Anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that anti-Israeli expression creates an environment where anti-Semitism becomes more acceptable. The mechanism they describe is social rather than logical: in an environment where many people hold anti-Israel beliefs, they are less likely to challenge anti-Semitism when it occurs. Hostility that would otherwise be named and refused instead passes as an unremarkable extension of a widely shared political view, and that absence of objection is itself what lowers the cost of expressing it. The evidence offered is the pattern of European opinion set beside the pattern of European violence. This is reflected most prominently in Europe, where just 54% of respondents believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, and around 25% believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. That second figure, proponents note, is not a view about any state's conduct at all but a claim about Jews as such, which is why they read the two as connected rather than separate. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there is also a high rate of anti-Semitic attacks against European Jews. In 2015 in Paris, for example, four people were killed during the siege of a Kosher supermarket. In Sweden, firebombs were planted outside a Jewish burial chapel, and in Denmark, also in 2015, a security guard was shot while guarding a bat mitzvah. Sadly, armed guards are often required outside European synagogues — a standing precaution that measures how ordinary the threat has become. The conclusion drawn is about conditions rather than about identity. There is evidently a direct correlation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and even if anti-Zionists are not explicitly anti-Semitic, they create an environment in which anti-Semitism can flourish. On that reading the two remain different concepts — one directed at a state, the other at a people — while anti-Zionism is nonetheless damaging to Jewish communities.

Context

Even if anti-Zionism isn't itself anti-Semitic, it creates an environment where anti-Semitism can flourish.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Demonstrating Europe has a large number of anti-Zionists and Europe has a large number of anti-Semitic attacks does not prove causality. Anti-Zionism does not create an environment for anti-Semitic attacks to take place. The two are entirely independent and unlinked. Firstly, there are many anti-Semites who actually embrace Zionism. In 1905, the former British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour supported the Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the UK and was widely seen as an anti-Semitic bill. In 1917, he also asserted he was very much in favour of Zionism. The fact that the two beliefs can be held concurrently disproves any notion that anti-Zionism creates fertile ground for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites come from all sides of the Zionism debate. Many argue for it and many against. Secondly, the vast majority of the anti-Semitic attacks which are carried out in Europe are carried out by radicalised Muslims. It would be a far more accurate statement to assert that radical Islam creates an environment in which anti-Semitism prospers, not anti-Zionism.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Anti-Zionism has no impact on anti-Semitism.