OP-ED: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Here is why
Dotan Rousso writes, "The majority of Jews living in the diaspora understand their identity as deeply intertwined with the State of Israel."
By: Dotan Rousso
Dotan Rousso was born and raised in Israel and holds a Ph.D. in Law. He is a former criminal prosecutor in Israel. He currently lives in Alberta and teaches philosophy at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.
As the State of Israel marks its 78th Independence Day on April 22, 2026, it is an especially fitting moment to confront one of the most common and misleading claims in contemporary public discourse: that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism.
There are roughly 15.8 million Jews in the world. About eight million of them live in Israel. This is not a marginal detail. It reflects a fundamental reality: for a vast number of Jews, Israel is not a separate or optional component of identity. It is its core. It is their language, their culture, their historical narrative, their shared memory, and their collective future.
For Israeli Jews, this connection is self-evident. Hebrew, the language of the Bible, is spoken in daily life. Jewish history is not studied as distant memory but lived as a continuous story. Public life follows the rhythm of Jewish holidays and national days of remembrance. Israel is the one place in the world where Jewish identity is not a minority experience but the organizing principle of society.
But this connection extends far beyond Israel’s borders. The majority of Jews living in the diaspora understand their identity as deeply intertwined with the State of Israel. They support it, visit it, send their children to Jewish and Zionist schools, and celebrate holidays that include not only religious traditions but also Israel’s Independence Day and Memorial Day. Israel functions as the historical and cultural anchor of the Jewish people, the place that has connected them since their forced exile by the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years ago.
To claim that Judaism and Israel are separate in any meaningful sense is therefore not a neutral position. It is a distortion. It asks Jews to accept a definition of their own identity imposed from the outside. It is akin to suggesting that one’s body can be separated from one’s memory, language, and consciousness while still remaining whole. That is not how identity works, and it is not how Jews understand themselves.
It is true that a small minority of Jews reject or distance themselves from Israel, sometimes even adopting strongly anti-Zionist positions. This exists in every large group. There are always individuals who dissent from the collective narrative. Some are motivated by genuine ideological convictions, others by distance from their heritage, and some by the social rewards that often accompany visible opposition to Israel. But the existence of a minority does not redefine the identity of the majority.
The central issue is this: anti-Zionism, in its clear meaning, denies the right of Israel to exist as the national home of the Jewish people. Given that Israel is home to roughly half of the world’s Jews, this is not an abstract position. It is a call to dismantle the one place where Jews exercise collective self-determination.
What follows from that is rarely stated plainly. If Israel should not exist, what is meant to happen to the millions of Jews who live there? There are no serious proposals that avoid displacement, coercion, or violence. History, especially Jewish history, makes it impossible to treat such implications lightly.
When a movement seeks to eliminate the only Jewish state, while accepting the legitimacy of dozens of others, it is not operating on neutral principles. When it attempts to detach Jews from a central component of their identity against their own understanding of themselves, it crosses from critique into negation.
At that point, the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism does not hold. It collapses.