Last week, on Nov. 7, videos of Zionist-Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C. soccer fans went viral. In these videos, the fans chanted, “Death to the Arabs”; “Fuck you, Palestine” and “No children are left in Gaza” around the streets of Amsterdam.

The Maccabi fans vandalized homes of Palestinian families, burned a Palestinian flag and attacked pro-Palestine protestors and taxi drivers in the city. Later, locals on scooters retaliated by carrying out “hit-and-run” attacks on the Maccabi fans.

As an Israeli, I was not surprised by the fans’ behavior. I have childhood memories from my early school years of boys in my class chanting, “Death to the Arabs” during recess breaks. I was always confused as to why my teachers did nothing to stop them, but I remember hearing one of my teachers say, “They learn this behavior at soccer games.” 

I learned that day something my teacher already knew: that in Zionist-Israeli society, soccer games are one of the spaces in which anti-Arab genocidal sentiment becomes especially normalized.

Nonetheless, many Western media outlets chose to portray the Maccabi fans as innocent victims of antisemitism, while only briefly providing context about their genocidal chants and focusing primarily on the locals’ retaliatory attacks. Additionally, Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, used the word “pogrom” to describe the event.

Herzog’s statement actively diminishes the experiences of Jews in the Holocaust who were murdered for merely being Jewish, unlike the Maccabi fans who were attacked after publicly demonstrating genocidal intent against the entire Arab population.

As a Jew and a descendant of Holocaust victims, the manipulation of the violence that took place on Nov. 7 not only debases the antisemitic experiences my family endured but equates their experiences to those who carry a genocidal ideology eerily similar to that of the Nazis who murdered them.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and Jewishness and Zionism are not the same thing. Judaism is a monotheistic religion that originated approximately 4,000 years ago. Currently, over 15 million people worldwide identify as Jewish.

Some branches of Judaism include Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Core Jewish values include justice (tzedek), repairing the world (tikkun olam), giving charity (tzedaka), respect (derech eretz) and caring for strangers.

On the other hand, Zionism is a political ideology that was founded in the 19th century, around 200 years ago by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who viewed the creation of a “Jewish state” as a solution to the “Jewish problem.”

At first, most Jewish people opposed Zionism for different religious, social and political reasons. The Zionist movement was mostly secular, and Orthodox Jews were of the strongest opposition because, according to the Jewish tradition, the exile of Jews was a punishment from God and Jews were only meant to return when the Messiah arrives.

After the Holocaust, the Zionist movement grew. While some Jews chose to move to the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, many either decided or were pushed to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

Conflating Zionism with Judaism has historically harmed Jewish lives. On the website “People of the Book” — which strives to use social media to foster understanding between Arabs and Jews — Ezra Lagnado, who is Egyptian and Jewish, describes his father’s great love of Egypt in a video interview. In the interview, Lagnado mentions that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt between 1956 and 1970, fed into the Zionist idea that conflated Zionism with Judaism.

“We were all accused of being Zionist [when] in reality we weren’t, but that’s what people thought. So what could we do?” Lagnado said. He described his father’s great grief when they settled on a ship to Greece after being forced to leave Egypt. Lagnado’s father yelled, “Take us back to Egypt.”

In an event held at Rice University in April titled “Gaza in Context: Reflections of an Arab Jewish Historian,” Arab-Jewish historian Avi Shlaim spoke about the history of Israel and Palestine.

According to The Rice Thresher, “In Shlaim’s interpretation, Zionism was created by European Jews, and Arab Jews were largely excluded from Zionism until Germany murdered some 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust. Shlaim said Zionists then turned to Arab Jews — often forcibly displacing them — to fill the new state of Israel.”

Moreover, Shlaim recalled his “involuntary displacement to Israel and said that Zionists perpetrated terror attacks in Baghdad to force Jewish migration into Israel.”

To create a Jewish majority and take over populated Palestine, the original Zionists ethnically cleansed a population of nearly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Later, to maintain the Jewish identity of the Zionist ethnostate, the Israeli government established the apartheid regime through discriminatory laws that still exist today.

Many Jews still oppose Zionism for different religious and moral reasons. Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Orthodox Neturei Karta community states that the existence of the Zionist state of Israel is antithetical to Judaism. Jewish American professor Noam Chomsky stated in an interview with Al Jazeera,“ Israel used to be the darling of the liberal American Jewish community … Now, the main support for Israel is the

far-right evangelical community.”

Some of the dangers of conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism include demonizing criticism of Israel and failing to portray Jewish people as a pluralistic and diverse community. Instead, we are relegated to a small ideological box that discards Jewishness when it does not align with Zionism.

This false equivalence promotes antisemitism by silencing Jewish people who are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. It also creates the notion that all Jews approve of the crimes of the original Zionists and the Israeli state, including ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.

Stop conflating Zionism with Judaism, and fight back against universities, governments and media outlets attempting to conflate the two.

Harlow Raye is a senior majoring in sociology writing about genocide, colonialism and capitalism from an abolitionist perspective. Their column, “First Justice, Then Peace,” runs every other Thursday.