Talk:Anti-Zionism

Possible content fork
The article Calls for the destruction of Israel may be a fork of this article Anti-Zionism. Both articles cover opposing Israel's right to exist. Please give your opinion here and at the AfD.VR (Please ping on reply) 08:27, 15 January 2024 (UTC)


 * These are two separate concepts. Unfortunately, the meaning of "anti-Zionism" in today's political discourse has been bastardized. Calls for the destruction of Israel is destructive: the elimination or annihilation of the State of Israel as a political entity. Anti-Zionism, in the non-politicized definition, is the opposition to Zionism, the self-determination of the Jewish people or the creation of the State of Israel. Longhornsg (talk) 02:49, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * A New York Times article defines anti-zionism as "the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews". How is that different from calling for the destruction of Israel? VR (Please ping on reply) 03:19, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The American Jewish Committee says "Today, Zionism refers to support for the continued existence of Israel, in the face of regular calls for its destruction or dissolution. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Jews having a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland." The AJC uses anti-Zionism interchangeably with "calls for its [Israel's] destruction". VR (Please ping on reply) 03:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * There's no difference between opposing the Jewish people's right to self-determination and calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. It's just two different sets of words to describe the same thing. KronosAlight (talk) 08:03, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * There's a pretty huge difference. The right to self-determination and the right to have a racist ethnostate in a specific location are not the same concept. Perhaps more importantly, Israel doesn't speak on behalf of all Jewish people, and doesn't get to define what satisfactory self-determination for the Jewish people constitutes. There are a wide range of definitions as to what constitutes self-determination. The State of Israel is an institution, so statements about its destruction can likewise mean a variety of different things. At the extreme end of the spectrum, such statements could potentially be genocidal if taken to imply harm to its people. At the opposite end, it could simply mean an end to the current form of the institution of government – if, for example, the governmental regime is identified as being institutionally corrupt, such as in the case of an apartheid regime, and presumably unfixable, e.g. by simply excising certain laws. Iskandar323 (talk) 15:53, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Garbage, Jews that don't live in Israel, the US say, have self determination there, in the modern understanding of self determination, you don't need to have a state to self determine. Btw, equating Israel with Jews is considered antisemitic. Selfstudier (talk) 16:12, 18 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Requesting input from, .VR (Please ping on reply) 03:35, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Longhornsg is correct. Anti-Zionism and Calls for the destruction of Israel are two different things historically, whatever fuckwit sources may say about the former. 'fuckwit' sources because anti-Zionism preceded the creation of the state of Israel and therefore cannot have called for the destruction of what did not exist. 'Calls for the destruction of Israel', a title that discourages me from reading it and subjecting my boredom threshold to any more stresses than reading the newspapers every day causes, seems to collapse everything - as if calls to overthrow the Jewish ethnocracy that is Israel were identical to calls for the physical destruction of that state. This is not an area where logical clarity and verbal finesse ever find much of a toehold.Nishidani (talk) 04:05, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @Nishidani but would you consider "calls to overthrow the Jewish ethnocracy that is Israel" to be synonymous with post-1949 anti-Zionism? Even if they are different topics, knowing the exact difference helps define the scope of each article. VR (Please ping on reply) 07:14, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't, because Haredi anti-Zionism for the most part does not call for that. Chabad-Lubavitch's position is that there should be no Jewish state until the Moshiach (messiah) comes to establish it, but since it exists, they support it because it is where millions of Jews live. ElasticSnake (talk) 01:49, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The phrase "Israel's right to exist" is a propagandistic slogan. On the one hand, the right to national sovereignty or self-determination is a legitimate right, and the Jews of Palestine, certainly by 1946, and arguably as early as 1930, were an embryonic nation. However, there is no such thing as the right to occupy or annex another state or ethnic group's land. Nor is there any such thing as the right to establish an ethnostate or apartheid state. Nor does a genocidal war criminal state have a right to exist. Apartheid South Africa didn't have a right to exist. Nazi Germany didn't have a right to exist. And Israel doesn't have a right to exist *in its current form*.
 * Nevertheless, regardless of the fallacy of Israel's "right to exist" as a genocidal expansionist ethnostate on territory that was recently Arab-majority land, and territory that was assigned to the Palestinian Arabs under the UN-approved 1947 partition plan, even the most radical elements of the Palestinian national liberation movement, such as Hamas, have expressed a pragmatic willingness to accept a Jewish state on all of historic Palestine except for Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, if there is a national consensus or a referendum among Palestinians backing the decision. For example, see https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf, a 2017 document titled 'A Document of General Principles & Policies', which was effectively an updated Hamas Charter, specifically point 20:
 * '... without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.'
 * I suggest reviewing this article (https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/11/11/in-defence-of-from-the-river-to-the-sea-palestine-will-be-free), which really teases out the nuances and evolution of the Palestinian national liberation movement's position on a one-state vs a two-state solution. MathewMunro (talk) 04:45, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @MathewMunro Ok but what's your opinion on the question I asked at the top? VR (Please ping on reply) 07:14, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Calls to abolish Israel are a subset of broader anti-Zionism. All those who call for the abolition of Israel are anti-Zionists, but not all those who are/were anti-Zionists call/called-for the abolition of Israel, and there's diversity of opinion regarding in what way Israel should be "abolished", or if instead, it should be transformed, democratised, secularised, shrunk/borders-modified, and/or somewhat-disarmed, and indeed, there's a somewhat blurred line between some forms of transformation and abolition - it can be kind of subjective and contextual as to whether one considers it one or the other, what might be considered "transformation" by Arabs might be considered "abolishing Israel" by the vast majority of Israeli Jews and international Zionists.
 * And yes, I think the 'Calls for the destruction of Israel' article is a closely related article, and I think it would be fine to Wikilink to the 'Calls for the destruction of Israel' article or even use the "Main article" tag under the subsection 'Jewish right to a state' of this article, or some similar, new or renamed subsection, or to include it under the See Also section (under which it's already listed). MathewMunro (talk) 07:33, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * As Nishidani says above, obviously pre-1948 anti-Zionism couldn't have wanted to abolish or destroy Israel since Israel didn't exist back then. So I wonder if we have an article on "Calls for the destruction of Israel", then it should just be renamed Anti-Zionism (1949-present). VR (Please ping on reply) 07:58, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * No. There are significant numbers of anti-Zionists or people branded as such who have never ever called for the 'destruction of Israel', from Chomsky and Uri David to Brant Rosen. The hasbara attempt to repackage anti-Zionism as interchangeable with calls for Israel's destruction (usually just the standard, vapid Arab /Iranian political rhetoric, devoid of any other function than to throw a sop to the respective masses) aspires to impress the public 'mind' with the idea that any opposition to a racist state or its apartheid and ethnocidal policies is a camouflaged reproduction of a Holocaust threat and confuses a very significant, predominantly Jewish intellectual tradition that repudiates nationalism as part of Jewish identity, with the cheap memes of political sloganeering often encouraged in Arab media.  All these articles lend themselves to dumbdowning and caricature, and if you want to know what anti-Zionism is you go to the Timeline link, which embodies everything the article we have was manicured to obscure.Nishidani (talk) 09:24, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Agree on the merits of what Nishidani says (though I disagree with the characterization that groups like the ADL are claiming anti-Zionism = calls for Israel's destruction), and I'll hold up the example of the Satmars, the exemplar of ultra-Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionism. To the Satmars, any Jewish state -- especially a secular one -- prior to the messianic age–by the very nature of its human, natural, mundane provenance–undermines and denies the Torah and is against Jewish law. The Satmars do not seek to bring an end to the state of Israel (of course, they know what the alternative would mean for their fellow Satmars in Bnei Brak, Mea Shearim, and Meron). By comparison, a group like Neturei Karta seeking the "dismantling" of Israel and actively meets with entities like PIJ, Hamas, and the Iranian government that have the same goal, to the point that the Satmar Rebbe himself has even condemned NK for going too far . Good piece by Shaul Magid in Tablet explaining this: Longhornsg (talk) 10:20, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @Longhornsg So what do the Satmars seek? VR (Please ping on reply) 06:41, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Nishidani put it very well - the 'Calls for the destruction of Israel' article should not be renamed 'Anti-Zionism (1949-present)', because many prominent anti-Zionists have never called for the destruction of Israel. There are other reasons, but that alone is more than enough reason.
 * The pre-Israel anti-Zionists, which included most Arabs both inside and outside of Palestine, and a significant portion of pre-Zionist Jews of Palestine and their descendents undoubtedly mostly never imagined the full scale of the horrors Zionists had in store for the Palestinian Arabs until after the Zionists won the 29 Nov 1947 UN partition vote and no longer needed to pretend they weren't a threat to Palestinian Arabs.
 * The Arab states presented a number of arguments against the 1947 partition plan - one of them was self-determination - they argued that the majority of residents of Palestine - Jews, Arabs and Christians, did not want to partition Palestine, therefore it should not be partitioned, period, and I think most anti-Zionists would still agree that the UN had no right to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of residents. But with every defeat of the Arab states by Israel, it became ever more fanciful and even counterproductive to talk of abolishing Israel, even if morally, there's a case for it.
 * I'm probably just one of a few who think partition could've been OK for most Palestinians if adherence to partition borders and the security of those who remained on the wrong side of the border had been internationally guaranteed, for as long as it takes to find or build a house for everyone who ended up on the wrong side of the border after the partition, and if far fewer people were put on the wrong side of the partition in the first place, and if the land had been divided proportionally rather than giving the Jews roughly 2.5 times the per land given to the Palestinian Arabs, and if they hadn't put a ridiculously unfair ~50 times as many Arab homes on the Jewish side of the partition as the number of Jewish homes on the Arab side of the partition, and if there had been more cross-roads to better facilitate internal trade & travel, and shared access to the Gulf of Aqaba, and longer-term internationally administered & defended zones around shared sacred sites and large mixed and adjacent ethnic communities such as Jerusalem. I think partition could've been like pulling a bad tooth, reducing ongoing conflict by keeping the antagonists separated, but instead of being a relatively painless affair, it was butchered without anaesthetic. MathewMunro (talk) 17:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * IMO there's no reason for "Calls for the destruction of Israel" to be a separate page. The page itself is pretty slanted toward the Zionist/pro-Israel POV. I can't see how "calling for the destruction of Israel" is possible to do without being anti-Zionist as well, so I'd say it's a subset of anti-Zionism. But the title "calls for the destruction of Israel" is itself misleading. "Destruction" is a term that evokes strong emotions and can mean anything from killing all Israelis to replacing the State of Israel with a democratic, binational state that does not grant special status to any ethnic group. Both of these would result in the "destruction" of Israel as a Jewish state, which is a core part of its identity. ElasticSnake (talk) 01:47, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I would consider people who call for Israel's destruction to be a subset of opponents of Zionism. But there are people who have opposed Zionism and its racist ideas for other reasons and through other ways. Dimadick (talk) 10:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, it's just my personal view but I think proposals for the destruction of Israel as a topic is logically  a subset or a fork of antisemitism, which is quite distinct from anti-Zionism Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that's right, the desire to equate AZ = AS is the cause of a lot of the confusion. Selfstudier (talk) 11:18, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that probably depends on whether the sources are talking about institutional abolition in the revolutionary sense or explicitly "destruction", i.e. disassembly of power structures or something altogether different in intent. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:46, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The word 'destruction' cannot avoid entailing the notion of obliteration, annihilation. Most if not all sources, being polemical, will comfortably play on that ambiguity in order to imply that any call for the destruction of Israel in revolutionary terms, the disassembly of its nature as an ethnic state, is tantamount to a demand Israel be wiped off the map, to urge a second Holocaust. That is why so much was made of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad statement in various farcical translations. Sources generally don't make that distinction surely. (Of course there are numerous sources referring to this, as many perhaps as prominent sources referring to its obverse: statements that a state for the Palestinian people will never exist. The parallel would be a page of the type, Calls for the non-existence of a Palestinian state.:) Nishidani (talk) 21:47, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Longhornsg and Nishidani are quite right - these are clearly distinct topics and require different articles. I have been an active anti-Zionist for half a century now, and have never called for "the destruction of Israel". Indeed, I am on record as opposing this both as a slogan and as a goal. What I, and most anti-Zionists I know or have worked with (including many Israeli Jews living in Israel), have called for is dismantlement of the Zionist structure of the Israeli state. Whether you agree or disagree with this formulation and aspiration, it should be evident that it is not a call for the destruction of Israel any more than the demand to end apartheid was a call for the destruction of South Africa.

Those calling for "the destruction of Israel" are not a subset of anti-Zionists. I suspect that many of them have no idea what anti-Zionism means, and just use the term as part of a propaganda rhetoric. Our article does not fall into this error, and I wish that some of those who bandy the term around would read it to get a better understanding of the issues involved. It would be a serious mistake to compromise the article by throwing into it the often ignorant or ill-informed comments of those who have no understanding of what Zionism means and why it should be opposed. RolandR (talk) 00:47, 17 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Well said. Zerotalk 03:11, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @RolandR @Zero0000, @Nishidani you seem to be implying that anti-zionism is distinct from "calling for the destruction of Israel" because the latter necessarily entails something very violent, "a second Holocaust" as Nishidani puts it. But that's not how Calls for the destruction of Israel defines it. For example, that article lists Iran, yet Iran has not only never called for a Holocaust, it has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East (outside of Israel). Iran has of course called for a one-state solution, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. But that's also effectively what anti-zionists advocate, right? VR (Please ping on reply) 06:34, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Who cares for what that shabby and incompetent wiki article states? The point is that there is a huge polemical output that, obedient to a smudging of distinctions pushed by the hasbara bandwagon, will tell anyone careless in their reading that anti-Zionism and the 'destruction of Israel' physically or otherwise, are coterminous or interchangeable. The route to this implication is via the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites want to rid the world of Jews: Israel is a Jewish State: Anti-Zionists oppose Israel as a Jewish state, ergo anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic, and as such, seek the destruction of Israel. That shoddy sequences of entailed cross-premises is so embedded in the flatulent polemics of our times that no argument or analysis can get anywhere unless (a) the premises are examined (b) the historicity of each grasped and (c) the patent use of the manufacture of these confusions to blindside lucid discussion is brought out. All these things have been done in the academic literature (which in turn has been challenged by a number of prominent scholars who deny the confusion and insist on the overlap) and all one need do is (i) familiarize oneself with the literature, and on wikipedia neatly draw out the distinctions and confusions as described in these sources.
 * The only way to save that article from its own inanity would be to examine and rewrite the article strictly in terms of the extensive scholarly literature (which also has both the distinction and the denial of a distinction) and exclude rigorously all use of cheap newspaper or internet sources that more or less muddle this discourse.Nishidani (talk) 06:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * "The route to this implication is via the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites want to rid the world of Jews: Israel is a Jewish State: Anti-Zionists oppose Israel as a Jewish state, ergo anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic, and as such, seek the destruction of Israel."
 * All of this is correct. KronosAlight (talk) 08:08, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh and the article Calls for the destruction of Israel also considers "From the River to the Sea" as an exemplifying the "destruction of Israel". So it is clear that that article is using "destruction of Israel" to mean opposition to Israel as a Jewish-majority state. VR (Please ping on reply) 06:46, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * "dismantlement of the Zionist structure of the Israeli state."
 * What does that even mean? KronosAlight (talk) 08:06, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 6 February 2024
The page states: "In December 2023, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism." This is misleading at best as the source does not say this. The closest the resolution comes is: “Whereas Jewish students have been targeted for disparate treatment in classes, and derision and exclusion on college campuses and in official student organizations, not only because they are Jewish but often because of their real or perceived views about or connection to, or support for, the State of Israel.” This is much more ambiguous than what is currently in the wikipedia article and should be changed. 2.96.195.197 (talk) 09:56, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅ . Removed the sentence. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me! 04:30, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
 * @BanyanClimber: You have reverted this edit with the edit summary "this is exactly what source says." Which part of the source supports this? Anti-Zionism is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the article ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me! 17:29, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
 * You were right. I thought Jpost reported the resolution on anti-Zionism since it was big news at the time, but it's not explicitly stated what the resolution says for some reason. I've changed it for the New York Times which is clearer. – (talk) 00:32, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Works for me, thanks. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me! 01:36, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
 * H.Res. 894, passed December 5, 2023, includes the language "Resolved, That the House of Representatives—...(4)clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism". The sentence was accurate and should not have been removed. Source ElasticSnake (talk) 01:37, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * @ElasticSnake: Please review the discussion above and the article. It was only temporarily removed, and later restored with a proper source. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me! 03:09, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Criticism of Israel as Antizionism
This page states, "Anti-Zionism includes, for example, criticism of the current policies of the state of Israel as well as moral, ethical, or religious criticism of the idea of a Jewish nation-state, in contrast to a secular state." I understand why this is included, but criticism of the policies of the state of Israel is not inherently antizionist and therefore does not belong in this article. These are criticisms often made by antizionist individuals, but they are not inherently antizionist in nature unless they are objecting to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. There are zionists who make criticisms of the current policies of Israel. Therefore, I wouldn't consider merely criticizing their policies as inherently antizionist, even though that is something antizionists do regularly. Tul10616 (talk) 06:43, 18 February 2024 (UTC)


 * I agree, that sentence doesn't seem consistent with how the term is generally used. To be fair, the claim is backed up by the JVP citation, which uses similar language. This should probably be taken with a grain of salt since JVP is explicitly anti-Zionist. The ADL (which admittedly isn't neutral either) states essentially the opposite: "Anti-Zionism is distinct from criticism of the policies or actions of the government of Israel."
 * I think it's clear that the sentence is at least lacking appropriate qualification. Certain specific policy critiques (relating to the Law of Return, for example) might fall under anti-Zionism, but not most. Clearly a Zionist who criticizes tax or zoning policies isn't anti-Zionist, for example.
 * We could try to come up with carefully qualified version of the statement, but I think the preceding language seems sufficient already, at least for an introduction. I'll remove it. — xDanielx T/C\R 09:18, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Neither of these are suitable sources to define a concept; they're both advocacy. Zanahary (talk) 03:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree. I have never encountered a person who believed that criticising the policies of a given government of Israel constitutes anti-Zionism, so it's not clear to me why this Wikipedia article entertains the hypothetical.
 * Anti-Zionism in real terms simply means denying the right of the Jewish people to a state, uniquely among all the peoples on this planet. KronosAlight (talk) 08:02, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

can we flag this for potential bias?
the whole second paragraph is opinion or without citations. Frankly, it should be deleted, along with other statements. However, for now, can we at least flag this article for it's questionable content? 2600:8807:6807:BD00:1857:3917:DB25:43A3 (talk) 13:11, 9 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Not done. The citations needed tags were only added recently. Allow some time for these to be dealt with. Selfstudier (talk) 13:39, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Most of the para being complained of here was written by a blocked sock. Would you cast an eye over it and see if anything leaps out? I cannot easily tell from just looking if what is written is supported by citations in the body or whether it is an accurate summary. Selfstudier (talk) 16:03, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I cannot see anything that would require the requested citations, esp. since the tagger apparently has not read the article and its sources. Nishidani (talk) 20:21, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks. Selfstudier (talk) 22:57, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

MondoWeiss
Per WP:RSP on MondoWeiss: Mondoweiss is a news website operated by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC), an advocacy organization. There is no consensus on the reliability of Mondoweiss. Editors consider the site biased or opinionated, and its statements should be attributed. It should either not be used at all — or used with great caution — for biographies of living people. We need to attribute in text when we use it. Removing attribution goes against the community consensus. BobFromBrockley (talk) 13:14, 26 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Not "when we use it", more precisely when it is the source eg if an expert published in MW, the source would be the expert not MW, right? Selfstudier (talk) 14:01, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Btw, that last part about blps looks like it will be amended Selfstudier (talk) 14:03, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * See also my talk page. If any clarification on the wording of the "should be attributed" is needed, it would be better to leave this until after the BLP review is done, to avoid confusing everyone. Zerotalk 14:16, 26 April 2024 (UTC)