I’ve watched what antizionism does to Jews. I’ve seen it pressure and push and violently demand. Some fold, others get crushed, and almost every Jewish person I talk with has described its sinking weight. I’ve been messaged by many who are ashamed of lying low, being quiet, losing a piece of themselves just to get past a day.

I wish I could act superior and say I’d never compromise, but life is too complex, and I won’t pretend to know what I haven’t faced. Sometimes you have to pick your battles. Sometimes to protect yourself and others you have to shrink, defer, and postpone. 

At the same time, I see more and more people clapping back, being bold, and refusing to be crushed. They won’t suffer ignorance, shy away, or cower under duress. It’s these who are the first to say what I’m about to.

I’ve kept my voice level a long time and I’m unsure being careful helps anymore. I don’t have a neutral word for what I see, nor do I desire one. It’s bullying I see, and bullies don’t stop at silence. So if you feel what I feel, let’s begin where they do and name it.

Hold this definition, because it’s the one that matches the world. Presumptuous, perhaps. Correct, certainly. It’s worth sounding overly-confident for. 

This is an instrument for detection. Point it at the last three years and compare what’s happened. Marches of mobs have chanted homicidal slogans at synagogues, not embassies. A father and son went to a Hanukkah crowd, not a consulate. “F@ck Israel” was spray-painted on a federation building, not a foreign ministry. The inverted red triangle, “from the river to the sea,” Globalize the Intifada, Zionism is Racism, apartheid, genocide, colonizer, child-killer, ethnostate. That’s what’s being said, and it’s the language of modern antizionism.

Elias Rodriguez shot two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington last May and shouted “Free, Free Palestine” as they took him. If you want hear those exact words as chants, there’s a crowd of people who do so. The doubled “Free” was his way of signaling the cause. Ayman Ghazali drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield with thirty-five gallons of gasoline, after searching for “the largest gathering of Israelis in Michigan.” He had just posted that Israel was “pure evil.” 

Neither man reached for the words we are used to Jews hearing. They spoke the language I’ve been studying since October 8, the language of the NYT opinion section and the postcolonial seminar. The march and the truck. Ghazali and Rodriguez. Kristof and Khalidi. 

It doesn’t need to be antisemitism to hate Jews. It doesn’t need to resemble anything we’ve been used to. Antizionism is different, having its own source, libels, and........

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