The Left-Wing Case Against Antizionism

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone associated with it.The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named. The displacement of so many Jews from their ancient home becomes a kind of tit for tat—a balancing act of victimhood against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence. The fact that accusations of “Zionism” were what legitimized anti-Jewish violence—whether during the Tripoli pogroms of 1945, 1948, and 1967; the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, and synagogue bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in 1949; or the expulsion of Egyptian Jews in 1956 by Gamal Abdel Nasser—drops out of the calculus.[David Frum: Anti-semitism is becoming mainstream]How can it be that an ideology that has produced repeated acts of discrimination, dispossession, and violence now bears the mantle of progressivism in the West and has been normalized within the Democratic Party? Like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge, anti-Zionism represents a wrong turn for the left. Anti-Zionism claims to be concerned with rights of minorities,