A History of Modern Antisemitism

On 15 April, forty out of 47 Democratic Senators voted for Bernie Sanders’s motion to block arms sales to Israel. Prominent Jewish and non-Jewish Democrats who were once solid supporters of Israel are now parroting the Gaza genocide libel. Jews who refuse to disavow Israel’s right to exist are increasingly subject to abuse and exclusion from mainstream cultural, educational, and professional environments, regardless of their views on Israel’s policies and actions.

Developments like these indicate that, across the West, anti-Zionism is moving from the fringes of political discourse into the precincts of the mainstream liberal Left and populist Right. It is not motivated by antipathy to the Netanyahu government or by concern for Palestinian suffering; it is a rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a nation state, and the right of its population to basic security.

To understand where this movement has come from, it is useful to consider the historical antecedents from which it evolved.

Zionism, Anti-Zionism, and Internal Jewish Debate

Zionism—and opposition to it—first emerged during debates within 19th-century Jewish communities about how to ensure their own survival as antisemitism spread across Europe and other parts of the diaspora. A common misconception holds that the Zionist movement first appeared with the publication of Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaadt (The Jewish State) in 1896, and the subsequent founding congress of the Zionist Organisation in 1897. In fact, influential political works advocating the creation of an independent Jewish polity preceded Herzl’s book by decades.