If we take the straightforward dictionary definition of antisemitism rather than the tendentious IHRA one, we find that Zionism itself exhibits signs of anti-Jewish ideology.
Merriam-Webster defines antisemitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” On this score, Zionism minced no words. In its foundational doctrine “the negation of the Exile,” Zionism, of course, did not discriminate per se against Jews as a religious, ethnic or racial group. It did, however, express hostility towards them, particularly in its devalorization of Jewish life and culture abroad over the past two millennia – often encapsulated in the dismissal and ridicule of “galut (exilic) mentality.” While targeting Jewish communities for the purpose of recruiting them to its settler project, Zionism repudiated them, denying their very validity, akin to conceptually eliminating the Palestinians as “natives” with no national existence or rights. It did so by defining Jews exclusively as a national group, a claim that annulled Jewish ethnicity, Jews’ ability to live among other peoples, and refashioned Jewish religion as an organ of the state – “Constantinian Judaism” as the anti-Zionist theologian Marc Ellis puts it. (Neither Diaspora Jews nor Zionists ever claimed that Jews are a race.)
Negation of the Exile
“Negation of the Exile” began as an assertion that Jewish life in the “Diaspora” was untenable, either in terms of the persecution generated by one nation inhabiting the lands of other nations and its opposite, the existential danger of assimilation, or both, as in the US today. If diasporic Jews would only grasp the fact of Exile, they would see
— source mondoweiss.net | Jeff Halper | Jul 2, 2021