I’ll start by reiterating how liberal identity politics works in practice. It treats identities as moral categories, and not as historical or political formations. ‘An identity is a morally indivisible bloc, something you protect from harm, not something you analyze as part of a system of power,’ or so it goes.
Now add in a state. Israel says: we are the state of the Jewish people. Not metaphorically, not culturally, but politically. Once you’ve accepted the idpol frame, the logic is as follows:
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Jews are a historically persecuted group.
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Historically persecuted groups must be protected from attack.
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Israel defines itself as the political embodiment and defender of Jews.
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Therefore, attacking Israel is attacking Jews.
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Attacking Jews is antisemitism.
At no point in that chain is there room for asking, “Okay, but what kind of state is Israel? What it is materially doing in Gaza? Can a state permissibly commit these crimes, regardless of who it claims to represent?”
These questions are wrongspeak inside the idpol framework, because they reorient the focus from identity to power. Identity politics collapse the difference between an identity and an institution. Judaism (a religion, culture, and people spanning thousands of years and political positions) gets fused to Zionism (a modern nationalist project backed by a state and an army). Therefore, all critique shares the same taboo.
This is why even Jews can’t criticize the Israeli state and its actions without being labeled as antisemites or bad jews. The system cannot compute “a protected identity criticizing the institution that claims to embody it,” so it resolves the contradiction by declaring those Jews illegitimate. If politics is about protecting identities rather than analyzing power, and a powerful state successfully wraps itself in a protected identity, then any attempt to stop that state’s violence will be reclassified as bigotry.
In this sense, the Judaism–Zionism conflation has to be aggressively policed. If that distinction is allowed to stand, the moral framework disappears.
Zionism becomes a modern nationalist project with concrete class interests, military institutions, borders, and hegemonic allies. Israel becomes a state among states, not an identity under threat; genocide becomes genocide, no longer self defense.