By Esti DeAngelis, Managing Editor
After terrorists murdered 15 people at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, something particularly revealing happened on X. First, a popular pop culture account posted a statement released by Australian singer and actor Troye Sivan in the hours after the massacre. It read, in part, “My heart is broken. Thinking tonight of the victims and their families, the Bondi and wider Sydney communities, and for every Jewish person in this country.” This statement was reposted by another X user, who has a Palestinian flag in his screen name. That user’s caption read as follows: “Oh brother this guy STINKS.” Though his comments were flooded with others telling him he was being antisemitic, the post received 17,000 likes.
Sivan’s statement did not mention Israel, and he has not been vocal on Israeli-Palestinian issues in the last two years. He is, however, Jewish.
It was reactions like the extreme response to Sivan’s statement that sparked a trend I’ve been noticing for the first time since October 7: pro-Palestinians observing that some anti-Zionists sound explicitly antisemitic.
To be fair, their logic was deeply flawed: For them, it was okay to mourn the Bondi Beach massacre because these were ordinary Jews who shouldn’t be associated with the evil ideology that is Zionism. Because of this, they probably won’t leave the movement nor consider how they would react if the celebration being attacked was explicitly Zionist. Most likely, they will shove away any memories of the attack and those who refused to condemn it and continue on without changing their ideological conceptions.
Another related incident I saw online in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack was some pro-Palestinians and radical Islamists sharing photos of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad rabbi murdered in the attack, with IDF soldiers. This, for them, justified his murder. He was a Zionist, and, as the mainstream comparison goes, Zionists are Nazis, and they deserve to die. I did not see pro-Palestinians engage in a large-scale defense or even acknowledgement of these photos. See, those who aren’t explicitly calling for open season on Jews are left in a tricky predicament. Murdering Jews is certainly antisemitic, they insist, but they also cannot mourn the death of someone seen smiling alongside IDF soldiers. So, they mourn the Bondi Beach attack in vague terms, but only because they ignore any proof of Zionist sympathies among the victims. For them, mourning murdered Jews is okay because you shouldn’t assume all Jews are Zionists, not because murdering Jews is wrong, no caveats.
Those who think this way reveal their true beliefs in subtler, less obvious ways. Recently, Jewish actress Odessa A’zion came under fire by pro-Palestinians who accused her of being a Zionist after a photo resurfaced of her wearing an IDF t-shirt when she was 17 years old. Her middle name is also Zion, which she includes in her stage name. A’zion responded directly to the accusations: “debunking!! not a zio!” she posted, followed by a heart emoji. This was enough to placate some but not all of her critics. Those satisfied with her response are endorsing putting Jewish actors through struggle sessions to prove their undying loyalty to the pro-Palestinian cause.
But those unsatisfied reveal something much deeper: their definition of Zionist is very different from our own. If you ask someone in the Jewish world what Zionism means, they will give a standard definition relating to the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination. They will consider those who support Israel as a Jewish state with a Jewish government Zionists. Many Jews don’t fit within this definition. Many Yeshivish Jews don’t, nor do many Charedim who live in Israel.
In the mind of many anti-Zionists, however, the word Zionist means something very different. It includes Troye Sivan because he mourned the murder of Jews, one of whom appeared alongside IDF soldiers. It includes Odessa A’zion because she once owned an IDF t-shirt, and because her middle name is a word used over and over again in Tanach (canonical Jewish texts). A’zion is not a “zio” in her mind, but in the minds of the most extreme anti-Zionists, she is.
This is because the anti-Zionist definition of Zionist includes anyone who lives in Israel, has been to Israel, associates with anyone Israeli or Zionist or believes in any Jewish connection to the State of Israel. It is not about the Israeli government for them. It is about Jews believing they have a connection to the land that has been central to their religion for thousands of years. The anti-Zionist movement at its core holds a definition of Zionism that includes virtually every Jew.
The uncomfortable consequences of that definition show up in refusing to mourn the Bondi Beach attack. They show up among the “moderate” anti-Zionists who mourn it too, because they mourn it by saying that not all Jews are Zionists. They reveal that they will mourn Jews so long as they can pretend that Judaism has nothing to do with the Land of Israel.
But it does have to do with the Land of Israel, and even Jews who are against a Jewish government in the land, who only call it Eretz Yisrael, know this. So, the anti-Zionists have two options: pretend Judaism isn’t about the ancient Jewish homeland or acknowledge that, by their definition, virtually all Jews are Zionists. The less extreme have chosen the path of ignorance; the more extreme have chosen the second path, and it has led them to justify violence against Jews to an extent that would make the Nazis proud.
Outspoken Zionists often argue that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” I agree wholeheartedly, but I think that when we say this, we don’t often explain what we mean. This statement is commonly rebutted with the argument that there are many Jews, even (or especially) religious Jews, who aren’t Zionists. How can anti-Zionism be antisemitism if there are Jews who are against Zionism? This is a rhetorical trap against which I don’t often hear Zionists easily defend themselves. But there is an easy response, and we should start using it: What anti-Zionists define as Zionist and what non-Zionist Jews define as Zionist are two very different things. The non-Zionist Jew is not Zionist according to a traditional definition of Zionism. But according to the anti-Zionist definition, unless he totally rejects any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, he is one, and he deserves whatever the genocidal, racist, Nazi Zionists deserve.
This is the kind of thinking that leads one to condemn a Jew for mourning the murder of other Jews. It is a rot that has set in the pro-Palestinian movement that will continue to spread if it is not rooted out. If it is not, Jews everywhere will be in increasingly acute danger. Not just traditional Zionists who support the State of Israel. Every single Jew.
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