Anti-zionism and anti-semetism: is there a difference?

I've never delved deeply into the definitions, but I'll give it a shot.

I've been called a Zionist for supporting Israel. That has more to do with that nation being a close ally to the US.

I've always thought of antisemitism as a prejudice against Jews.

The former is more political, while the latter is based in bigotry.

It is a little foggy because both of these words have changed throughout history. Zionism used to just be the belief that the Jews should have an ethnostate. Eventually it became a form of Jewish Supremacy, where the ethnostate must also be an apartheid society. Zionist philosophy evolved in Nazi Germany and absorbed a lot of elements from Nazism.

To be anti-zionist today is to oppose Israel as an apartheid society.

Semitic is really a language group, so it used to be that anyone who spoke a semitic language was a Semite. It's still that way in academic circles, historians and linguists will talk about the Semites as the people who later broke into other groups, like the Arabs, Hebrews, Assyrians, and such.

But today, anti-semitism really just refers to hatred of the Jews on a racial level, as opposed to a cultural level. And it doesn't refer to hatred of the Arabs, even though Arabic is also a semitic language.

Yes.

Just like if I criticize the British government doesn't mean I hate Anglicans. Most mature adults can understand these concepts.

I thought Zions were these guys from Doctor Who.⬇


Whoops, my bad! Those are Zygons. (It's just that Zion and Zygon almost sound alike, though being spelled differently)

A semite can be a Jew or Arab. Not all Jews or Arabs are rooted in the Middle East where semitic people lived long before the British messed things up there.

Let me help get this started.

Professor Jeffery Sachs is a semite, a Jew to be exact. He is not a bad actor in my books.

Anti Semitism would be a hatred of a racial group. Anti Zionism would mean you are against an ideology of racial nationalism.

As I suspect, there is no such thing as anti-semitism. When the matter is laid bare for examination, there is nothing to see. Semitism itself is a meaningless word.

This post is a challenging wank.