'Zionophobia' versus 'Anti-Zionism': A Brief Terminological Reflection on Jew-Hatred, with a Shout-Out to my Main Man Moses Hess

I hesitate to write this, because I don't believe that as much hinges on terminology right now as some seem to think. It might nonetheless be of some value to share a brief word about why I think 'Zionophobia' a more helpful word than 'Anti-Zionism' at our present historical juncture. For my reasons are rooted in what is at bottom a NON-terminological distinction that I think is CRUCIAL - a distinction that the term 'Anti-Zionism' elides. This while, ironically, 'Anti-Zionism' simultaneously OVERPLAYS a MORE SUBTLE, only PARTIAL distinction that SHOULD NOT BE EXAGGERATED.

1.   First the important DISTINCTION to which I allude:

What I call the Zionophobia of the present moment is an entirely different animal from the opposition to Zionism expressed by assimilationist and Bundist Jews of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The latter's positions espoused what were simply alternative strategies for Jewish survival thought best by certain European-Diaspora Jews themselves. The latter were not for the most part 'self-loathers' or 'kapos' or antisemites. They were primarily proud Jews who simply happened to misjudge what they were up against - and were ultimately mass-murdered in consequence. (More on this below when I turn to dear Moses Hess, pictured here.)

The Jewish assimilationists and Bundists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were in that sense what I call misguided 'Anti-Zionists' who were not pathological antisemitic Zionophobes. They were non-antisemites who missed something that Hess saw and to which I'll return.

The current Zionophobia that now plagues all Western societies is not that at all. It is NOT late 19th, early 20th century Jewish-Diaspora Anti-Zionism. It is a mass social psychosis on all fours with the Nazism of 90 years ago, now spread worldwide, with the overwhelmingly greater part of the afflicted psychotics being NON-JEWISH.

Yes there are some Jewish exponents of this new Zionophobia too, just as there were death camp kapos and just as there have been some Jewish 'Stockholm Syndromers,' 'self-loathers,' and functional antisemites (even Nazi ones) for nearly 4000 years. (Trot out the 'two Jews, three opinions' joke here.)

But the cardinal point here is that in THESE cases the JEWISH exponents are OUTLIERS and the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the offenders are NON-Jewish (while oft on the lookout for any tokenizable Jewish Stockholm-Syndromers or cringing 'virtue-signallers' they might find); ...

... whereas in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries the debate was almost entirely INTERNAL to THE JEWISH EUROPEAN-DIASPORA COMMUNITY, and was A GOOD FAITH RATIONAL-STRATEGY DEBATE rather than a mass-psychosis effectively demanding a Second Shoah.

2.   Now to the merely minor DISTINCTION that some current users of the term 'Anti-Zionism' OVER-PLAY ...

I do not believe it possible now to be 'Anti-Zionist' without being antisemitic, especially if one is non-Jewish. That decisively distinguishes today's so-called 'Anti-Zionists' from those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As noted before, the Anti-Zionist Jew of the late 19th or early 20th century was simply recommending against the pursuit of establishing something not yet established, on strategic grounds quite compatible with unashamed Jewish identity. 

The psychotic Zionophobe of the present, by contrast - especially the anything-but-gentle GENTILE psychotic - is calling for the destruction of the one organized structure now standing between nearly 8 million Jews and their 2 million non-Jewish co-citizens, on the one hand, and literally scores of millions of 7th century Oedipally-afflicted Jew-hating genocidal theocrats on the other hand.

There is no way to favor that, let alone hysterically and performatively call for it, without oneself being a bloodthirstily bigoted anti-semite. Without being a latterday version of a Nuremburg-Rallyer. And this is why, incidentally, pretty much everything that Sartre and the Frankfurt School noted with breathtaking insight about the mass antisemitism of the 1930s maps on without remainder to the mass Zionophobia of the present.

Hence, while contemporary antisemitism and Anti-Zionism' are not quite literally extensionally equivalent - one could conceivably, even if not likely, be antisemitic without being 'Anti-Zionist' - they are nevertheless logically joined at the hip since one CANNOT be 'Anti-Zionist' now without being antisemitic as well, in the most barbarous, bloodthirsty conceivable way.

Hence, then, my mild preference for 'Zionophobia' as term here.

3.   Finally, my shoutout to Moses ...

What I am saying here all was effectively said over 150 years ago - by none other than my man Marx's own mentor ...

It will perhaps surprise some that the founder of modern communism, the man who taught Marx and Engels and whom Marx accordingly called 'my Communist Rabbi' - Moses Hess (pictured here) - was also the founder of modern Zionism.

Hess's writings of the early 1840s on the role played by money under capitalism are THE source, indeed almost a PLAGIARIZED source, both of Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' and of what surely is the most breathtakingly insightful passage of Volume I of Marx's Kapital: Chapter 1, Section 4's exposition of 'The Fetishism of Commodities.'

But Hess was more than an early communist and spirit hovering over Kapital. He was also the founder, in effect, of what later came to be called Marxist Labor Zionism - which was literally the FIRST modern Zionism, the form to which I adhere, the form that dominated Israeli politics until the 1980s, and the form that my site LeftForZion is dedicated to reviving.

To explain, ...

Hess's 1862 'Rome und Jerusalem' is easily the most important opening salvo in the commencement of modern Zionism - published fully 35 years before Herzl's 1897 'Judenstaat.' Even Pinsker's amazing 1882 'Auto-Emancipation' only arrived two decades later.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, while Hess's remains after his 1875 death were originally interred in the German city of Koeln, since 1961 they have lain in Jerusalem alongside those of my other Marxo-Zionist heroes Ber Borokhov, Berl Katznelson, and Nahum Syrkin.

I bring up Hess here because he once said something I wish more folk knew now - and that the Jewish Anti-Zionist assimilationists and Bundists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had heeded earlier:

Hess said that the gentiles of his day objected ...

'less to the Jews' peculiar BELIEFS than to their peculiar NOSES,' and that ...

'CONVERSION [to Christianity]' would not change 'the BLACK, wavy HAIR of the Jews ... into BLOND.'

It is shame that such dreadful metaphorical words proved - and are now again proving - prophetic.

It's not about 'differences of opinion' or 'ideas,' friends. It is now, as it was then, about ethnic existence within societies still structured, knowingly (islamism) or unknowingly (post-Christian), by forgotten (post-Christian) or unforgotten (islamist) eschatologies in which the Jew carries 'the sins of the fathers' and is thus cursed by birth.

That's not mere 'anti' some 'ism.' It is phobic of a projectedly ineradicable identity.