The conflation, thus confusion, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism

August 14, 2025

Anyone who’s studied philosophy would know that Zionism is a matter of policies intended to create and maintain a “Jewish” state (definition of “Jewish” is a rabbit hole); antisemitism is the hatred and fear of Jews for merely being Jews. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people should be repudiated on all occasions – one of Zionism’s major policies is the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish people, which puts the lives of Jewish people on a level with the policy of ethnic cleansing.

I’m not Jewish myself, but some of my ancestors were — putting policies like ethnic cleansing on a level with my distant relatives in Krakow, ethnically cleansed during the 1940s, is frankly, antisemitic — and that’s the consequence of using the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism” (which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism) as the Australian antisemitism envoy Segal is doing. So basically Segal is working from an antisemitic basis.