The calamitous weakness of the “anti-Zionism can’t be antisemitic because some Jews are anti-Zionist” argument ought to have driven it from the public square long ago. Nevertheless, this rotten corpse of an idea keeps popping to the surface, again and again.

Writing in a review of  Globalising Hatred, Denis MacShane’s  book on antisemitism,  Antony Lerman says,

Unsurprisingly, at the heart of MacShane’s definition of “neo-anti-Semitism” is the belief that “anti-Zionism is Jew-hatred by other linguistic means”. Some anti-Zionism is a cover for anti-Semitism, but expressed as a general rule, MacShane’s view is conceptually and historically false. Moreover, it ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of strictly Orthodox Jews oppose Zionism, and thousands more secular-leaning Diasporan Jews and Israelis, who feel strongly Jewish, reject Zionism’s current form.

Let’s try a few examples of the same argument in different contexts and see how it works. Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s homophobic sidekick, was gay. From the existence of Cohn, and others like him, we might reasonably conclude, if we follow Legman’s logic, that there is nothing necessarily anti-gay about people who express hatred and contempt for homosexuals. After all, Ray Cohn used to do that and he was one himself, so what’s the problem?

Now, a political example. During the apartheid era in South Africa, there was never a shortage of Bantustan leaders and assorted black hirelings willing to tell foreign journalists how the system was great for black people and what a horrible bunch of communists the ANC were.  If we were to apply Lerman’s logic to this case, we’d have to say that there was nothing necessarily racist about the apartheid regime because some black people were perfectly happy with it.

I’ll throw in one final argument.  In countries where the influence of religion causes women to suffer from gross and undeniable limitations on their human rights it’s quite common to hear women speak publicly in favor of the system that oppresses them.  The existence of such women, if we follow Lerman’s logic, means that it would be impossible to describe the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, for example, as being a form of oppression of women. After all, the system couldn’t have functioned without the direct intervention of nuns and the quiet support of lay women in the broader society.

Could it be any clearer that it’s the content of the opinion that matters, and not the ethnicity or gender of the person expressing it? I doubt it.

Lerman’s argument about many Jews rejecting the current form of Zionism can be dismissed with contempt. There’s a huge difference between rejecting the current form that the nationalism of one’s people is taking and rejecting their right to national self-determination tout court.

There’s much more to criticize in Lerman’s review but I’ll confine myself to one more point. He says,

He  [Mac Shane] draws attention to how Jews were disproportionately represented among the “disappeared” under the Argentinian junta of the 1970s and 1980s, but then grossly exaggerates the actual number.

There’s a lot of controversy about exactly how many people were “disappeared” by the 1976 -1983 military dictatorship in Argentina. The official enquiry put the number at around 10,000 while human rights organizations put the number at around  30,000.  The mumber of Jews among the victims has been credibly estimated to have been between 1800 and 2000. That means that if we accept  30,000 as being the real number of disappeared, then at least 5% of them were Jews. Considering that in 1976 Jews made up about 1% of Argentina’s population, the disproportionate degree to which they were victims of the dictatorship is plain to see.

In this regard it must also be remembered that many prominent figures in the apparatus of state terror were firm believers in the existence of a Judeo-Marxist world conspiracy against Catholic Argentina and treated their Jewish victims - or even those with supposedly Jewish names - with special savagery as a result.