, firings, deportations, defamation, and state violence. Examples abound: the anti-Zionist Jewish organization Jüdische Stimme has faced persecution in Germany; members of PAL Action collective in the United Kingdom have been arrested and risk severe sentences; in France, leader Anasse Kazib has been accused of antisemitism for his support of Palestine; in the U.S., activists have been jailed, deported, or threatened with laws that equate boycotts and civil disobedience with terrorism; Francesca Albanese, UN rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, has been targeted with pressure and threats for denouncing the genocide in Gaza. In Argentina, Jewish actor and film director Norman Briski, Congresswoman Vanina Biasi, and journalist Alejandro Bodart are similarly facing a campaign of criminalization.
This legal and media war is no accident. It is part of a global context of rising neofascism, in which the language of human rights has been emptied of meaning and turned into a tool of domination, to the point of calling a concentration camp a “humanitarian city.” Resistance is redefined as “terrorism,” dissent as “hate,” and the defense of life as “dangerous radicalism.”
Israel is a key player in neocolonialism and the global imperial order. It is not just any state. Since its founding, it has operated as a military and technological enclave of the West in the heart of the Middle East. It has armed, trained, and supported dictatorships, such as apartheid South Africa and military juntas in Latin America. It has collaborated with right-wing regimes such as Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina. It sold arms to the Guatemalan government and trained its army and paramilitary forces responsible for the Mayan genocide, during which more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared from 1960 to 1996, including the “Silent Holocaust” of 1982–83. It has even been linked to terrorist networks such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
All this is done in permanent alliance with the United States and the European Union, which support Israel economically, diplomatically, and militarily. Western complicity in the current genocide in Gaza is not an omission; it is a policy. International law has been instrumentalized by imperialist powers to punish enemies and protect allies. There is no International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court for the empire’s allies, including threats against judges who have issued international arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his top ministers.
All this reveals that Gaza is not an exception to but a reflection of a world order that normalizes dehumanization, an order in which life can be annihilated with impunity before the eyes of the world. It is a territory blockaded, besieged, and converted into a laboratory for surveillance, control, and extermination. Thus, it reflects the mechanisms of global domination: the racialization of the enemy, necropolitics, and technology serving death, with propaganda as official truth.
Gaza has thus become a universal symbol of collective punishment, a global model of domination that is being tested.
As Francesca Albanese has pointed out, what is at stake in Palestine is the future of international law and of humanity itself. And as philosopher Rodrigo Karmy affirms, “Everything is Gaza”:
An entire population can be subjected to extermination without the law being able to prevent it. … ‘Everything is Gaza’ means that no one can be safe, there is no safe place because no protection is possible anymore. There is no legal protection (impunity reigns), no economic protection (job insecurity is rampant), and no political protection (conflicts escalate every day).
Faced with the breakdown of shared human values, anti-Zionism does not emerge merely as a denunciation or protest but as an ethical and political horizon from which to rebuild a common humanity.
Being anti-Zionist today is not just an opinion; it is an ethical stance, a political decision, and an act of decolonization of consciousness. For those of us who are Jewish, it means reclaiming our history of struggle, our collective memory, and our ethics of justice. It means returning to a Judaism of critical questioning and internationalist solidarity.
But it is also a universal call. Palestine challenges us all. Zionism threatens not only the Palestinian people but also the very future of humanity. Defeating imperialism and neofascism requires confronting their most sophisticated forms: those that manipulate historical memory, invoking the role of the absolute victim to perpetuate the crimes of the Israeli occupation.
Faced with this machinery of global impunity, the people are resisting. A new intifada seems to be sweeping the world.
Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of an anti-Zionist spring. If so, it will be because we have finally managed to wrest from Israel’s grip the voice of our collective conscience. Above all, it will be because Palestine is leading the way to liberate humanity through its unyielding resistance and the sumud (steadfastness) of its people, who are teaching us what it means to live with the courage and dignity to break at last the pact between colonialism and silence.
Originally published in Spanish on July 18, 2025 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translated with DeepL and edited by Rita Singer.
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