What I Mean When I Call Myself Anti-Zionist -- MJ Rosenberg
Sid Shniad
What I Mean When I Call Myself Anti-Zionist
As a person who opposes all violent "solutions"
MJ Rosenberg
May 20, 2026
Anti-Zionism is routinely translated by its critics into a single terrifying phrase: the destruction of Israel. That translation is false.
No, anti-Zionism does not mean driving seven million Israeli Jews into the sea, deporting them, stripping them of rights, or exposing them to insecurity and vengeance. It means opposing a political system based on ethnic preference and replacing it with one based on equal citizenship.
That is a very different proposition.
When critics demand, “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” they usually mean something more specific: Does a state have the right to privilege one ethno-religious group over another indefinitely?
Zohran Mamdani gave the clearest answer I have heard.
“I believe Israel has the right to exist.”
“As a Jewish state?” the moderator asked.
“As a state with equal rights,” he replied.
Exactly.
The argument is not about whether Israelis should continue living where they live. They should. It is not about eliminating Hebrew culture, Jewish communal life, or Jewish security. It is not about replacing one domination system with another.
It is about the state.
More precisely, it is about whether a state controlling the lives of millions of Jews and Palestinians should be organized around permanent ethnic hierarchy or equal rights.
That distinction is absolutely critical.
Ending apartheid in South Africa did not mean deporting white South Africans. It did not mean abolishing Afrikaans culture or denying whites security or citizenship. It meant abolishing a system that privileged one group by law.
The target was the structure, not the people.
The same principle applies here.
A democratic one-state framework — if it ever comes — would not emerge because Israelis and Palestinians suddenly wake up tomorrow and cheerfully embrace shared sovereignty. Nobody serious believes that. Distrust, trauma, fear, nationalism, and decades of bloodshed make that impossible today.
The point is not immediate acceptance. The point is a political horizon.
The goal would be negotiations aimed at creating conditions under which equal rights, constitutional protections, and shared institutions could become imaginable.
Think Northern Ireland.
The Good Friday Agreement did not appear because historic enemies spontaneously reconciled. It emerged from exhaustion with violence, painstaking negotiation, external guarantees, constitutional creativity, and acceptance that neither side was going to disappear.
Something similar would be required in Israel-Palestine.
Any democratic settlement would need ironclad security guarantees for everyone. Jews would require protections against persecution, terrorism, demographic panic, and the understandable fear — intensified by Jewish history — that majority rule could become revenge rule. Palestinians would require protection from military domination, dispossession, unequal law, and the denial of national and civil rights.
There would need to be international guarantees, constitutional safeguards, power-sharing arrangements, minority protections, demilitarization provisions, perhaps federal or cantonal structures — whatever the parties themselves negotiated.
Because yes, negotiated.
Not imposed by activists on social media. Not dictated by outsiders. Negotiated by Israelis and Palestinians, with international mediation and guarantees, exactly as deeply divided societies have done elsewhere.
And there is only one indispensable precondition: an end to violence.
Critics often say that one democratic state is unrealistic. But it less so than than believing that the existing reality of permanent inequality, occupation, blockade, or domination can survive
The two-state solution once sounded realistic. Today, after decades of settlement expansion and territorial fragmentation, many people — including many former supporters of partition — no longer believe it can deliver equality or sovereignty.
So they look elsewhere.
Not toward the destruction of Israelis, but toward a different constitutional idea: one state for all who live there.
You can oppose that vision. You can argue that partition remains preferable. Reasonable people do.
But honesty requires describing anti-Zionism accurately.
For almost all anti-Zionists, the demand is not that Jews disappear. It is that ethnic privilege disappear.
That is not a call to destroy a people.
It is a call to change a system.
It is a call not for more violence but to end violence completely.
As Herzl said when he envisioned a Jewish state in 1897—not, I am sure, a Jewish state in the form Israel has taken—”If you will it, it is no dream.”
And, unlike the other alternative “solutions,” it is a dream that is worth having. Not, as Zionism turned out to be, a dream for one people that was, in fact, the other people’s nightmare.