We’ve all expressed immense frustration over being lumped in with Nazis and other rabid bigots over our opposition to apartheid and settler colonialism. The cynical attempts to crush opposition to Zionism by browbeating anyone who opposes the American empire with accusations of secret antisemitism can be seen both before and since October 7. It is somewhat ironic that Zionism, especially among evangelical Christians, is itself an unconscious expression of toxic and deleterious antisemitism from which they have failed to liberate themselves.

Among Evangelical Americans, a popular belief posits white Israelis as not only being indigenous to Palestine, a bizarre contortion of reality in itself, but as being the “chosen people” with a separate covenant with their god which guarantees a Jewish ethnostate in the “Holy Land.” In the same way that their god promised the New World to white European settlers from coast to coast, he has promised Jews all the land in Palestine from the river to the sea.

On its face, this belief seems to be pointedly not antisemitic, but a clean inversion of the idea that Jews are inferior. But this inversion of antisemitism is not the same thing as the abolition of antisemitism.

Importantly, “chosen people” is not and has never before been an expression of supremacist thinking, at least not traditionally among Jews. The true meaning of the phrase “chosen people” refers to the special obligations, or “mitzvot,” which Jews observe in obedience to their god. They are the “chosen people” because, unlike in Christian doctrine, these laws are not universally applicable. No Jew in their right mind will claim eating pork, for instance, is an offense to God independently of one’s own religious identity precisely because non-Jews do not have the same obligations to God. We gentiles have no mitzvot to follow. That is what actually makes Jews “chosen.”

The insistence that Jews’ unique relationship to the divine reflects a supremacist worldview is, in fact, an antisemitic contortion of Jewish doctrine to justify the oppression and extermination of Jews. Antisemites are very fond of invoking this imaginary Jewish doctrine to claim that Jews are the originators of the ideology of racial hierarchy. It is a bold-faced lie engineered to justify genocide. “If we don’t do it to them, they will do it to us.”

Rather than parting with this bigoted idea, non-Jewish Zionists have preserved their erroneous antisemitic belief with the additional caveat that Jews are, in fact, “chosen” in the sense that they have not just special obligations, but special rights, namely the right to all the land in Palestine. They have not parted with antisemitism whatsoever, but have merely inverted it to justify yet another genocide.

When these same people accuse us of antisemitism, it is wholesale projection which suggests since that they are the self-appointed opposite of antisemites, and since we oppose their Zionist regime, we must be antisemitic. In reality, in agreement with true Jewish doctrine, we reject all claims of racial supremacy.

So don’t let anyone tell you that you’re antisemitic for not being a Zionist. Zionism is antisemitism. Do not forget this for a second.