Misconstrued and Misused: Defining Terms to Disarm Conflict

Introduction

Few conflations do more damage to clear thinking than the collapsing of “Jewish,” “Zionist,” “Semitic,” and “Israeli” into a single, interchangeable category. The confusion is not accidental – it serves real political purposes on more than one side of the debate – but it is also not inevitable. Judaism is a religion and a civilisation more than three thousand years old. Zionism is a political movement barely a century and a half old. Israel is a modern nation-state, founded in 1948. Semitic is a linguistic classification that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic speakers alike. These are four different things, and the failure to separate them has become one of the most consequential category errors in contemporary political discourse – an error that harms Jewish people, Palestinian people, and honest debate all at once.

This essay tries to pull the categories apart, examine how and why they came to be merged, and ask what follows when we insist on the distinction.

Judaism Is A Religion; Zionism Is A Political Movement

Judaism is a religious and cultural tradition stretching back to the ancient Near East, encompassing law, liturgy, ethics, and a body of interpretive scholarship that has evolved continuously for millennia. It has no single political programme. Throughout its history it has produced Hasidic mystics, Talmudic legalists, secular Bundist socialists, Reform reformers, and, more recently, both fervent Zionists and fervent anti-Zionists. To be Jewish, religiously or ethnically, has never in itself implied a single stance on the question of a Jewish nation-state.

Zionism, by contrast, is a specific political and nationalist movement that crystallised in late-nineteenth-century Europe, most closely associated with Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat. It emerged from a particular historical context: the failure of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Europe, the trauma of pogroms in the Russian Empire, and the rise of racial antisemitism that made many Jewish intellectuals conclude that safety required a state of their own. Zionism was, at its founding, one proposed answer among several competing Jewish political responses to persecution – Bundism (Jewish socialist autonomism in the diaspora), territorialism (seeking a Jewish homeland somewhere other than Palestine), and religious anti-Zionism (which held that a Jewish state before the Messianic age was theologically illegitimate) all had substantial followings among European Jews in the early twentieth century. Zionism did not simply represent “the Jews”; it won an argument among Jews, and not without dissent that persists to this day.

This matters because a great deal of confusion – much of it politically convenient – comes from treating Zionism as simply the political expression of Judaism itself, as though supporting or opposing it were equivalent to supporting or opposing Jewish existence. That equation is not historically accurate, and Jewish communities themselves have never been unanimous on it.

Jewish Anti-Zionism Is Real, Organised, And Longstanding

It is often asserted, particularly in pro-Israel advocacy, that Zionism is simply the natural political expression of Jewish peoplehood, and that opposition to it is therefore opposition to Jews as such. This claim ignores an entire, organised strand of Jewish religious and political life.

Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) anti-Zionism has deep theological roots. Groups such as Neturei Karta and the broader Satmar Hasidic movement hold that the ingathering of Jews into a sovereign state before the arrival of the Messiah is a transgression against Jewish law – that Zionism represents a human usurpation of a divine prerogative. This is a minority position even within Orthodoxy, but it is neither new nor fringe within the communities that hold it; it has been argued in rabbinic literature since the earliest Zionist congresses.

On the secular left, organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, Independent Jewish Voices in Canada and the UK, and various Israeli groups (B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, among others focused more narrowly on documenting occupation abuses) organise explicitly around opposition to Zionism or to specific Israeli state policies, while identifying as Jewish and, in many cases, as religiously observant. Their existence is not a talking point; it is a sociological fact about the diversity of Jewish political opinion.

None of this means Zionism is a fringe position among Jews – it plainly is not; the majority of the world’s Jewish population either lives in Israel or expresses some degree of identification with it as a political project. The point is narrower and more defensible: Jewish opinion on Zionism has never been monolithic, and treating “the Jews” and “Zionism” as synonyms erases a real and long-running internal Jewish debate, one that predates the state of Israel itself.

What “Zionism” Actually Refers To, And Why Definitions Matter

Part of the difficulty in this debate is that “Zionism” is used to mean different things by different speakers, often within the same conversation. At minimum, three distinct senses are commonly in play.

Zionism as the historical movement for the establishment of a Jewish national home, which achieved its central goal with Israel’s founding in 1948. In this narrow historical sense, the movement’s founding project is complete.

Zionism as an ongoing ideological commitment to the continued existence of Israel as a state with a Jewish majority and a specifically Jewish character – this is the sense in which most Israelis and most diaspora Jews who call themselves Zionists use the term today. It is, in this usage, closer to a form of nationalism than a specific policy programme, and people who hold it disagree sharply among themselves about settlements, the occupation, religious authority, and the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Zionism as a term of political critique, used by critics to refer to the specific practices of the Israeli state and its supporters – occupation, settlement expansion, the legal and military structures governing Palestinian life in the West Bank and Gaza – treating these as the logical or inevitable expression of the ideology itself.

Collapsing these three senses into one is where a great deal of bad-faith argument on both sides occurs. When a critic says “Zionism is racism,” they may mean the third sense – a critique of specific policies and structures – while a defender hears the second sense, an attack on the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination as such, or even the first, an attack on the historical fact of Israel’s founding. Precision about which sense is meant would resolve a great deal of talking past one another, even where real disagreement remains.

The 1975 Un Resolution And Its 1991 Repeal

This dispute has a specific and instructive history at the United Nations. On 10 November 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination, by a vote of 72 in favour, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. The resolution emerged from a specific Cold War context: the Soviet Union had been promoting the “Zionism-equals-racism” formulation since the late 1960s, following the 1967 Six-Day War, as a way to strengthen ties with Arab states against Israel, and it was championed at the UN by the Soviet bloc, the Arab League, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The resolution did not stand unchallenged. After over a decade of lobbying for its reversal by Jewish organisations, Israeli diplomats, and international parliamentarians, it was formally revoked on 16 December 1991, by Resolution 46/86, adopted with 111 votes in favour, 25 against, and 13 abstentions. The repeal took place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991 Gulf War, and the United States explicitly linked the resolution’s repeal to Israeli participation in the Madrid Peace Conference – President George H. W. Bush urged the repeal in September 1991, and American diplomatic pressure was a decisive factor in shifting the votes of numerous countries that had originally supported the 1975 resolution.

“Is Zionism a form of discrimination” has been a live, internationally contested political question for half a century – not a question manufactured recently, and not one resolved by fiat in either direction.

What should one take from this history? Not, as some now argue, that the underlying question was definitively settled by either vote – UN resolutions reflect the diplomatic balance of power in a given decade as much as they reflect settled moral truth, and honest observers across the spectrum should be able to say so about both the 1975 and 1991 votes. What the episode does demonstrate is that this question has been argued through ordinary diplomatic channels by identifiable state and civil-society actors for half a century.

Antisemitism: Definition And Abuse

Antisemitism, in its ordinary historical usage, means hostility, prejudice, or discrimination directed at Jewish people because they are Jewish – a hatred with a documented history running from mediaeval blood libels and expulsions through nineteenth-century racial pseudoscience to the Holocaust. This is a real, specific, and still-active form of bigotry, and its persistence is well documented independent of any argument about Israeli policy: antisemitic vandalism, harassment, and violence occur in many countries, target Jewish individuals and institutions with no connection to Israeli policy, and long predate the modern state.

The genuinely difficult question – the one worth taking seriously rather than resolving by assertion – is how criticism of Israeli state conduct relates to antisemitism. There are defensible positions across a real spectrum here, and honest people disagree.

One position, associated with organisations such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, holds that certain modes of criticising Israel – applying standards to Israel not applied to other states, denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, or using classical antisemitic tropes (blood libel imagery, conspiratorial claims of hidden global control) to describe Israeli policy – cross into antisemitism even when framed as political criticism. This view has been influential in shaping how governments, universities, and institutions define and respond to alleged antisemitism.

A competing position, held by many human rights organisations, legal scholars, and – notably – a large number of Jewish and Israeli human rights advocates, argues that this framework has in practice been used to suppress legitimate criticism of specific Israeli government policies (settlement expansion, the blockade and bombardment of Gaza, the legal status of Palestinians in the West Bank), and that conflating such criticism with antisemitism cheapens the term and makes it harder to identify and combat actual antisemitism when it occurs. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), drafted by more than two hundred scholars of antisemitism, Jewish studies, and Holocaust history, was produced explicitly as an alternative to the IHRA definition on the grounds that it draws a clearer line between antisemitism and criticism of Israeli state policy, including harsh criticism.

Both documents exist, both have serious scholarly and institutional backing, and reasonable people – including many Jewish scholars – disagree about which better serves the goal of protecting Jewish people from real prejudice while preserving space for legitimate political debate about a state’s conduct. What is not reasonable, on either side, is treating the existence of this disagreement as proof of bad faith by the other side. It is a genuine definitional dispute with real stakes, not a smokescreen invented by one camp.

What can be said with more confidence: documenting, criticising, or campaigning against specific state actions – military operations, settlement policy, legal treatment of a subject population – is a form of political speech that is applied, as a matter of course, to every other state actor in the world without triggering accusations of bigotry against that state’s dominant ethnic or religious group. Singling out criticism of Israel for a uniquely disqualifying label, applied to no other state’s critics, is difficult to justify on principle, even by people who otherwise believe Israel’s actions are largely defensible. At the same time, the actual record of rising antisemitic incidents – attacks on synagogues, harassment of Jewish students, vandalism of Jewish institutions unconnected to any specific policy position – is independently documented by monitoring organisations in country after country, and treating that pattern as merely a manufactured pretext used to shield Israeli policy from criticism is its own form of evasion, understating a real and separately trackable phenomenon.

Semitic Peoples And The Linguistic Argument

The term “Semitic” is a linguistic classification, not an ethnic or religious one. It designates a family of languages historically spoken across the Near East and North Africa, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, and Tigrinya, among others. By this definition, Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Lebanese are Semitic-language speakers in precisely the same technical sense that Hebrew speakers are.

This linguistic fact is often deployed as an argument that Arabs “cannot” be targets of antisemitism, or that hostility toward Arabs is somehow definitionally excluded from the term. This is a popular rhetorical move, but it does not survive scrutiny of how the word actually developed and is used.

 “Antisemitism” was coined in the 1870s, by the German polemicist Wilhelm Marr, specifically to describe and organise hostility toward Jews – it was invented as a “scientific”-sounding, ostensibly more respectable replacement for older religiously framed Jew-hatred, at a time when European racial theorists were constructing a hierarchy of “Semitic” versus “Aryan” races. From its coinage onward, the term has functioned, in essentially universal usage by scholars, dictionaries, and international bodies, to mean hostility toward Jews specifically, not toward Semitic-language speakers generally. The linguistic point is accurate as etymology but does not describe how the word has actually been used for the century and a half of its existence; it is a clever observation, not evidence of an alternative established meaning being suppressed.

This does not mean the concern behind the argument is baseless. Hostility toward Arabs and Muslims – Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, dehumanising rhetoric applied to Palestinians and Lebanese civilians in wartime coverage – is a real and independently documented problem, worth naming and confronting on its own terms, with its own vocabulary and its own monitoring organisations. It does not need to borrow the word “antisemitism” to be taken seriously, and doing so tends to produce more heat than clarity, since it invites exactly the definitional derailment this essay is trying to avoid.

Why The Conflation Persists

If the categories are genuinely distinct, why does the confusion persist so stubbornly? A few structural reasons, more mundane than any single coordinated plan, are sufficient to explain it.

First, the state of Israel has, since its founding, presented itself in official rhetoric as the guarantor and homeland of Jewish people everywhere, not merely its own citizens – the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide, and Israeli officials routinely speak in the name of “the Jewish people” as a whole. This is a coherent nationalist self-presentation, but it has the side effect of making it rhetorically easy – for supporters and critics alike – to treat state and religion as a single entity, even though most diaspora Jews are not Israeli citizens and have no say in Israeli policy.

Second, critics of Israeli policy sometimes do slide from criticising state actions into language and imagery historically associated with antisemitic conspiracy theory – invoking hidden, disproportionate Jewish control of media, finance, or governments generally, rather than confining criticism to the specific conduct of a specific state. When this happens, it legitimately blurs the line the critics themselves usually want to maintain, and gives ammunition to those who want to dismiss all criticism of Israel as bigotry in disguise.

Third, and cutting the other way, defenders of any given Israeli government’s policies have a strong incentive to characterise opposition as antisemitic rather than political, because the antisemitism charge is far more socially disqualifying and harder to argue against in good faith than an ordinary policy dispute. This incentive exists independent of whether any particular critic’s motives are actually prejudiced, and its overuse is a documented complaint even from within Israeli political life and from Jewish critics of the government.

None of these three dynamics requires a hidden coordinating hand; each is a fully sufficient, mundane explanation for why the terms keep collapsing into each other in public discourse – and each also means the fix is the same: more precision, not less, from everyone using these words.

Conclusion

Judaism, Zionism, Israel, antisemitism, and Semitic identity are five related but genuinely distinct concepts, and the discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is measurably worse for how often they are treated as one thing. Judaism is a religious and cultural tradition with no single political programme. Zionism is a modern nationalist movement that a majority, but never the entirety, of Jewish people have identified with. Antisemitism is a real, historically specific, and still-active form of bigotry against Jewish people, distinct from political criticism of a state’s conduct, even when the two are sometimes genuinely difficult to disentangle in a given case. Semitic is a linguistic category encompassing Arabic and Hebrew speakers alike, whose modern usage does not track the actual history of the word “antisemitism.”

Holding these distinctions clearly does not resolve the underlying political disputes about Israeli and Palestinian rights, security, and self-determination – those disputes are real, difficult, and will not be settled by better vocabulary alone. But clearer terms make it possible to disagree about the right things: about specific policies, historical claims, and competing national rights, rather than about who is secretly in league with whom. That is a modest goal, but in a debate this saturated with bad faith on every side, it is not a small one.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, August 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010