Pro-Palestinian protest, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, at New York’s Grand Central Station on October 27, 2023. Photo by Zachary Schulman.

BY DANIEL A. SEGAL

The assault on academic freedom and campus-speech rights for pro-Palestinian students and faculty has been so fast and furious in the wake of October 7 that one hardly knows where to begin. Indeed, even to write that simple—even obvious—sentence feels risky: a voice in my head asks, Can I write that without first assuring readers that I do not now support, nor have I ever supported, Hamas?

And given that there is no obvious starting point amid this new scare, I will begin by jumping into the deep end: by defending academic freedom protections and speech rights for anti-Zionist faculty and students. The oft-repeated charge against us—I am anti-Zionist—is that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, a claim that makes anti-Zionist speech hate speech and thus speech that tests the limits of protected speech.

An important example of this view in recent weeks comes from the well-known champion of First Amendment protections, Erwin Chemerinsky, currently the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. In an October 24 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, “Nothing Has Prepared Me for the Antisemitism I See on College Campuses Now,” Chemerinsky states that while “criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism,” anti-Zionism is “blatant antisemitism.” Put otherwise, for Chemerinsky, attacks on Zionism and on the legitimacy of Israel’s existence as a Zionist state are the equivalent of such self-evidently repugnant speech acts as the chants of “Jews will not replace us” heard in Charlottesville in 2019.

Importantly, Chemerinsky sticks to his longstanding commitment to First Amendment rights. Referring to anti-Zionist students on his and other campuses, he writes: “Students have the right to say very offensive and even hateful things.” Yet even as Chemerinsky affords this protection to anti-Zionist students, we must recognize that his fervent claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is an instance of counter-speech that chills anti-Zionist speech—which would be deserved if it were indeed antisemitic speech.

Given this, we must go beyond content-neutral arguments for speech protections and grapple with this vexed question: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? Here it is important to define our terms.

Zionism names the project of creating a sovereign state for Jews, and not for Jews among others, but a sovereign state especially for Jews. To be clear what this logically implies: Zionism seeks to create a sovereign state that privileges Jews and discriminates against non-Jews. By this definition, Israel is unquestionably a Zionist state.

Consider that even though roughly two of the seven million Palestinians who live under Israeli rule have the legal status of Israeli citizens (the two million who live inside the 1948 borders), Israel’s basic nationality law declares that Israel is not a state for all its citizens but a state for the Jewish people everywhere, even Jews who are noncitizens. Consistent with this, Israel’s Palestinian citizens are unambiguously second-class citizens, as was the case for non-white US citizens under Jim Crow. In addition, the roughly five million noncitizen Palestinians who live under Israeli rule (in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem) are denied even the most basic human rights.

In its earliest moments, in the late 1800s, Zionism considered several geographic sites for the future Zionist state that it aimed to establish. But at the First Zionist Congress of 1897 in Switzerland, with no Palestinians present, Palestine was selected as the site for the Zionist state that the movement sought to create. Since then, Zionism has been a project of establishing its state at the expense of Palestinians, engaging in settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid (see Said’s 1979 essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”).

Given that actually existing Zionism has been and is a project of establishing a Zionist state at the expense of Palestinians, it thus makes as much sense for Palestinians to be anti-Zionists as it does for Jews to oppose antisemitism. So, too, we also expect and understand that Black Americans and Latinx Americans abhor white racism. There is, then, simply no sound basis for claiming or even suspecting that the Palestinian rejection of Zionism is antisemitic. Indeed, to hold to this view is a travesty of parsimony and an expression of bigotry. And its purpose is easy to discern.

Antisemitism is an instance of hate. The conceptually flawed claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism thus tells us that being anti-Zionist is hateful—which is to insist, in effect, that the pursuit of freedom and equality by Palestinians is itself something hateful. Imagine a history in which white people represented the African American pursuit of emancipation as hateful; as ingratitude to white Christian “benefactors” who had unburdened them of “savagery” and “heathenism”; or as a threat to the very existence of white people. Except we do not have to imagine any of this; it is history. Put simply, the false claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a weaponization of antisemitism, not a struggle against it. That claim might leave some space for Palestinians to pursue some amelioration of the worst of their oppression (Chemerinsky’s allowable criticisms of the Israeli government and its “policies”), but its purpose is nothing less than to shut down Palestinian efforts to pursue full liberation from Israeli state oppression.

Finally, Jews are a people and Judaism is a religion. Israel, however, is a state—the state that is the project of Zionism. But a state is neither a religion nor a people. To be against a state is not to be against a religion or a people. States are, among many things, dense clots of power, specifically concentrated rather than dispersed power. All states should be criticized when they oppress people; and all states should be deemed illegitimate and made to change if they are ethno-supremacist. If this calls for the end of the Israeli state in its current Zionist form, this is not an attack on Jews or Judaism; nor is it a call to expel Jewish Israelis from the land that is today Palestine and Israel. It is a principled demand for equality and freedom for all—Palestinians, and Israelis alike—living in the land from the river to the sea (see Yousef Munayyer, “What Does ‘From the River to the Sea’ Really Mean?)

Anti-Zionism is about the state and the oppression: it is not about the Jews.

A counterargument that is made is that what makes anti-Zionism antisemitic is that many Jews today feel that Israel is central to their identity as Jews. The predicate is true, and we can certainly be concerned that our Zionist Jewish students subjectively feel attacks on Zionism are attacks on them as Jews. But we have already worked through this argument in several other cases. Regardless of what some southern whites say about symbols of the Confederacy, we know that calling for removal of these symbols is not anti-white, but anti–white supremacy. Similarly, some white people hear “Black Lives Matter” as meaning white lives do not. Such subjective feelings are worth our attention, and even our compassion, but they do not trump the material reality that the Zionist state exists at the expense of Palestinians.

In sum: antisemitism is hate against Jews and/or Judaism; anti-Zionism is opposition to an oppressive and supremacist state. To conflate them is a profound and materially harmful conceptual error—a cheap but potent propaganda trick in the service of state oppression. We must contest this deceit to contest the oppression of Palestinians and to fully protect academic freedom and campus speech rights on our campuses at this perilous moment.

Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses to theorizing states and non-states in world history. He is a past president of the Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and a member of the coordinating committee of TIAA-Divest!, which organizes to rid faculty retirement funds of fossil fuel investments.