Who Are the ‘Zionists’? Finding the Boundaries between Political Criticism and Antisemitism in the Romanian Online Discourse
Who Are the ‘Zionists’? Finding the Boundaries between Political Criticism and Antisemitism in the Romanian Online Discourse

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes the common ground and disagreements between the three definitions of antisemitism (IHRA, Nexus, JDA) and elaborates a practical guideline for distinguishing between antisemitic and non-antisemitic references to Israel and Zionism. It then applies this guideline to three random samples of articles, posts, and comments totalling 10% items out of 8,061 Romanian-language online messages containing the word ‘Zionist’, published from March 2023 to March 2024. The findings show that up to 85% of the Romanian comments and 60% of the posts and tweets use the term ‘Zionist’ in antisemitic contexts. The format and source of the message matters, antisemitic meanings being much less present in web articles (14.9%). The non-antisemitic annotated content is divided in messages that are critical or neutral towards Zionism or Israel, on the one hand, and those that are positive, critical towards anti-Zionism or even fall into other forms of racial prejudice – most com­monly targeting Palestinians. Each category is exemplified in the qualitative analysis that explains how the assessments were made in the annotation process. While results show that anti-Zionism and political criticism of Israel should not be conflated with antisemitism, they also confirm the findings from other countries that online commentary overwhelmingly uses the term ‘Zionist’ as a stand-in for ‘Jew’, associated with classical antisemitic stereo­types. This should caution the use of terms like ‘Zionist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.

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