The central falsehood of anti-Zionism is the separation of two identities that are historically, spiritually and nationally inseparable: Israel and the Jewish people.
Jacob is renamed Israel in Genesis 32:29. His descendants become Bnei Yisrael—the Children of Israel; their collective becomes Am Yisrael—the People of Israel; and their homeland becomes Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel.
After conquest and exile, this same people became widely known as the Jews. The word Yehudi originated with Judah, the surviving center of Israelite national life, but ceased to mean only a member of that tribe. Mordecai is called “a Jewish man” while the same verse identifies him as a Benjaminite. “Jew” had become the historical name of the surviving nation of Israel.
The terminology changed. The people did not.
Jacob is Israel.
His descendants are the Children of Israel.
The continuing People of Israel are the Jews.
Their homeland is the Land of Israel.
Their restored state is the Jewish State of Israel.
In national and historical terms, Israel and the Jewish people are synonymous.
If Jews are reduced to adherents of a portable religion, Zionism can be portrayed as Europeans carrying their faith into somebody else’s country. Once Jews are recognized as the continuing People of Israel, Zionism assumes its actual character: the return of a dispersed indigenous nation to the land in which its name, language, law, memory and civilization were formed.
The Stone of Israel is the people
In The Bible's Vayechi, the Zohar compounds Jacob’s matzevah, the Foundation Stone, the rejected cornerstone and the Stone of Israel into one identity.
The Foundation Stone is the central point from which the world was planted:
ובהאי נקודה קיימא קדש הקדשים
“At/on this point stands the holy of holies.”
The Zohar identifies its earthly manifestation through Jacob: “Jacob took a stone and set it up as a matzevah.” Jacob establishes it “above and below” by making there a “house of God.” The sequence culminates in the “Stone of Israel,” followed by:
אבן, דא כנסת ישראל
“Stone—this is Knesset Israel.”
The stone is the Assembly of Israel: the collective spiritual identity of the Jewish people. The patriarch, people, stone and sacred center of Israel belong to one identity. Israel did not select Zion. Israel became Israel there.
An unparalleled restoration
Conquered and dispersed, the Jewish people retained their national name, language, scriptures, law, calendar, ancient capital and expectation of return. Jews prayed toward Jerusalem; Passover concluded with “Next year in Jerusalem”; weddings remembered Jerusalem at the moment of greatest joy. This was the national memory of a displaced people.
Zionism did not transform a religion into a nation. It organized the return of a nation that exile had caused others to mistake for merely a religion.
The League of Nations Mandate recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and grounds for “reconstituting their national home”—reconstituting, not creating. Israel’s Declaration of Independence similarly calls the land the birthplace of the Jewish people.
The anti-Zionist exploit of “State”
Criticism of an Israeli government, law, military action or settlement is not inherently antisemitic. Supporting Arab dignity and self-determination is not anti-Jewish. But criticism of a state is fundamentally different from denying that the Jewish nation may possess a state.
The danger was exposed by the recent NSW Supreme Court decision concerning Mohommed Farhat. Justice Desmond Fagan held that the slogan “Fuk Israel” was, in that case, a crude political curse directed at a foreign state rather than proof of antisemitic motivation. The vandalism and arson remained criminal; the Court rejected their use as evidence supporting an extended terrorism supervision order.
The ruling addressed Farhat’s evidence and intent. But treating “Israel” exclusively as the name of a foreign state is historically and practically incomplete. Israel was the name of the Jewish nation 3500 years before 1948. A curse directed simply at “Israel” is therefore capable of targeting the people as well as the polity.
Political anti-Zionism must not become a legal shelter for antisemitism. Anyone claiming to protest a government can and should identify the State of Israel, its government or the policy being opposed. Where protesters refuse that distinction, especially when their words target Jews, Jewish institutions or Jewish neighborhoods the law should not automatically presume an innocent political meaning.
Hostility directed at Israel as a nation should face the same consequences under racial-vilification law as hostility directed at any other ethnic people. Political criticism must remain protected; but denying Jews the right to exist collectively through the Jewish State of the nation of Israel is not criticism of policy. It is discrimination against the People of Israel.
Abolitionist anti-Zionism crosses that line. It separates modern Jews from ancient Israelites, treats exile as the creation of a foreign people, recasts Jewish return as colonial invasion and denies Jews a right to self-determination afforded to others.
The test is simple:
If displacement does not extinguish Muslim or Christian indigeneity, exile cannot extinguish Jewish indigeneity.
If others constitute a people, Jews constitute a people.
If Muslims or Christians possess collective national rights, Jews possess collective national rights.
The IHRA working definition therefore distinguishes ordinary criticism of Israel from denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.
Jacob became Israel.
Israel became a nation.
That nation survived exile as the Jews.
The Jews returned to Zion as Israel.
To sever Jews from Israel is not decolonization. It is the erasure of an indigenous people from its own identity.
