The Thesis

The political position of this campaign, in plain language.

The slogan

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

Anti-Zionism is racism.

What Zionism is

Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination. It emerged in late 19th-century Europe as a response to a hard fact: the liberal promise of emancipation had not protected Jews from pogroms, expulsion, blood libel, or — within living memory of its founders — from the Shoah. Zionism's claim is the same claim every other national movement has made in the modern era: that a people has the right to a homeland in which it is sovereign and safe.

Zionism, like any political project, contains a range of currents — religious, secular, labour, liberal, revisionist — and is internally contested on questions of borders, settlement, and the rights of non-Jewish citizens. None of those internal disagreements is at issue here. What is at issue is the bare claim: do Jews, alone among the peoples of the world, lack the right to a national home?

What anti-Zionism is

Anti-Zionism is not criticism of an Israeli government, or of a settlement policy, or of the conduct of a war. Those are matters on which Jews themselves disagree, often loudly. Anti-Zionism is the position that the Jewish state should not exist — that the political project of Jewish self-determination, uniquely among the world's national movements, is illegitimate at its root.

Stated plainly: anti-Zionism does not call for the dissolution of Pakistan, of Bangladesh, of South Sudan, of Kosovo, of Slovakia, of any of the more than ninety states created since 1945. It calls for the dissolution of one. The one whose population is, alone in the world, majority-Jewish. That singling-out is the thing that makes the position racist rather than political.

Why anti-Zionism is antisemitism

Antisemitism, in its modern form, is not only or primarily the crude image of the hooked-nose caricature. It is a structure of thought in which Jews — uniquely — are denied what other peoples are granted as a matter of course: the right to a self-defined identity, the right to safety, and the right to political agency on their own terms. Anti-Zionism applies that exact structure to Jewish nationhood. Every other national movement is presumed legitimate; Jewish nationhood, alone, is treated as a colonial pathology that must be undone.

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted by the UK government and dozens of others, lists among its examples "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour." That is anti-Zionism in plain words. The campaign accepts that definition.

It follows that an organisation which is proudly anti-Zionist — which makes opposition to Jewish self-determination a defining commitment — has, on this analysis, made antisemitism a defining commitment.

Why anti-Zionism is racism

Racism, at its core, is the application of a different standard to one group of people than to all others, on the basis of who they are. Anti-Zionism does precisely that. It accepts that Kurds, Kosovars, Tibetans, Catalans, Scots, Palestinians, and a hundred other peoples may legitimately seek a state of their own; it accepts the existence of every Muslim-majority, Christian-majority, Hindu-majority, and Buddhist-majority state in the world. It objects, in principle, only to the one Jewish-majority state. The double standard is the racism. It does not become less racist because it is dressed in the language of anti-colonialism.

What this means for SUTR

Stand Up To Racism is, on the public record gathered on the evidence page, openly and proudly anti-Zionist. It excludes Friends of Israel and pro-Israel groups from its coalitions. It publishes material framing the Israeli government as a structural ally of the international far right. It takes its political direction from a tradition — the Socialist Workers Party — with its own well-documented history of contempt for the concerns of British Jews.

If anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and SUTR is proudly anti-Zionist, then SUTR — for all the anti-racist branding — is, on this campaign's analysis, an antisemitic organisation. That is the case this site exists to make.