jadis

Absolutely. It has layers of historical complexity which Americans are not always best equipped to parse, though the truth is that thinking about "the Jewish question" is difficult in general (David Nirenberg's masterpiece is a long and tentative answer to why that is the case).

Basically, before Hitler, Stalin and the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism (Zion = Jerusalem) was just one response to the growing untenability of the Jews' situation in Europe. Assimilation and the horizon of the socialist revolution that would make everyone equal etc were generally more popular among Western European Jews, while Zionism was driven by their un-emancipated Eastern European brethren (swapping rural Ukraine for Palestine was a different proposition to swapping Paris for Palestine, even though Paris was hardly any less antisemitic). But it was a legitimate debate within and between Jewish communities, where being anti-Zionist was a perfectly understandable position.

In the 1940s, the terms of the conversation were altered, very rudely, by capital-H History. What does it even mean to be "anti-Zionist" when there is a Jewish state? And when we saw what happened to millions of Jews who didn't have a state. Perhaps the more accurate question is "how calling yourself an anti-Zionist can mean anything other than a call for the annihilation of the world's only Jewish state?"

And then the terms were appropriated by the worst regime in the world: the contours of anti-Zionism as antisemitism's post-1948 guise were drawn in the USSR. After realizing Israel will not become a Soviet satellite, Stalin launched a series of "anti-Zionist" campaigns that bore the hallmarks of conspiratorial antisemitism at its most paranoid. For Stalin and subsequent Soviet ideologues and apparatchiks, Zionists were the counter-revolutionary agents of global capitalism, the reactionary lackeys of imperialism, the new Nazis: a view that is still extremely popular today with literal billions of r-words across the world (and a number of persons who can be expected to know better). In Dara Horn's words, "The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.)"

There is of course the goofy messianic anti-Zionism of quite a few ultra-Orthodox denominations in North America (and in Israel, incredibly): for them, returning to Zion before the coming of the messiah is haram. These ravings deserve no more respect than those of any other religious fundamentalists. To their credit, however, most of them despise those who let themselves be the antisemites' token Jews (see Neturei Karta).

Messianics aside, it's hard to see what "Zionism" can legitimately mean today beyond "the belief that the only Jewish nation state in the world should not be annihilated."