Deborah Lipstadt revises the Nakba: Palestinian leaders told their people to leave in 1948 so we have ‘free rein to wipe out the Jews.’ She also says that anti-Zionist Jews are “belated” to their Jewishness, and that Muslim countries all over the world are intolerant of religious minorities.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is applying Jewish myth, scripture, and ancient history to a highly political Jewish agenda– defending Zionism– that’s become enthralled to secular ideas of power. Calling anti-Zionism antisemitism is not a lesson in Jewish history, it’s an exercise in the delegitimisation of another people’s historic experience.

In her new book, Deborah Lipstadt says, “Zionism is the national liberation movement of Jews,” and therefore those who oppose the idea of a Jewish state are anti-Semitic. She distorts the values of anti-Zionists, who are for democracy not ethnic states, and offers an ideological justification for the displacement of Palestinians.

A new documentary called WitchHunt points out the narrow room for debate over alleged antisemitism in the British Labour Party. Anti-Zionist Jews are excluded as unrepresentative of British Jews. And why is it okay to talk about antisemitism and Zionism in Britain without asking a Palestinian what their direct experience of Zionism has looked and felt like?

Activists Eyad Kishawi, Max Ajl, and Liliana Cordova-Kaczerginski applaud Jewish Voice for Peace’s recent statement outlining its “unequivocal opposition to Zionism,” but raise a critique that it gives credence to the idea that Zionism emerged from Jewish life, and was not a colonial ideology developed to expand western imperialism in Palestine. “Anti-Zionism is not merely criticism of current Israeli policies or even the idea of a Jewish nation-state,” they write, “It is a rejection of an imperially-imposed, racist, settler-colonial state.”

For 22 years after its founding Jewish Voice for Peace declined to take a position on Zionism. Now it has boldly stated that “Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations” and “We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter” to “our vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people.” JVP member Robert Herbst writes that the landmark statement “helps restore in my Jewish heart and soul a modicum of pride.”

Just when anti-Zionism is becoming mainstream, Bari Weiss reads the pro-Israel hasbara playbook and says that all anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic, because they demonize the Jewish desire for a homeland and apply a double standard to 6 million Jews as opposed to the other 7 billion people on the planet. But the New York Times columnist is powerful and important.

Many Jews have kept their silence about Israel, knowing that a critique of Israeli policies (not to mention Zionism) can get you labeled as a “self-hater” and have detrimental consequences to reputation and career. I know such people, and I don’t blame them. But it appears that this climate is beginning to change.

On November 17, the British anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was informed by Twitter that his account was suspended permanently. No reason was given. It turns out that according to Twitter, comparing the siege of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto is a breach of rules whereas wishing Jewish anti-Zionists had died in Auschwitz is not.

US writers in intellectual journals bash Zionism. “It is anathema to say so,” Nathan Goldman writes in the Baffler, but Zionism is ethnonationalism, which is the opposite of liberal democracy; while Molly Crabapple writes in the New York Review of Books, “Jewish ethno-nationalism is a poison like all ethno-nationalisms.”