Since the beginning of large, coordinated and sustained Palestine solidarity protests around the world, the Israeli government and its Zionist supporters have portrayed the protesters as motivated by antisemitism. This slander is nothing new; since the inception of the state of Israel, Zionism’s partisans have kept up an unrelenting barrage of accusations that Palestinians, and the wider Arab and Muslim communities, oppose the Israeli state on antisemitic grounds.

Let’s untangle this topic, because it is impossible to highlight that multiethnic solidarity underpins the protests for Palestine solidarity, which is the exact opposite of racial or ethnic hatred.

Since its origin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Zionism’s creators have regarded European antisemitism as not only inevitable, but an important political ally. Accepting the growth of antisemitism as something unavoidable, Theodor Herzl, the main foundational thinker of modern Zionism, regarded the antisemitic nations of Europe the most reliable allies. Pushing Jews out of Europe and into the putative homeland of Palestine, Zionism’s goal of an exclusive Jewish state corresponded with the exclusionary philosophy of white European antisemitism.

So much for the claim, advanced by Tel Aviv and its supporters, that Zionism emerged as a response to European antisemitism. In fact Herzl, Weizmann and the early leaders of Zionism accepted the racist logic of the antisemite – which holds that Jews are a biologically distinct ‘race’ incapable of assimilating into their host nations.

Herzl and his cothinkers were a tiny minority in the European Jewish community at the time. Zionism was a marginal force, but one which sought the patronage of imperial powers. It is well known that Herzl actively pursued the support of, for instance, Tsarist Russia, in the hope that the Russian Tsar would encourage the expulsion of Russia’s large Jewish community. Tsarism’s secret police and paramilitaries were engaged in antisemitic pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jews were maligned as the originators of Bolshevism; the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy becoming a staple of antisemitic parties.

That huge numbers of Jews participated in antiracist and socialist movements is indisputable. It is this segment of Jewish opinion against which Zionism has fought. Anti-Zionist Jews are a serious thorn in the side of the Zionist movement. Ellen Brotsky and Ariel Koren, writing in The Guardian last year, explicitly denounce Israel’s assault on Gaza for what it is; an act of collective punishment tantamount to an unfolding genocide.

Indeed, the staunchest supporters of Israel and Zionism in Europe today are the far right and ultranationalist parties. They each have their own shameful history of antisemitism. Viktor Orban, the ultrarightist president of Hungary – and populist peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories – is a fervent Zionist.

Geert Wilders, the far rightist Dutch politician who won the most recent elections in the Netherlands, is a fanatical supporter of Zionism, finding similarities between his ethnonationalist vision and the apartheid practices of the Zionist state. A notorious Islamophobe and anti-Arab racist, he has suggested the mass expulsion of the Palestinian population and its relocation to Jordan.

In fact, Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters in the United States are not Jews, but Christens. The evangelical movement, motivated by a literal belief in the tenets of the Old and New Testaments, see the ‘ingathering’ of Jews in the holy land of Palestine as fulfilment of biblical prophecy. While rejecting the eligibility of Jews to enter heaven – Protestant millenarians have a long tradition of antisemitism – white American evangelicals encourage the settlement of Jews in Palestine in accordance with their particular interpretation of biblical orthodoxy.

Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic majority leader, was a keynote speaker at a March for Israel rally, held in Washington by evangelical groups. Supporting the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza, Schumer and his colleagues regard the foundation of Israel as an opening salvo in the final apocalyptic battle of Armageddon.

Let us stop comparing the October 7 attack by Hamas to the Holocaust. No, Hamas did not attack Israelis because of their Jewishness, anymore so than Belgian anti-Nazi resistance fighters attacked German soldiers because the latter were Christian. Attacks on civilians are always horrendous, but do not saddle Hamas with the equivalent moral culpability as the Israeli military. The latter has besieged, blockaded, starved and malnourished the entire population of Gaza at least since 2007.

In fact, the conditions in Gaza since 2006-07 have resembled those of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War 2. Squashing an entire population into an overcrowded open-air prison creates the conditions where the oppressed lash out in their own ways. Our comfortable feelings about Hamas tactics may be shaken, but our feelings are also irrelevant. The Palestinians in Gaza do not have to consider the ‘feelings’ of the outside world, as they are fighting for their very lives.

Invoking the Holocaust, and the feelings of Zionism’s supporters, is an emotionally manipulative tactic to divert conversation from the realities of Palestinian oppression. Comparing Palestine solidarity as motivated by a Holocaust-continuing desire to eliminate Jewish people is a smear tactic deployed by Zionism’s supporters.

The accusation of antisemitism is used to censor critics of Israeli government policies – and Australian journalists are bearing the brunt of these kinds of attacks. Even the purportedly centrist ABC is enforcing a pro-Israeli perspectives on its journalists reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Do not allow the ultranationalist Right to monopolise the definition of antisemitism to criminalise Palestinian solidarity. Palestinians are fighting, not for the physical elimination of Jews, but for the repeal of Zionism, and the reestablishment of a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of nationality or religious affiliation.