Antisemitism has learned how to pass a background check.

It no longer shouts.

It governs.

For years, Jews who warned that anti-Zionism was simply antisemitism with better manners were told to relax. Anti-Zionism, we were assured, was a critique of a state, not hostility toward a people. If Jews felt targeted, that was unfortunate, but also, beside the point.

That argument collapsed this week.

But to understand why, you have to start with history. Because none of this is new.

When Theodor Herzl argued at the end of the 19th century that Jewish emancipation without sovereignty was an illusion, he wasn’t indulging paranoia. He was describing a recurring condition. Jews could assimilate, contribute, convert, even patriotize, and still be told they did not belong. Zionism was not born of triumph. It was born of pattern recognition.

The pattern hardened in 1975, when the international community made the quiet part loud. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared that Jewish self-determination itself was racist, while leaving every other national movement untouched. Arab nationalism was fine. Turkish nationalism was fine. Dozens of post-colonial national projects were celebrated. Only the Jewish one was deemed illegitimate. Welcome to the 20th-century double standard.

The resolution was eventually revoked. The logic behind it was not.

That logic is anti-Zionism’s engine: Jews may exist as individuals, even thrive as a minority—but not as a people with power. Not with borders. Not with sovereignty. Not with the same moral presumption afforded to everyone else.

For decades, this worldview remained largely rhetorical. It lived on campuses, in NGOs, and in activist spaces where it could be dismissed as overheated moral theater.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)