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

the cycle of libel

Throughout history, Jew-hatred has persisted not as isolated acts of prejudice, but through a recurring cultural pattern in which false accusations—libels—play a central role. Across time and place, societies have projected their own anxieties onto Jewish people, organizing these projections into a cycle of accusation, stigmatization, violence, and denial.

This enduring structure—what we call the libel-cycle—helps explain the persistence and adaptability of Jew-hatred. While the content of the accusations shifts across eras, the underlying pattern remains consistent. More than a series of external attacks, this cycle reflects a deeper cultural mechanism: by casting Jews as symbolic threats, societies have historically stabilized their own narratives of moral coherence and collective identity.

Recognizing the libel-cycle as a civilizational reflex allows for more than reactive response—it invites proactive understanding. Breaking the cycle requires exposing its logic, challenging its legitimacy, and reaffirming the principles of equal dignity and factual integrity in public life.

  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 forged their own moral identities by projecting its own anxieties and failures onto the Jew—the heretic, the pollutant, the oppressor—turning acts of anti-Jewish violence into rituals of collective self-purification.

  • Act I: Anti-Judaism
    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
    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. Antisemitic pseudoscience 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
    In the wake of racism, apartheid, and colonialism, Western societies sought moral redemption through the new faiths of antiracism and decolonization. Yet these creeds became the site of a profound inversion: Jews and Israel were recast as the distilled image 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 once again the Jew again supplied the means. Libeling Israel as racist, colonial, apartheid, or genocidal allows societies to cleanse themselves symbolically of their own histories of oppression. Denunciation becomes atonement; scapegoating, a rite of moral renewal. By casting Jews as the repository of Western sin, the cycle of libel begins again.

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 ultimate 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

Antizionism weaponizes libel to exclude and harm Jews wherever they live. It brands anyone who stands with Israel as a “Zionist agent” and drives them out of classrooms, boardrooms, and civic spaces. It defaces synagogues with graffiti and smashes their windows in the name of “justice.” It sends masked mobs to stalk Jewish gatherings, elevates token Jews who renounce their peoplehood as “authentic,” and silences the overwhelming majority. In every act, antizionism assaults the Jewish spirit—eroding safety, stigmatizing identity, and striving to extinguish Jewish life in the West even as it seeks Israel’s destruction.

Israelis

Antizionism victimizes Israelis through both direct violence and global isolation. It launches missiles into towns and cities, striking homes, schools, and marketplaces where ordinary life endures. Abroad, it organizes boycotts, exclusions, and divestment campaigns designed to suffocate Israeli culture, science, and the economy. It mocks or bans the Hebrew language, revived after centuries of exile. It harasses Israeli travelers in airports, assaults them on European streets, and casts them as pariahs on university campuses. At every turn, antizionism tightens its grip on Israeli existence.

Palestinians

Antizionism exploits Palestinians with special cruelty. It turns their suffering into a commodity and weaponizes their pain to fuel a perpetual industry of outrage. It celebrates extremists who perpetuate the conflict as “freedom fighters” and threatens moderates who seek compromise as “traitors.” It traps ordinary Palestinian families in unending cycles of war and deprivation, reducing their lives to emblems for Westerners who crave spectacle over solutions. Antizionism thrives on Palestinian victimhood; true Palestinian liberation demands breaking free from the grip of this antizionist obsession.

non-jewish allies of israel

Beyond Israel, antizionism harasses and maligns anyone who expresses solidarity with Jewish sovereignty. It smears students, professors, clergy, and politicians who defend Israel’s right to exist as “racists” or “colonialists.” It shouts down speakers, cancels invitations, and issues threats, branding supporters as collaborators with an imagined evil. Antizionism projects its hostility outward, punishing all who affirm the Jewish right to nationhood.

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.

antizionist jews

The libels of Jew-hatred are so potent that, in every age, it ensnares some Jews themselves—those who seek safety or acceptance by echoing the accusations leveled against their own people.

  • 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. 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, so that it becomes visible for what it is: the contemporary face of Jew-hatred.