In 2022, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad suggested Malaysia “should demand not just that Pedra Branca, or Pulau Batu Puteh, be given back to us, we should also demand Singapore as well as the Riau Islands, as they are Tanah Melayu (Malay land)”.
While he walked it back, most Singaporeans do not need a lecture to understand why that is profoundly offensive. Singapore’s own existence, of course, is a product of colonial boundary-drawing, a territorial carve-out from a British empire that no longer exists.
The insult suggested that Singapore’s existence as a sovereign nation is somehow conditional. It implies that the country we belong to is not really ours, and that others may dismiss our nationhood as a historical mistake to be undone.
Imagine someone saying: “I have nothing against Singaporeans. I respect them as a people. I just don’t believe Singapore should exist as a sovereign state. It really belongs to Malaysia.“
Few Singaporeans would regard that as a neutral distinction. Instead, we would immediately understand that denying a nation’s right to exist is a denial of our legitimacy as a people.
And That’s Why…
That is precisely why “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” is not as morally neutral as it sounds. Sure, not everyone who criticises Israel is antisemitic, and not everyone who calls himself anti-Zionist actively or intentionally hates Jews.
But when Jews (and only Jews) are told that their people do not deserve what every other people is assumed to deserve – a sovereign homeland to secure self-determination and security – then their singling-out and selectivity in doing so itself is the tell.
Anti-Zionism earns the antisemitism label by the consistency test. Those who deny Kurds a state are called what they are: authoritarian, self-interested, geopolitically motivated. Those who deny Tibetans or Uyghurs their homeland are recognised to be oppressive regimes acting from ethnic animus.
Now apply the same standard to those who single out Jews alone for permanent statelessness, and the moral calculus becomes clear.
Israel’s history is obviously very different from Singapore’s. But the underlying principle is the same: we cannot neatly separate a people’s dignity from their right to exist politically.
How Definitions Shape the Debate
Much of the appeal of the slogan “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” depends on how people define “Zionism. At its core, Zionism is the belief that Jews, like other peoples, have the right to national self-determination in their historic homeland.
Critics often redefine it more narrowly. Instead of treating Zionism as a claim to Jewish self-determination, they treat it as a project of Jewish political domination. Once they do that, anti-Zionism can be made to sound morally neutral by definition. Yet many now contest that very definition of Zionism.
One cannot simply adopt the narrowest possible definition of Zionism and then treat opposition to it as self-evidently innocent.
Consider the colonial framing – an accusation constantly lobbed at Israel. To call Zionism “settler colonialism” requires a colonising metropole, a home country dispatching settlers to extract resources for the mother nation. No such metropole exists for Jews.
In fact, Britain, far from sponsoring Jewish settlement, actively restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine after 1939, including the survivors of the Holocaust. The accusation of being an imperialist or colonial power seeks to exploit anti-colonial sentiment, but is ultimately maladapted.
Further, that it is applied selectively to Jewish nationalism while Palestinian nationalism is treated as self-evidently legitimate is, again, an asymmetry that demands explanation.
The problem goes beyond anti-Zionism. Too often, we do not just import foreign conflicts; we import the language that comes with them, dividing the world too quickly into oppressors and oppressed before we have seriously weighed the facts.
Most Singaporeans already know this instinctively, and felt it when Mahathir suggested our country was merely a historical mistake waiting to be corrected. But if we instinctively recognise the contradiction in saying one “respects Singaporeans” while denying Singapore’s right to exist, we should be able to recognise the same principle when Jews are the people being denied that right.
There is one further irony worth naming. Anti-Zionists invoke the colonial displacement of earlier people groups and boundary-drawing to deny Israel’s legitimacy. Yet nobody questions the borders of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, most of the modern Middle East, and yes, even Singapore — borders drawn by Britain and France less than a century ago.
Neither are tears shed for those displaced by the Ottoman Empire, or the Empires preceding, nor for the Bugis and Orang Laut of Singapore.
Nobody demands the dissolution of any of these states on those grounds. If colonial origin delegitimises a nation, Singapore and half the world should not exist as they do.
Since most of us reject that conclusion, then colonial origin cannot be the real objection. What’s really happening is that it is applied to one state and one people only. That selectivity has a name.
When the Distinction Collapses
In theory, many will insist there is a clean distinction between opposing Zionism and harbouring hostility toward Jews. In practice, that distinction collapses very quickly.
What begins as opposition to “Zionism” often becomes hostility toward “Zionists.” And before long, “Zionist” becomes a label used broadly enough to morally indict Jews as a whole.
Once that happens, the rhetoric is no longer merely about a foreign state or a political ideology. It becomes a way of treating Jewish people, Jewish-linked spaces, and institutions that people associate with Israel as legitimate targets of public hostility, as though association with the Jewish state were itself a crime.
Nor is this merely theoretical. In Singapore too, we have already seen how quickly such rhetoric can spill over. What begins as political outrage does not always remain confined to Israel or Zionism alone.
It has extended visibly to Jewish individuals, Jewish spaces, and institutions that people associate, however loosely, with the Jewish state. Once that happens, the line between anti-state rhetoric and anti-Jewish hostility becomes blurred.
For Singapore, the issue is not simply what position one takes on a distant conflict. It is whether we still possess the discernment and restraint needed to keep a plural society intact.
The consistency test is available to anyone willing to apply it. If you have advocated for Kurdish statehood, marched for Tibetan autonomy, or insisted on Palestinian self-determination, you are operating from a principle: that a people’s dignity is inseparable from their right to exist politically.
If you are operating from that principle consistently, then you already know where the logic leads. The only question is whether you are willing to follow it when the people being denied that right are Jews.
