Both of Them Agree

A topical companion to the series on Zionism, Judaism, and why the difference matters.

A photograph is circulating from the London Underground: an ad panel above the heads of Metropolitan line commuters, reading "Dismantle the Zionist war machine," with an invitation to sign up for direct action training. One widely shared reaction called it the closest thing to 1930s propaganda its author had ever seen.

Two people are speaking in that little scene — the activist who printed the poster and the passenger who photographed it — and they believe they disagree about everything. They don't. Beneath the argument, they share a premise, and the premise is the problem. Both of them believe that "Zionist" and "Jew" name the same thing. The activist accepts the equation and makes it a target; the passenger accepts it and hears a threat against his people in a slogan about a state. Neither of them seems aware that the equation itself has a history, that it was contested from the day it was proposed, and that the tradition which contested it — Torah Judaism — is still here, and inconveniently located outside both of their frames.

The fear is not imaginary

Start where honesty requires: with the passenger. A British Jew looking up at the word "dismantle" on his morning commute is not being hysterical. In the past few years, "Zionist" has repeatedly served in Britain as a costume for something much older — pinned on synagogues that govern no state, on kosher grocers who command no army, on schoolchildren who have never voted in an Israeli election. When a word that names a political ideology is applied to people because of who they are rather than what they believe, the word has stopped doing political work and started doing antisemitism's work under an alias. Anyone tempted to wave this away should apply a simple test: if the poster's audience cannot reliably tell a Zionist from a Jew, then whatever the designer intended, the poster functions as a threat to Jews. In today's Britain, that reliability does not exist. The fear is rational.

The diagnosis is still wrong

But a rational fear can be attached to a mistaken diagnosis, and "this is the 1930s again" is one. The comparison assumes that hostility to Zionism is, in itself, hostility to Jews — that the two have always been one thing, such that attacking the ideology means attacking the people. History says otherwise, and says it emphatically. When political Zionism appeared, the most sustained opposition to it came from Jews — above all from the rabbinic leadership of Europe, who saw in the new nationalism a rebellion against the Jewish religion itself. The earlier articles in this series documented that judgment from the founders' own mouths: men who did not believe in the God of the Torah, building a national identity out of European materials, in conscious opposition to the traditional Jew. Communities descended from that rabbinic opposition live in London today.

Anti-Zionism as such cannot be antisemitism, because Jews faithful to Judaism have held it since before the state existed. What can be antisemitism — what often is — is the use of "Zionist" as a permission slip, a way to say the old thing in new clothing. The distinction is not a technicality; it is the entire question. And it has to be enforced in both directions, or it is worth nothing.

What the ugliest witness confirms

There is a historical passage worth knowing here, precisely because of whose pen it comes from. In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes his early years in Vienna and his hardening conviction that the Jews were not Germans of a different religion but a foreign nation. He then records that his remaining indecision on the point was resolved by, of all things, the rise of Zionism — a movement of Jews whose aim, in his words, was "to assert the national character of Judaism."

The passage must be read carefully, because it is easy to draw the wrong lesson from it. Hitler did not learn racial antisemitism from the Zionists; that ideology was fully built by Europeans, for European reasons, decades before Herzl wrote a line, and its authors needed no Jewish assistance. What the passage shows is something narrower and, in its way, more damning for the equation on that Underground poster: the most murderous antisemite in history looked at Jewish nationalism and recognized agreement on the central question. He held that the Jew was a nation and could never truly be a German; and here was a Jewish movement declaring that the Jew was a nation and should stop trying. Two enemies, one premise. The party missing from both of their accounts was the same one missing from the poster and the tweet — the traditional Jew, who insisted he was a member of a faith, bound by a covenant, and a loyal subject of whatever country he lived in. Both the antisemite and the nationalist required that Jew not to exist. He existed anyway, and still does.

Breaking it, not choosing sides in it

Which returns the argument to that train car. The activist who wants his slogan to be political rather than racial has exactly one honest path: police the distinction relentlessly — aim every word at a state and an ideology, and treat any comrade who lets it slide onto a synagogue or a schoolchild as having crossed into the oldest hatred, because he has.

The passenger who fears for his community has the same path from the other side: stop certifying the equation. Announcing that an anti-Zionist slogan is 1930s propaganda tells every antisemite in Britain that the Jews themselves confirm the two words mean one thing — and so every future attack on the state lands, with the community's own endorsement, on the community.

The equation is the weapon. It was the antisemite's weapon before it was anyone's flag, and everyone who repeats it — from either direction, with whatever intentions — is sharpening it. The Jews of the older tradition declined it from the beginning, and their descendants ride those same trains, asking nothing more than to be what Jews always were: a people of a covenant, not combatants in a war over a state that they never accepted.