Anti-Zionism as antisemitism

o how the very methods they rightly condemn in Putin's Russia were perfected by the Soviet anti-Zionist machine of which Putin himself was once an eager apparatchik.

But don't take my word for it: ask the vanished Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Jews of every background—Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Bukharian, and beyond—have borne the brunt of anti-Zionism's violent consequences. Before 1948, Baghdad was over a quarter Jewish—today, the community is a ghost. Egypt's 75,000 Jews have dwindled to a handful of souls. The same macabre story unfolds wherever anti-Zionism has triumphed, from Poland to Syria to Tunisia to the Soviet Union: harassment, dispossession, and sanctioned terror—enacted with the righteous zeal reserved for those convinced they stand on the side of virtue.

So yes, we do need a new understanding of antisemitism—one that doesn't cast Jews as paranoid, traumatized, hysterical, terrified, and incapable of understanding their own history. One that recognizes anti-Zionism not on the terms of its own conceit, but as the engine of discrimination, disenfranchisement, dispossession, displacement, and violence against Jews it has always been—up to and including today.

If you don't know, the Livingstone Formulation (third paragraph), named after our former London mayor, is a term coined by David Hirsh after Livingstone's remark that "the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government". Ken was a notable Corbyn ally, suspended from the Labour Party after his claim that Hitler "was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews".