What is antizionism?

Antizionism is not “criticism of Israeli policy” but a movement built on defamation and denial — one that seeks the erasure of Jewish sovereignty and the diminishment of Jewish life everywhere. It does not debate borders or governments; it indicts Jewish existence itself, casting the Jewish state as a moral offense and those who affirm it as deserving of exclusion, hostility, and violence. Wherever antizionism takes root, Jewish life withers: suppressed in the Soviet Union, erased across much of the Middle East and North Africa, and now increasingly constrained within Western culture and institutions.

To understand antizionism fully, we must place it within a far older story. Jew-hatred did not emerge in the twentieth century, nor with the founding of Israel. It is a civilizational pattern more than two millennia old — born of theological displacement, perpetuated through recurring libels and persecutions, and continually reinventing itself to suit the fears and ideologies of each age.

Please read these sections to understand antizionism in context.

Table of Contents

what is jew-hatred?

Jew-hatred is among the oldest and most enduring hatreds in human history. Long before theology gave it doctrine, ancient societies cast Jews as the embodiment of defiance—aliens to civic order, corrupters of piety, enemies of the gods. But its true generative moment came with supersessionism: the belief that Judaism had once been true, but that its truth had been fulfilled and replaced. Christianity and later Islam defined themselves as inheritors who had surpassed the Jewish covenant. From that point, Jewish existence became intolerable, because to remain Jewish was to expose the fragility of their own claims to divine authority. Jews became the negative image against which societies defined themselves—the people who had known God’s truth yet refused it, whose very endurance mocked the idea of final revelation. In this logic, Jews appeared as a demonic force: the ultimate obstacle to universal redemption, whose survival stood as a perpetual accusation against the world’s self-conceit.

Supersessionism thus acted as a civilizational Big Bang, embedding Jew-hatred into the cultural DNA of the West and the Islamic world. It fused theology, law, and imagination into a reflex that has endured for two millennia: the need to purge, humiliate, or convert the Jew in order to purify the world. This reflex has flared and faded across centuries—sometimes dormant, sometimes erupting in convulsions of libel and violence—but always alive beneath the surface. To explain these eruptions as responses to Jewish behavior is to mistake effect for cause. They are expressions of a structure civilizations built into themselves—a cycle of accusation and expulsion through which they continually reassert their own virtue. To understand Jew-hatred is to see it as one of civilization’s oldest engines of self-definition—a pathology masquerading as moral order.

the cycle of libel

The cycle of libel is the engine of Jew-hatred across history. From antiquity to the present, societies have not only projected their fears onto Jews but organized those projections into a recurring pattern: libel, stigma, violence, denial. The libel-cycle explains why Jew-hatred endures, mutating with each age yet retaining the same structure. Most crucially, it reveals that Jew-hatred is not simply something societies inflict on Jews—it is a constitutive cultural process. By inventing Jewish crimes and branding Jews as threats, civilizations stabilize their own sense of virtue and belonging. In this way, Jew-hatred becomes a tool through which societies build identity, define order, and narrate redemption, even as it devastates Jewish life.

Once societies installed this civilizational reflex, it repeated for centuries. The libels change, but the cycle does not:

  1. Libel. Societies invent charges that mark Jews as a mortal danger. They repeat these libels obsessively—sermons, pamphlets, slogans, social media feeds—until the population enters a fevered state.

  2. Stigma. Once the hysteria takes root, institutions formalize it. Laws segregate, edicts restrict, ghettos confine. Societies brand and mark Jews, declare them unclean, untrustworthy, and unfit for civic life.

  3. Violence. After the libels and stigmas have saturated society, violence follows as an act of supposed necessity. Communities erupt in pogroms, expulsions, and organized annihilation. The mob does not see itself as murderous; it believes it is purging corruption, protecting virtue, cleansing the body politic.

  4. Denial. When the frenzy subsides, societies rarely confront what they have done. Instead, they rewrite the record: minimizing the violence, shifting blame, or claiming that Jews brought catastrophe on themselves. The memory is buried, leaving the reflex intact, ready to flare again.

This is a paroxysmal dynamic. It feels both sudden and eternal because it is both: a recurring fever through which societies attempt to cleanse their conscience, only to reenact the same drama of accusation and expulsion, targeting Jews again for their own moral renewal.

anti-jewish hate in 3 acts

Across two millennia, societies have defined themselves by casting Jews as the negation of their highest ideals. Each era forged its moral identity by projecting its own anxieties and failures onto the Jew — the heretic, the pollutant, the oppressor — transforming violence into a ritual of self-affirmation.

  • Act I: Anti-Judaism (Faith vs. Heresy)
    In the ancient and medieval world, Christianity and later Islam built their identities as the true, universal faiths by claiming to fulfill and replace Judaism. Jews who refused conversion became the living refutation of that claim, a people whose continued existence exposed the fragility of each new revelation. The libels of anti-Judaism were theological and relentless: Jews were depicted as cursed, blind, guilty of killing God, and enemies of all truth. By persecuting Jews through conversion campaigns, confinement, expulsion, and massacre, Christian and Muslim societies sought to secure their own salvation. Violence became a sacred duty, a ritual affirmation that stabilized faith and confirmed religious supremacy.

  • Act II: Antisemitism (National Unity vs. Degeneracy)
    When religion fractured and lost authority after centuries of sectarian war, nations sought new foundations for belonging in blood, race, and purity. The Jew, once cast as the heretic, was reborn as the racial pollutant—the alien within who threatened the coherence of the national body. Pseudo-science and social Darwinism gave hatred a vocabulary of reason, recasting ancient fears as biological truth. Pogroms, exclusion laws, and ultimately extermination became acts of political purification, forging national unity through the imagined defense of purity. By destroying the Jew, modern states affirmed their own vitality and coherence, turning murder into a civic sacrament.

  • Act III: Antizionism (Antiracism vs. Racism)
    After the devastations of racism, apartheid, and empire, Western societies sought redemption through the moral creeds of antiracism and decolonization. Yet these creeds became the stage for a new inversion: Jews and Israel were recast as the embodiment of the very crimes the West could not forgive in itself—colonial conquest, racial hierarchy, and the will to domination. The guilt of modernity demanded purification, and the Jew again supplied the means. Libeling Israel as racist, apartheid, or genocidal allows societies to cleanse themselves symbolically of their own histories of oppression. Denunciation beomces atonement; scapegoating, a rite of moral renewal. By casting Jews as the repository of Western sin, the cycle of purification and persecution begins again.

who are antizionists?

Antizionism does not arise from a single ideology. It is a complex coalition of forces that converge on one point: denying the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. This antizionist complex draws strength from its breadth, embedding Jew-hatred in multiple domains of culture and politics at once.

  • Islamism: Frames Jewish sovereignty as religiously intolerable, portraying Israel as an affront to God’s order.

  • Arab Nationalism: Casts Israel as a colonial implant in the Arab world and a perpetual enemy of regional unity.

  • Far-Left Marxists and Communists: Reinterpret Israel as the spearhead of global capitalism, imperialism, and oppression.

  • Far-Right Nationalists: Resurrect older antisemitic tropes, branding Jews as a corrupting or parasitic nation disguised as a state.

  • Institutions and NGOs: Promote antizionism under the banner of “human rights” and “justice,” normalizing delegitimization in policy circles.

  • Academia: Codifies antizionist narratives in scholarly frameworks, granting them the prestige of intellectual legitimacy.

  • School Boards and Teachers’ Unions: Introduce boycotts and antizionist resolutions into public education, embedding hostility at the civic level.

  • Hollywood and Celebrity Culture: Amplify antizionist slogans through entertainment and social media, projecting them into global popular consciousness.

Together these parts form the antizionist complex: a network that makes Jew-hatred appear universal, moral, and inevitable. To focus on only one component—Islamism, or the far left, or the far right—misses the reality. Each part reinforces the others, and when one is challenged, another provides cover. The only effective strategy is to name the entire structure for what it is: a coherent hate movement.

the antizionist complex

Antizionism presents itself as a movement for justice, but in practice it operates as a self-perpetuating industry of exploitation. It thrives not on solutions but on perpetual crisis, feeding regimes, institutions, and cultural actors who gain influence and profit by keeping Israel cast as civilization’s villain. Like any parasitic system, it survives by keeping its host alive. The paradox is stark: antizionist leaders condemn Israel with apocalyptic fervor, yet their survival depends on Israel’s continued existence. To “solve” the problem would destroy their most lucrative asset. The constant denunciation, the unending stream of libels, are not meant to bring peace. They are meant to sustain the machinery of outrage.

This incentive structure explains why the antizionist complex resists resolution. Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East deflect attention from corruption and repression by railing against Israel. Western politicians invoke antizionist rhetoric to appease constituencies and distract from domestic failures. International institutions and NGOs keep Israel on perpetual trial to justify their budgets and relevance. Media and influencers amplify outrage because outrage sells. Academics, unions, and cultural elites adopt antizionist positions to posture as righteous at little cost. Each actor exploits the “Zionist threat” to preserve its own standing. What emerges is not a movement toward peace but a sprawling system—an antizionist complex that grows stronger the longer the Israel-Palestinian conflict endures.

victims of the antizionist complex

The antizionist complex feeds on libels, hate, and performative outrage. Its operations leave real human victims in its wake:

Jews

Antizionists use libels to mark Jews for exile and violence wherever they live. They brand those who express solidarity with Israel as “Zionist agents,” driving them out of classrooms, boardrooms, and civic spaces. Synagogues are desecrated with graffiti, windows shattered under the banner of “justice.” Masked mobs stalk Jewish gatherings, while token Jews who denounce their peoplehood are exalted as “authentic” and the overwhelming majority silenced. In every act, antizionists press against the Jewish spirit—thinning the ground of safety, stigmatizing loyalty, and aiming to snuff Jewish life from the West even as they seek Israel’s destruction.

Israelis

Antizionists victimizes Israelis through both direct violence and global isolation. They fire rockets into towns and cities, targeting homes, schools, and marketplaces where ordinary life persists. Abroad, they organize boycotts, exclusions, and divestment campaigns that aim to choke Israeli culture, science, and economy. They mock or ban the Hebrew language, revived after centuries of exile. They harass Israeli travelers in airports, assault them in European streets, and treat them as pariahs on campuses. Missiles in the skies become a global siege, an atmosphere of hostility that presses on Israeli life at every turn.

Palestinians

For Palestinians, antizionism is especially cruel and exploitative. Their suffering is commodified, their pain instrumentalized to keep the industry of outrage alive. Extremists who perpetuate conflict are glorified as freedom fighters, while moderates who seek compromise are condemned as "traitors. Ordinary Palestinian families are locked in endless cycles of war and deprivation, their lives reduced to symbols for consumption by Western audiences who prefer spectacle to solutions. Antizionism thrives on their victimhood; their liberation would deprive the system of its most potent fuel.

non-jewish allies of israel

Beyond Israel, antizionists harass and malign anyone who expresses solidarity with Jewish sovereignty. They smear students, professors, clergy, and politicians who defend Israel’s right to exist as racists or colonialists. They shout down speakers, cancel invitations, and issue threats, branding supporters as collaborators with an imagined evil. Antizionism directs its hostility outward, punishing all who affirm the Jewish right to nationhood.

People Oppressed by Antizionist Regimes

Antizionism also devastates populations ruled by the very regimes that weaponize it. In Yemen, families starve while their leaders siphon resources into missile programs aimed at Israel. In Iran, dissenters are crushed while billions are funneled to proxy militias sworn to Israel’s destruction. In Lebanon, communities are held hostage by armed factions that fire rockets from their neighborhoods, ensuring both Israeli retaliation and endless internal misery. Across the region, rulers exploit the “Zionist enemy” to justify repression, silence opposition, and excuse catastrophic governance. Millions suffer—not because Israel harms them, but because antizionism becomes the excuse to ignore their hunger, deny their freedom, and sacrifice their lives for a cause that will never bring them peace.

Victims of Other Crises Worldwide

Antizionism also harms those far removed from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By monopolizing the world’s attention, it diverts outrage from other humanitarian crises. Mass atrocities in Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela, and elsewhere fade from public concern as Israel absorbs the world’s moral focus. Entire populations enduring starvation, enslavement, or mass killing lose empathy and visibility because the machinery of antizionism consumes all oxygen, insisting that the Jewish state is the world’s singular evil.

The Everyday Antizionist

The antizionist complex consumes the ordinary people who absorb and reproduce its propaganda. The everyday antizionist becomes trapped in a cycle of obsession, convinced that hating Israel is a moral substitute for solving their own society’s problems. Instead of working to end corruption, repression, poverty, or violence at home, they fixate on Israel as the singular source of evil in the world. This obsession offers a false sense of purpose, but it robs them of agency, chaining their identity to grievance rather than to creativity, responsibility, or hope. In this way, antizionism victimizes its own adherents: it turns them into instruments of outrage, distracts them from pursuing solutions for their own lives, and leaves them poorer, angrier, and less free.

antizionist jews

The libel cycle of Jew-hatred is so powerful that in every era it draws in some Jews themselves. Societies then elevate these individuals as tokens, using them to claim that hatred toward Jews is righteous and inevitable. It is a pattern as old as the hatred itself.

  • Hellenistic Jews (4th–1st century BCE): In the ancient Mediterranean, some Jews sought acceptance within Greek society by distancing themselves from Jewish tradition. They adopted Greek names, customs, and philosophies, mocked the Torah as primitive, and portrayed Jewish particularism as an obstacle to enlightenment and civic belonging. Their eagerness to prove cultural sophistication made them the first “evidence” that Judaism itself was the problem—a mark of backwardness to be outgrown.

  • The National Association of Foreign Jews (Germany, 1930s): In Nazi Germany, certain Jews, desperate for safety, echoed the regime’s nationalist rhetoric and proclaimed their distance from other Jews. They issued declarations of loyalty and self-critique, believing obedience might earn protection. The Nazi state rewarded their compliance with betrayal; it deported and murdered them alongside those they had sought to placate.

  • The Bund–Yevsektsiya (Soviet Union, 1920s–30s): In the early Soviet era, Jewish communists dismantled synagogues, silenced rabbis, and suppressed Hebrew culture in service to the revolution. They sought to erase Jewish difference to prove their loyalty to the Party. When the cycle turned, Stalin denounced them as “rootless cosmopolitans,” imprisoned them, and executed their leaders.

  • Jewish Voice for Peace (West, today): In the contemporary West, antizionist Jews front campaigns that condemn Israel and deny Jewish nationhood. Media outlets and institutions elevate them as moral cover, celebrating them as the “good Jews” who lend legitimacy to anti-Jewish hostility. Their advocacy gives political shape to an old pattern: societies rewarding Jews who repudiate their own people while vilifying those who refuse.

The pattern repeats with grim consistency: hatred so deep that some Jews internalize it and serve its ends. History shows that tokenization offers no safety. Societies elevate “Token Jews” only while they are useful, then cast them aside with the same contempt as all the rest.

is antizionism antisemitism?

The answer depends on how one uses the word antisemitism. In its colloquial sense, the term has come to mean all forms of Jew-hatred, whether religious, racial, or national. By that definition, antizionism clearly qualifies. Yet if one uses the specific, historical definition of antisemitism—the 19th-century racial ideology that branded Jews as a biological menace—then antizionism is not identical. This ambiguity creates a trap, one that antizionists exploit. They protest that they are “not antisemites” because they do not wear swastikas or seek race war, while continuing to stigmatize and target Jews through their hatred for Israel.

For this reason, we hold that the most important task is not to collapse antizionism into older categories, but to name and expose it on its own terms. Antizionism is a hate movement, with its own libels, its own aesthetics, its own mechanisms of harassment and violence. To describe it simply as “antisemitism” risks keeping it safe, allowing its practitioners to deny the charge while carrying on the abuse. The term antisemitism itself was coined as a euphemism and did not acquire a negative stigma until the catastrophe of Kristallnacht—far too late. We cannot afford such delay again. Now is the time to stigmatize antizionism directly, to make the word itself toxic, so that the hatred it represents is recognized for what it is: the contemporary face of Jew-hatred.