I would estimate that about 40-45% of Jews support Israel without qualification, about 50-55% support a two state solution upholding both Israeli and Palestinian national rights and favour open debate on Israeli policies, and less than 1% hold anti-Zionist views.

It needs to be emphasized that most of the Jews who support two states are strongly committed to the well-being of Israel and Jews generally. They are no different to citizens in other liberal democratic societies who critique the policies of their own government – for example, Australians who repudiate the Coalition Government’s policies on Indigenous issues or refugees, or Americans who oppose their government’s involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq – without demonizing their entire state or nation as evil and oppressive.

In contrast, the anti-Zionist Jews mostly believe in the so-called “one state” solution whereby the existing Jewish State of Israel should be eliminated, and replaced by an exclusivist Arab State of Greater Palestine in which Jews would be at best tolerated as a religious minority. Their viewpoint is not only tiny in Jewish communities worldwide, but also marginal even among left-wing Jews.

As I have argued elsewhere, there is little doubt that a Greater Palestine is the ultimate political objective of the international Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS). Not surprisingly within the BDS movement, the opinions of the small minority of anti-Zionist Jews loom larger than life. For example, Federal Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon has claimed that “many Jewish communities support this work.” In fact, no Jewish communities support the BDS. Similarly, the Mayor of Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, proudly cited support from the NSW Jews against the Occupation group which has about 10 members, and also claimed support from “a growing number of Jews from all over the world.” In fact, the only organized Jewish community group in Marrickville, the Inner West Jewish Community and Friends Peace Alliance which is left-oriented and strongly supportive of a two-state solution, devoted considerable time and resources to opposing the Marrickville BDS proposal during the 2011 NSW State election campaign.

Similarly, BDS campaigner Professor Jake Lynch, head of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, has responded to accusations of discrimination against Israeli Jews by citing talks at the Centre by anti-Zionist Jews such as Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky as evidence of a non-racist policy. But Lynch is disingenuous in not acknowledging that virtually all the Jews hosted by the Centre have been fanatical anti-Zionists, and that the Centre has specifically excluded any pro-Israel Jews.

Some conservative Jewish commentators label anti-Zionist Jews as “self-hating” Jews in an attempt politically to discredit their arguments. Self-hatred is an alleged psychological condition which involves members of despised low-status racial, religious or sexual minority groups identifying with the values and prejudices of the majority group and internalizing their stereotypes.

But quantifying these views in such psychological terms is arguably problematic. For example, one can hypothesize that there might be a link between childhood experiences of rejection or exclusion by the Jewish community and later adoption of an anti-Zionist position. But to date no empirical studies verifying such an association exist. However, there is evidence that many anti-Zionist Jews have no interest in or knowledge of Jewish history, values and culture. They really don’t care what most Jews say or do. Those whose sole identity is a political one rather than a Jewish one can hardly be accused of self-hatred when they reject something to which they had no attachment in the first place. I personally prefer the term self-denying Jews, since anti-Zionist Jews mostly reject ethnic or cultural connections with the Jewish community, and eschew feelings of solidarity with other Jews who are oppressed or attacked.

So why does the BDS movement highlight the views of this small group of anti-Zionist Jews who are so unrepresentative of collective Jewish opinion? There are two reasons.

The first is a continuation of malevolent historical practice. There has been a long history of anti-Semitism in parts of the radical Left whereby a small number of unrepresentative token Jews are opportunistically encouraged to exploit their own religious and cultural origins in order to vilify their own people. This happened in 1929 when American Jewish Communists were obliged to defend the anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine. It happened again in 1952/53 when Jewish Communists were rolled out to endorse Stalin’s anti-Semitic Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia, and the so-called Doctors’ Plot. It has happened many times since 1967 when left-wing Jews have been pressured to publicly conform to the anti-Zionist fundamentalism of the far Left.

Radical Left groups would never employ such techniques against other historically oppressed nations. They would not publish the views of Indigenous Australians who completely oppose land rights, or demand that a feminist journal publish the views of women who totally oppose abortion. They would certainly not publicize the views of Palestinians or Arabs who support Zionism.

The second factor is that the BDS movement attempts to use Jewish anti-Zionists as an alibi against serious accusations of anti-Semitism by arguing that Jews also share their views. But this transparent strategy is easily exposed by anti-racists. David Hirsh has noted in relation to the participation of a small number of anti-Zionist Jews in the British campaign for an academic boycott of Israel: “Jews too can make anti-Semitic claims, use anti-Semitic images, support anti-Semitic exclusions and play an important, if unwitting, part in preparing the ground for the future emergence of anti-Semitic movement.” For example, Jewish anti-Zionist groups have defended racist arguments such as the allegation that Jews collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust, or that Israel is perpetrating similar crimes to the Nazis, or that a Jewish lobby controls the international media.

Finally, our discussion needs to return to the question of which group gets to define the meaning and content of racism. The 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK is generally acknowledged as establishing that oppressed victims of racism should have that right. As an historically oppressed nation, Jews reasonably claim the right to identify when criticism of Israeli policies is reasonable and contextualized (as expressed by the large numbers of two state Israelis and Jews we discussed above), and equally when it falls into the realm of ethno-national vilification.

The fact that a small number of self-denying Jews join a movement that engages in ethnic stereotyping of all Israeli Jews and Jewish supporters of Israel worldwide irrespective of their political views does not provide any excuse for that movement’s prejudicial behaviour.

Philip Mendes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash University, and is the Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance.”