During the American civil rights era, racists didn’t just mask their faces with white hoods; they also donned the robes of self-righteousness. They framed segregation as tradition, defended disenfranchisement as “states’ rights,” and cast their opposition to integration as a defense of law, order, and Christian morality.
In pulpits, newspapers, and political speeches, they claimed the mantle of virtue while denying others their basic humanity. They didn’t see themselves as bigots but as guardians of civilization. The language was lofty, but the aim was clear: to preserve a system that kept blacks marginalized and powerless.
Modern conversations about race and justice increasingly rely on the concept of structural racism: discrimination is not only a matter of personal prejudice but of systems, policies, and ideologies that produce unequal outcomes.
As theorists like Ibram X. Kendi have argued, the only meaningful response to racism is anti-racism, an active commitment to dismantling structures of oppression and creating equitable conditions for marginalized communities. When we apply this framework to the Jewish people, it becomes clear that anti-Zionism is a form of racism.
Jews have the right to self-determination, too
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like all other peoples, has the right to self-determination in its ancestral homeland. It is a political response to a historical and ongoing condition: two thousand years of Jewish exile, persecution, expulsions, forced conversions, ghettos, pogroms, and genocide.
From the destruction of the Second Temple to the Holocaust, Jewish history has been marked by statelessness and dependence on the goodwill of host nations, an arrangement that has failed repeatedly and catastrophically.
The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was not a colonial project but a decolonial return, a national liberation movement grounded in the right to survive as a people in a world that had shown time and again that Jews were not safe without sovereignty.
To be anti-Zionist is to reject that response. It is to say, in effect, that Jews do not have the right to what nearly every other people is presumed to deserve: a homeland, a refuge, a nation-state.
Just as structural racism denies marginalized groups equal access to power, safety, and self-definition, anti-Zionism denies the Jewish people the mechanisms of collective security and political agency. Whatever its rhetoric, the outcome is exclusion, vulnerability, and continued Jewish precariousness.
Many anti-Zionists insist they are not antisemitic. But anti-racism, as Kendi argues, is not measured by intent but by outcome. If an ideology systematically undermines the security, dignity, or equality of a people, it is racist, regardless of the intentions of its advocates.
Anti-Zionism excludes Jews from the global consensus
ANTI-ZIONISM, in theory and in practice, functions this way. It excludes Jews from the global consensus that every people has a right to self-determination. It singles out the Jewish nation as uniquely illegitimate. And it ignores, or worse, justifies violence against Jewish individuals and institutions in the name of resistance.
Anti-Zionism is not simply an abstract rejection of nationalism; it is a selective rejection of Jewish nationhood. There is no global movement to dismantle Italian, Japanese, or Pakistani national identities despite their flaws and controversies.
Only the Jewish national project is targeted for erasure. In doing so, anti-Zionism reinscribes the long history of Jewish marginalization: the assumption that Jews must live as guests in other people’s lands, always subject to the tolerance of the majority, never fully at home.
If racism is the historical condition that marginalizes a group, then antisemitism is one of its oldest and most enduring forms. And if anti-racism requires not only opposition to hatred but active efforts to repair historical harm, then anti-racism with respect to Jews must involve support for the Jewish return to sovereignty, safety, and rootedness in their land. Anything less is complacency in Jewish persecution and, ergo, anti-Jewish racism.
Structural racism does not always announce itself with slurs or swastikas. Sometimes, it hides behind the language of justice, liberation, and even peace. But if the effect is to deny Jews the ability to determine their own future, to protect their own communities, and to live without fear of exile, it is racism.
Being anti-antisemitic today means more than decrying hate crimes or condemning Holocaust denial. It means recognizing the long arc of Jewish displacement and standing behind the only remedy history has offered that has worked: Jewish self-determination in a sovereign state.
To oppose that remedy is to perpetuate the very condition that made Jewish suffering possible. A sincere commitment to anti-racism must include the Jewish people. And that means standing up, not just against antisemitism but against anti-Zionism, too.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the infamous UN resolution, Zionism is Racism. In 1991, the antisemitic resolution was finally overturned. Nevertheless, Kendi’s theory would deem that repeal insufficient. To truly remedy the historical injustice, the time has come for a UN resolution that declares: Anti-Zionism is Racism.
The writer is a professor of political science at Touro University.
