Every week seems to bring news of another attempted massacre of diaspora Jews. This week, it was outside Detroit, Michigan, where an armed man rammed his car into a synagogue. The man, who lost family members in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, shot himself in a gunfight with synagogue security. Like clockwork, the rationalizations and qualifications came pouring in; not to justify of course, but merely to observe, with a heavy heart, some lamentable correlations. Here is a quintessential response to the attack, from antizionist author Ben Lorber:
Attacks on Jewish diaspora communities are morally inexcusable. They’re also bound to occur when communal representatives proclaim our collective allegiance to a pariah state pursuing some of the greatest atrocities of a still-young century
Such responses are especially notable coming from a self-professed antizionist like Lorber. Because in spite of Israel’s mass atrocities, its staggering war crimes and flagrant violations of international law, the case for “Zionism” (insofar as the word has any meaning) is stronger today than it was before October 7th, 2023. Lorber’s comments go a long way in explaining why.
The argument in Zionism’s favor is articulated and re-articulated in the day-to-day experience of diaspora Jews, not so much because of the hateful atrocities directed against us (though that certainly isn’t helping) – which tend to be the product of some toxic brew of hateful ideology and mental illness – but because of the silence, the hemming and hawing, the condemnations attached with conditions and qualifications about Israel and Zionism, that emanate from the people who claim to speak in the name of universalism, inclusion, and social justice.
It is this camp – the left – which is the only camp that is capable of making a compelling case against “Zionism.” Such an argument certainly won’t come from an ascendant, international and increasingly xenophobic right-wing. In the United States, masked agents of the state rove the streets asking immigrants for their papers. In the United Kingdom, the Reform Party promises a mass deportation agency inspired by ICE. Sweden’s center-right government has turned sharply against asylum seekers. Greece recently passed draconian laws in the hopes of curbing those seeking asylum to its shores. Chile’s new president has vowed to deport thousands of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants. And on it goes.
This xenophobic turn naturally strengthens the case for Israel as a Jewish state in the minds of Jewish people, who were themselves refused entry by the rest of the world in their desperate attempts to flee the rising tide of fascism. Today’s geopolitical reality underscores a sense of fragility for diaspora Jews – that they are mere guests in their countries’ and that an ascendant right-wing can render them stateless enemies once again, just as other regimes have done in the past. Under these stark conditions, the case for Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state seems self-evident.
But this is the easy case for Zionism; it is an argument that acknowledges the world as it is, not as it ought to be. In this view, informed by Jewish history and experience – which you can call Judeo-pessimism – our world is one of every man for himself (or every tribe for itself, as the case may be); it takes the fleeting and conditional nature of allyship with Jews as axiomatic. This is the status quo, the natural state of things, the background hum of Jewish precarity from which Zionism takes its strength. The tie goes to the runner, and the runner is Zionism.
The most effective way to undermine this argument is to make the case for pluralism, egalitarianism, solidarity, and democracy – to make the case to Jews that they are not mere guests of the non-Jewish majority, but its peers; that they are not in diaspora, but at home. One of the ironies of the present moment is that the hegemonic post-war liberalism of the United States – in its championing of tolerance and pluralism – presented the most acute challenge to Zionism (even as this hegemonic liberalism embraced Zionism); now, an ascendant left-wing is challenging this post-war liberalism, seeking not only to expose its real hypocrisies and reverse its legitimate failures, but to throw out its very commitment to tolerance and pluralism altogether. And here is another irony: in their totalizing zeal to undo Zionism completely, the ascendant left has abandoned the most potent tools available to them to successfully dismantle it – pluralism, tolerance, and democracy. In so doing, they find themselves solidifying the arguments in its favor.
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Zionism is the ur-solidarity problem: how do you make the case against garrison-state style nationalism — how do you convincingly argue that our world is not in fact a world of every man for himself, that a better one is possible — to a people who have been failed by collective action and betrayed by the promise of solidarity over and over again throughout their history.
Rather than wrestle with this reality, and respond with compassion and humility about the undeniable facts of Jewish history as part of an empathic, open-hearted campaign of persuasion against this kind of well-founded Judeo-pessimism, the Western left has largely responded instead with mockery, dismissal, and victim-blaming.
It is an ugly and shameful truth that the exhausting and unrewarding work of democracy — of fighting on behalf of people whose politics you might hate, in the hopes of one day reshaping them and the polity at large — has run aground for the left, not with Latino voters seduced by Donald Trump’s supposed business acumen, or the white working class persuaded by the promise to Make America Great Again, but with so-called “Zionists.” (To be clear, this work shouldn’t stop for anyone.)
And so Jewish life here in the diaspora will continue to move underground; bigger walls will go up, more armed guards will be stationed outside synagogues and schools, and membership dues will increase; not because Jews are possessed by some delusional sense of victimhood, but because such precautions have simply become a necessity for Jewish life to continue to function in the diaspora. Every Jew involved in communal Jewish life knows this to be the case.
Such fortification and securitization of Jewish life in the diaspora – long the norm in Europe and now the standard in the United States as well – is as good a definition of “Zionism” in the year 2026 as any. These security measures are likely to further isolate Jews from their peers; but this increasing isolation is not the fault of Jews, for whom such measures are now a necessity, but of the Western left who has failed to protect them. This reality is both an extraordinary loss for diaspora Jewish life and a searing indictment of the mass movement left over the last two years. The best case against a Jewish garrison-state is the ability for Jewish communities in the diaspora to remain un-garrisoned. And yet, the opposite has happened.
Antizionists (including antizionist Jews) like to observe – with a feigned helplessness, as if observing a passing cloud – the “inevitable” correlation between increased antisemitism in the diaspora and the actions of the state of Israel. But if we lived in a world in which antizionists were successfully making the case for their worldview, anti-Jewish hatred would decrease or remain steady in spite of Israel’s actions abroad. Antizionists would be springing into action, forming protective rings around synagogues and organizing multi-faith solidarity rallies after each new anti-Jewish atrocity, in which they proclaim that “in spite of our strong, even visceral disagreement on Israel, we want Jews of all kinds, regardless of their views on Israel and Palestine, to know that they are welcome in our communities.” (Surely by now, they’ve had enough time to internalize this lesson and organize such efforts.)
And yet: when was the last time you saw a self-identified antizionist show up at a vandalized kosher restaurant to help clean up its windows, broken in the name of a Free Palestine? Or clean the swastika graffiti off the wall of a synagogue? What we get instead from this camp is the usual dissembling, in which defenders of anti-Jewish harassment rifle through the dumpster for some kind of receipt that indicts this Jew and that Jew for having failed to sufficiently distance themselves from Israeli crimes.
The most compelling antizionist argument imaginable would be to point at the news and tell Jews, “see, even when Israel does horrific things, you are safe here.” But of course, the reverse has happened. It’s one thing for the movement to be doing the valiant work of trying to keep Jews safe, albeit unsuccessfully; it’s another entirely to not even try. Each new retreat to the same old talking point about the regrettable, but inevitable correlation between Israeli policy and antisemitism is itself evidence of a movement that isn’t really interested in trying. On the contrary, each new instance of anti-Jewish violence is trotted out not as a pained expression of their movement’s failures, of the need to do better – of asking “where did we go wrong?” (such hand-wringing questions are de rigueur for leftist Jews when it comes to Zionism) – but as a barely-veiled threat: here’s what happens when you don’t distance yourself from Israel – and you can expect a lot more of where that came from.
Such threats are unlikely to work on the majority of diaspora Jews, who simply have too much self-respect to accede to this authoritarian politics of coercion, and to a twisted logic that blames them for their own suffering. They will not “separate themselves from Israel” – whatever that means – when such an act is presented not as a choice available to full citizens, every bit the equal of their peers in a multi-ethnic democracy, but rather as the way out of a thinly veiled threat, an offer that diaspora Jews can’t refuse. Most Jews understand this as a Kafka trap, a rigged game that can’t be won.
And how exactly are we supposed to disentangle ourselves, not just from Israeli policy (which we have little to no control over – certainly no more so than any other American), but from Israel itself? How does an Israeli-American separate himself from Israel? For many Jews, Israel and Jews are linked together as a simple fact of history – and the ones who aren’t have enough humility and self-awareness to understand that they easily could have been. What humiliation ritual must I enact in order to overturn the judgement that renders me guilty until proven innocent? How much shame must I perform over the fact that the Holocaust happened to my grandparents? What spell can I cast to undo the events of the past? And who exactly is the judge, jury, and executioner that will determine whether Jews have sufficiently disentangled themselves from “Zionism”? The person burning them to death in their own city?
This might explain the reticence of at least some Jews to speak out more forthrightly on Israel’s actions in the first place: they have too strong a sense of Jewish solidarity — and too keen an awareness of Jewish history — to walk around wearing “Not Guilty” signs on their foreheads for the rest of their lives. They sense they are not having a debate among peers as much as receiving a visit from the goon squad. They understand they are playing an unwinnable game designed by bigots posing as leftists, and they are unwilling to point the finger at their Jewish brothers and sisters for the purpose of saving themselves from a show trial that is almost certain to condemn them later anyways.
Indeed, the demand that Jews separate themselves from Israel presumes both the collective guilt of world Jewry and the bigotry of our allies. This presumption is itself an unspoken admission of Judeo-pessimism: the world hates us, antisemitism is everywhere, and even our allies are bigots primed to betray us. It’s difficult to conceive of a more thorough concession to Zionism than this.
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The increase in anti-Jewish violence in the diaspora is evidence not of the antizionist left’s success as a movement, but of its failures – at least, that is, if we are to take their stated objectives at face-value. But it is the refusal to concede that such an increase is even a problem in the first place which really cements the movement’s extraordinary unseriousness. The unwillingness of such a movement to engage in the hard work and self-critique necessary to convince those who are not yet convinced and most urgently need to be – either because the movement is too lazy to be bothered, or too disingenuous, or shaped so thoroughly in reaction to the bad-faith of others that it is incapable of offering any affirmative vision, or simply because it doesn’t believe in its own shit it is shoveling – is a movement that is unworthy of support by (small-d) democrats in a democracy.
It is, in fact, the antizionist left who in their failures of solidarity — in their blathering about how “Zionism causes antisemitism,” or “that if Jews don’t want to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, they must be the first to denounce its crimes,” or that “those looking to protect Jews will need to turn their eyes from the violence of recent attacks towards Israel’s actions in Gaza” — make the case for “Zionism” more persuasively than any Zionist could ever dream of. For these are not the arguments of democrats engaged in the work of democracy; they are the arguments of extortionists. Such arguments don’t exist to convince the unconvinced; they exist to soothe the guilty conscience of the already converted. They are barely even arguments at all; they are doctrine.
This is the tragic irony of the authoritarian, antizionist left: every motte and bailey, every strawman, and false choice is regurgitated not as a genuine act of persuasion, but as a preemptive defense against what it knows is its own moral cowardice. As such, every tenuous assertion it makes serves only to buttress the case for the very thing it claims it seeks to undo. It is a movement that can’t get enough of what it doesn’t need. They would know as much if they were ever curious enough to ask.
Josh Yunis is a writer-director based in Los Angeles.
This article first appeared on Josh Yunis’ Substack “The Diaspora“.
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