Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone associated with it.

The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named. The displacement of so many Jews from their ancient home becomes a kind of tit for tat—a balancing act of victimhood against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence. The fact that accusations of “Zionism” were what legitimized anti-Jewish violence—whether during the Tripoli pogroms of 1945, 1948, and 1967; the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, and synagogue bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in 1949; or the expulsion of Egyptian Jews in 1956 by Gamal Abdel Nasser—drops out of the calculus.

How can it be that an ideology that has produced repeated acts of discrimination, dispossession, and violence now bears the mantle of progressivism in the West and has been normalized within the Democratic Party? Like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge, anti-Zionism represents a wrong turn for the left. Anti-Zionism claims to be concerned with rights of minorities, opposition to racism, and universal justice. In truth, though, it has appropriated the language of anti-colonial liberation to justify oppression, transformed anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global ritual.

Anti-Zionism has hijacked the left, and it did so through exploiting the left’s tendency toward internationalism and its skepticism of nation-states. It transformed Jewish peoplehood into a crime and charged that Jewish difference amounted to a claim of supremacy, even as it demanded that a persecuted minority submit to the dominance of the majority. Yet the public reckoning with anti-Zionism still awaits its moment.

I am a Jew who supports women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights, and who believes that climate change will pose a major challenge to human society. Opposing anti-Zionism is, similarly, a natural extension of my concern for truth and equality. If the Democratic Party wants to maintain an authentic commitment to human rights, it must oppose the movement that seeks the elimination of Israel and the purging from civil society of those marked as Zionists.

Dcades before the creation of the state of Israel, Vladimir Lenin laid the groundwork for anti-Zionism. In his early-20th-century polemics, Lenin cast Zionism, the movement to found a Jewish state, as a form of “bourgeois nationalism,” a scheme by privileged Jews to divide the working class. Either Jews should dissolve into the universal proletarian movement, he argued, or expect to be marked as class enemies. “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies,” he wrote. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, or Yevsektsiya, would systematically dismantle Jewish life, as synagogues and the Hebrew language itself were branded as Zionist.

Once Israel was created, the Marxist-Leninist ideology that cast Zionism as bourgeois nationalism flowed into a more developed propaganda apparatus, which coded Israel as the center of Western imperialism while elevating other nationalisms as virtuous expressions of opposition to capitalist power. A new definition of Jews emerged, inverting the classical anti-Semitic claim that Jews were non-European race polluters to charge instead that Zionists were “European colonizers.” As the 1956 Suez Crisis helped crystallize an alliance between Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union, this anti-Zionist ideology took root in the Middle East.

In 1965, Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, an ahistorical argument that Jews are not truly from the Land of Israel, but an alien people. Jewish indigeneity is but a settler fabrication, he charged, a 19th-century construct in which biblical fundamentalists invented the notion that Jews see the Land of Israel as their origin and destiny. In Sayegh’s work, and in that of his followers, Jewish history and belonging were erased, the truth of Jewish life made to dissolve in the face of a political project that cast elimination as justice.

Sayegh and other Arab nationalists believed that Zionism dismembered Arab unity and violated the universal norms of the post–World War II international order. These writers transformed theological polemics against the “chosen people” and accusations of “Jewish superiority” into the claim that “Zionism is racism.” Jewish nationhood was inherently “exclusivist,” whereas Arab nationalism could be framed as emancipatory, part of a global struggle against oppression.

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.