No one should be surprised by the targeting of New York City’s Park East synagogue or Los Angeles's Wilshire Boulevard Temple by “anti-Zionists” seeking to make Jews afraid to attend their own houses of worship. Such acts are the natural consequences and outcomes of the anti-Zionist ideology.
Fundamental to anti-Zionism is the denial of the Jewish right to freedom of worship at the holiest site in Judaism, a denial so absolute that the mere act of a Jewish person saying ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want’ on the Temple Mount is justification for the mass murder of Jews in the eyes of many. It is only natural that an ideology which denies Jews the right to so much as whisper a word of prayer at their holy site would also deny Jews their First Amendment rights to freedom of worship at synagogues in the US and around the world.
This is why pogromists have targeted synagogues not only in New York, but in New Jersey, Los Angeles, and many other cities around the world, over the last two years. The same excuse - that the synagogues hold events on Israeli real estate or Aliyah - masks the same ideology - that Jews do not have rights.
Anti-Zionism is built on the denial of Jewish rights. At the most basic level, it denies the Jews the right to self-determination and the right to be a people. This extends not merely to national rights, but to religious and individual rights. It denies Jews the right to their own history, their own trauma, and their own lives.
Even under the least extreme forms of anti-Zionist ideology, a child born in the same house as his parents or grandparents is considered a violator of international law because he was born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line, beyond which Jews have no rights and merely existing is a crime.
This ideology denying Jews rights was at the heart of the response to the Park East Synagogue incident by Zohran Mamdani’s press secretary Dora Pekec, who condemned the synagogue falsely for a “violation of international law” while merely “discouraging” the rhetoric of the people who called to remove all Jews from America.
According to the anti-Zionists, there is no right to live in safety, no right to earn an honest living, no right to not be attacked or to not be murdered, for the Jew. The UN’s rogues gallery of anti-Zionists built entire legal edifices on the denial of Israel’s right to defend and protect the lives of Jewish babies.
According to people like Francesca Albanese, even nine-month-old babies do not have the right to not be kidnapped and to not be murdered, a right that is denied to them solely because they were born Jews. The same denial of the right of Jewish babies to live was seen in the narcissists who tore down the posters of the kidnapped children and babies held hostage in Gaza, who believed that Jewish children do not have the right to be noticed or remembered by the world when they are kidnapped from their homes, held hostage, and murdered.
When anti-Zionists deny the rights of Jews to live in Israel, it is a short jump to denying them the right to live anywhere else. The anti-Zionists who turned Columbia University into the Intifada University made it very clear that did not see Jewish students as having any right, not the right to an education, and certainly not the right to live, as their calls for Hamas to murder Columbia’s Jewish students demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt.
The attempts to remove Jews from public life in Western countries follow the same pattern. Jews are denied the right to medical care by anti-Zionist physicians in the UK, they are denied the right to defend Israel or to defend themselves by thinly cloaked antisemites in the US.
The right to freedom of speech is denied to Jews by the invoking of classic antisemitic tropes and attempts to silence Jews wherever Jews dare to notice the antisemites attempting to seize control of the major political parties. Just as anti-Zionists seek to deny Jews their First Amendment rights to freedom of worship, they seek to deny the Jews their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech by resorting to the same old conspiracy theories that have fueled the mass murder of Jews since the 1800s.
Jews are denied the right to mourn the lives lost in the Holocaust and on October 7. They are denied the right to call for the release of the hostages. They are denied the right to attend class, pray in their synagogues, and to eat in restaurants in peace. They are denied the right to citizenship. They are denied the right to be alive.
Anti-Zionism is, at its core, an ideology that seeks to go back to the “good old days” when Jews were denied basic human rights. It is little different from an ideology that seeks the return of Jim Crow segregation of racial Apartheid in South Africa. The impulse to attack Jews for praying at their holiest site is the same as the impulse behind the attacks on Rosa Parks when she refused to go to the back of the bus and on Martin Luther King Jr. when he dreamed of equal rights for all.
Anti-Zionism declares that there is one people who are not equal, who do not have basic human rights.
Attacks on synagogues and on Jewish children are not an unexpected side-effect of anti-Zionist ideology. They are the inevitable outcome when people adopt an ideology as fundamentally incompatible with the idea of equality and basic human rights as anti-Zionism.