One of the most uncomfortable things for me about the last almost-year is realising that loud people equating anti-zionism to antisemitism has undermined my ability to spot genuine antisemitism within the left; through organising, I got to know some Jewish pro-palestine student organisers and it was grim to see how they were a lightning rod for bigot’s hatred, and how used to it they were.

One friend had studied in Israel and said that the propaganda that’s directed towards Israelis, especially young Israelis, was horrifying to her because as well as demonising Palestinians, they leveraged generational trauma around the Holocaust. She said that it hurt to see one genocide being used to fuel another because it felt like the Holocaust was still ongoing, still claiming lives. She said that it also felt like genuine antisemitism was also platformed often with the propaganda, because it helps to reinforce the idea that Jewish people will never be safe without a Jewish state.

She also said that buying into this rhetoric is why she used to be pro-zionism. What really sticks with me is when she explained how her position on the matter changed, she described it as a mounting sense of cognitive dissonance that begin to morph into dread as she realised how the cycle of violence perpetuates: “we were told that Palestinians wanted to exterminate and that it was necessary to fight back. Realising the lie in this came with the horrifying thought of ‘oh God, if they didn’t want to kill us all before, they surely must now’. This was so scary that I almost rebounded back into being Zionist, but the truth of it is that Palestinians, like Jews, just want to live and be safe”.

This struck me because I hadn’t realised how much Israel’s genocide of Palestine depended on constructing Jewish people as an “other”. Another person in that discussion commented that even if they only cared for the lives of Jews, they would still be anti-Zionist, because under such rhetoric of hate, the cycle of genocidal violence will continue, and no-one will be safe — Jews, Palestinians or otherwise