Anti-Zionism versus Anti-Semitism

Never Miss an Important Update! Assured Discounts on New Products!

Table of contents

Context (TH l AJ l IE ): The U.S. House of Representatives voted in favour of a Republican-sponsored resolution which, among other things, declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”.

The resolution was framed as an effort to reject the “drastic rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world”.

What is Zionism?

Zion is the name of the hill on which the Temple of Jerusalem was located.
Zionism is a nationalist ideology that describes the late 19th-century Jewish political movement.
The movement aimed to unite the Jewish diaspora worldwide and settle them in Palestine.
The ideology contends that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in historic Palestine, which Zionists view as their ancestral homeland.
Donations from wealthy Jews were sought, which helped the Holocaust survivors to migrate to Palestine and surrounding regions.
This movement led to the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Jews having a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland and denies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War.
It announced its support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population.

The question of Palestine was first brought before the General Assembly in 1947.
By resolution 181 (II), the Assembly decided to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem placed under a special international regime.

Semitic means a language group, not a race.
Anti-Semitism can linguistically be used to describe prejudice against speakers of the Semitic languages (including Arabs and Ethiopians), but it is commonly used specifically to pertain to Jews.
Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews.
This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who practices it is called an antisemite.

Modern anti-Semitism exists within the context of a historical prejudice against Jews by Christians.
According to Christian doctrine, Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus and thus deserved to be punished.
During the 1870s, this political and religious anti-Semitism was compounded by racial anti-Semitism, largely due to the works of Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was interpreted to mean that race was inherent and unchangeable, anti-Semites argued that Jews were genetically inferior on an evolutionary scale.
This argument was also used to justify discrimination against colonial subjects and blacks in America.