The New York Times today had a long article front page article detailing the growth of anti-Semitism within Europe, a phenomenon in which traditional anti-Semitism, which requires no excuse, has been augmented by hostility coming from two other groups, Muslim immigrants and non-Muslims, reacting to the recent events in Gaza and the long-standing policies of Israel, beginning with the Nabka, the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine in the late 40s, and the continued theft of land and police state population control over the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.
The failure to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is disturbing, but, hardly surprising, given the highly successful long-term efforts of the Israeli government and their overseas apologists to pretend for so long there is no distinction between the two. After all, if to be an anti-Zionist Jew make one a self-hating one, the common theme in the propaganda effort, why wouldn't those non-Jews who are opposed to Israeli policies fail to make this elementary distinction as well?
Ironically, traditional European anti-Semites, rather than being hostile towards Zionism, have often been its champions. During the 1930s, fanatical Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, were sympathetic to Zionism, in much the same way the KKK in the 1960s was sympathetic to Black Muslims' quest for self-segregation in a delimited part of US territory. At various times European Zionist leaders of all persuasions had contacts with Nazis to facilitate Jewish migration from Europe. Even in the US today, the Christian right, for theological reasons, combines anti-Semitism and impassioned support for the Israel's most aggressive colonial expansion at the expense of the Palestinians.
Anti-Semitism of the traditional kind, has also been used, during the Nazi era and immediately thereafter, as a recruiting device for Jewish immigration to Palestine. The destruction of European Jewry and the reluctance of many countries to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees, was a boon to Zionists in Palestine who desperately needed bodies (able-bodied more than those old or infirm) to add to the Jewish population in Palestine and offset the indigenous non-Jewish population. At times, as noted by Yosef Grodzinsky (In the Shadow of the Holocaust), this meant manipulating, and even coercing, non-Zionists into migration to Palestine, by working with the Allies in charge of the DP camps for WWII refugees to discourage or even block other alternatives. The anti-Semitic incidents occurring today will no doubt serve the same function.
It should be noted as well that, as Israeli journalist Tom Segev documents in his monumental and indispensable book, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, the Zionists were not all that sympathetic to the victims of Nazism once they dis-embarked in Palestine. They wanted them to enlarge the Jewish presence and fight Arabs (even against their will), but not so much to help them heal and thrive.
If the historical relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism is more complicated and darker than many are aware, it's also true that Zionism as embodied in the Israeli state, may be a far greater danger now to the safety of Jews outside its borders than would be the case if Israel had not existed, certainly in its aggressively expansionist form. This concern is not new and there have always been many non-Zionist Jews who have worried about Israel creating problems for Jews seeking to integrate as citizens of other nations. Concerns, for example, about being accused of dual loyalties.
The actions of the Israeli government has begun to alienate American Jews and there have been a number of organizations and prominent individuals that have spoken out in support of the Palestinians here. It is not clear from the Times article that a comparable current of disaffection has emerged in Europe, but it may be that de-linking being Jewish from being Zionist, in the minds of Jews themselves, and loudly communicating that to Europeans who are not part of the traditional anti-Semitic small minority, is the best way of avoiding the disturbing and completely unnecessary stereotype that has produced the incidents that make Jews physically insecure and are used by the Israeli government to obfuscate, and even justify, their inhumane policies against the Palestinians.