By Rabbi Asher Knight
In January, I traveled to Israel as part of a delegation of twenty-five American rabbis from across the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements, invited because of the communities we serve and the reach of our voices in American Jewish life.
All of us serve large congregations in major American cities. These are communities where Israel is not an abstraction. Israel shows up in classrooms and sanctuaries, in pastoral conversations, on college campuses, and in the pride we take in Israeli members of our communities.
But it also shows up, with growing urgency, in moments of fear, isolation, and confrontation, as anti-Zionism increasingly slides into antisemitism and Jews are held responsible not only for Israel’ s policies but for Israel’ s existence itself. We went because the gap between what is unfolding in Israel and how it is being experienced in American Jewish life has become too wide and too dangerous to ignore.
Over several long days, from early morning through late into the night, we met with officials from Israel’ s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, security and intelligence analysts, diplomats, legal experts, educators, and civil society leaders. We were not there for advocacy, and we were not there to collect talking points. We came to listen, to ask difficult questions, and to engage in real dialogue about issues that cannot be understood from only one moral vantage point.
One of the clearest through lines in those conversations, and one of the clearest takeaways for me, was how tightly antisemitism and anti-Zionism have become entangled in the way Israel is discussed, interpreted, and judged, and how dangerous that convergence has become for Jews far beyond Israel’ s borders.
Anti-Zionism turns most destructive not when it challenges Israeli policy, but when it treats Jewish collective existence itself as the problem to be solved. In that framework, Jewish history is flattened, Jewish vulnerability is erased, and Jewish self-determination is cast as uniquely illegitimate.
On parts of the left, this appears in the language of“ anti-colonial” purity, where Zionism is framed as an original sin that cannot be redeemed, and where anyone who affirms Israel’ s existence is assumed to be complicit in oppression regardless of their actual views. On parts of the right, it takes conspiratorial and nationalist forms, where Jews are tolerated conditionally, blamed collectively, or treated as a foreign presence whose loyalties in the
United States are always suspect.
This is the point at which anti-Zionism begins to function as antisemitism. Israel becomes the stage onto which ancient accusations are projected in modern language. Jews are cast once again as uniquely dangerous, uniquely immoral, and uniquely undeserving of the protections granted to other peoples. Anyone who refuses to renounce Israel’ s existence is treated as suspect, regardless of their views on policy, borders, or leadership.
Jews everywhere feel the consequences of this logic, whether or not they support the Israeli government, whether or not they live in Israel, and whether or not
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At the same time, we confronted an equally painful and unavoidable truth. Some Israeli actions have sincerely complicated this moment. They have actively deepened the crisis. Settler violence in the West Bank is no longer a fringe phenomenon. It is a real moral emergency that the State of Israel has failed to confront with the seriousness it demands.
And when senior figures within Israel’ s governing coalition speak openly about the mass displacement or erasure of Gaza, even if those views do not reflect official policy, the damage is real. Such rhetoric hardens global suspicion, fuels anti-Zionist and antisemitic narratives, and leaves Jews far beyond Israel’ s borders defending not only a war but actions and statements that should never have happened.
When Jewish civilians assault Palestinians, seize land illegally, intimidate communities, or act with impunity under the protection or indifference of state authority, the damage does not stop with Palestinians. It reaches inward. It corrodes Jewish ethics and moral authority. It teaches that Jewish power need not answer to the law. And it reinforces to the world that extremists acting in the name of Zionism do not face real accountability.
What made these conversations honest rather than ideological was the refusal to collapse these truths into slogans. Naming settler violence does not mean surrendering to anti-Zionism. And resisting anti-Zionism does not require silence about wrongdoing.
In fact, the opposite is true. Settler violence provides moral fuel for those who want to deny Jewish legitimacy altogether. Anti-Zionism, in turn, convinces some Israelis that no amount
of moral accounting will ever be enough, pushing them toward denial and defensiveness. In this environment, Jews everywhere feel less safe, Palestinians suffer, and the language needed to hold complexity collapses.
Our delegation pressed Israeli leadership not to underestimate how deeply their words and actions reverberate in diaspora lives. Israeli politics often pays little internal price for the actions of settlers. American Jews, however, pay the price immediately, in classrooms, workplaces, and on the streets. That gap in lived consequence is widening the divide between Israeli and American Jews, especially Jews of younger generations – a divide rooted not only in politics but in profoundly different experiences of vulnerability.
This trip did not offer clean answers. What it offered was clarity about the work ahead. The task before us is not to choose between defending Israel and defending morality. It is to refuse frameworks that deny Jewish existence while also refusing to excuse injustices carried out in our name. It is to teach our children how to live inside complexity without losing their Jewish moral compass. And it is to insist that Jewish power, like Jewish vulnerability, must be taken seriously, ethically, and honestly.
That work is harder than slogans. But it is the only path that keeps Zionism morally alive and Jewish solidarity intact in a world increasingly hostile to complexity and disturbingly comfortable with erasure.