The History of Antizionism
a trail of harm
Antizionism is not an abstract theory confined to seminars, slogans, or institutional resolutions. It has produced a continuous record of harm that is concrete, personal, and enduring. Wherever antizionism takes hold, it manifests in the persecution of flesh-and-blood people: families displaced, communities erased, and individuals silenced, imprisoned, or killed. In the Soviet Union, it took the form of state campaigns to extinguish Jewish identity. In the Middle East, it fueled expulsions, pogroms, and the near-total destruction of long-standing Jewish life. In the West, it normalized a discourse that renders Jews conditional citizens. Its damage has never been limited to Jews. Antizionism has trapped Palestinians in cycles of false promise and political manipulation, denied Israelis legitimacy and security, and drawn others into movements that rationalize violence. It continues in the present, chanted at rallies, taught in classrooms, and repeated by institutions, harming Jews and non-Jews alike.
Soviet origins of Antizionism
The Soviet Union built the first great stage for antizionism. After the Holocaust, open antisemitism reeked of fascism, so Moscow repackaged it in the language of anti-imperial virtue. Lenin had already branded Zionism as “bourgeois nationalism,” and after the revolution the Bolsheviks created the Yevsektsiya, a Jewish section of the Communist Party tasked with dismantling Jewish life from within. The state shut synagogues, raided Hebrew schools, and sent Zionist activists to prisons and camps. Soviet propaganda plastered “Zionist traitors” on posters and in newspapers, until “Zionist” became a convenient code for “Jew,” a way to criminalize identity without saying the word aloud.
After the war, the state tightened the vise. Censors banned Hebrew books and Jewish culture. Secret police interrogated anyone caught teaching Jewish history or practicing rituals at home. Employers blacklisted those suspected of “Zionist sympathies,” forcing families into poverty. When Jews applied to leave, the government branded them “refuseniks” and unleashed a campaign of punishment—surveillance, harassment, loss of work, eviction, arrest. Children watched their parents humiliated, their grandparents silenced, their communities erased from public view.
Figures like Natan Sharansky made the repression visible to the world, but thousands of others endured it in quieter agony—lives constricted until the only path left was escape. The Soviet Union called this progress; in reality it was suffocation. Antizionism was not an argument about politics but a machinery of control. It reached into kitchens, schools, and workplaces, stripping Jews of language, culture, and dignity, and punishing Jews for the simplest offense: the crime of being Jewish.
Middle East & North Africa Antizionism
From the Soviet stage, the language of antizionism spread into the Middle East and North Africa, where it fused with older prejudices and nationalist upheaval. For centuries, Jewish life had been woven into the fabric of the region: synagogues tucked beside markets, Hebrew prayers mingling with the call to prayer, families rooted in Babylon, the Maghreb, and Yemen for over two millennia. That life grew precarious in the twentieth century. In the 1920s, mobs swept through Jewish neighborhoods in Mandatory Palestine; by the 1930s, pogroms in Hebron and Safed left centuries-old communities in ruins. In 1941, Baghdad’s Farhud turned terror into spectacle: over two days, state-incited mobs murdered more than 180 Jews, raped women, and looted thousands of homes. A city that had once been the heart of Jewish learning and culture was left in ashes.
After 1948, persecution became policy. Governments branded Zionism a foreign plot, and Jews—no matter how ancient their roots—were recast as “Zionist conspirators.” Police dragged fathers from their businesses; bureaucrats revoked citizenship with a stamp; mobs shouted down neighbors who had shared streets for generations. Nearly 850,000 Jews were forced to abandon their homes, leaving behind synagogues, schools, cemeteries, and entire quarters that had stood for centuries. Cairo’s Jewish district fell silent. Aleppo’s synagogues were gutted. Sana’a’s ancient community disappeared almost overnight.
The expulsions were not an episode of migration but an unmaking. Families carried out what little they could—keys to houses they would never see again, prayer books smuggled under shawls, recipes and songs committed to memory because there would be no homes left to house them. What was called “Arab nationalism” or “anti-Zionism” in official decrees was, in practice, the erasure of Jewish identity from lands where it had flourished for over two thousand years.
Western Antizionism
From the emptied streets of Baghdad and Cairo, the current of antizionism swept westward, carried by Soviet propaganda and Arab nationalist rhetoric until it lodged in the bloodstream of universities, media, and governments. After 1967, Moscow poured resources into casting Zionism as racism, and in 1975 the United Nations ratified that lie with a resolution equating Jewish sovereignty with apartheid. What began as propaganda hardened into global common sense. In lecture halls, NGOs, and newsrooms, antizionism simmered—wrapped in the language of decolonization and human rights, presented as progressive virtue rather than recycled hate.
By the early 2000s, the script had taken deep root. Durban’s 2001 World Conference Against Racism turned into a stage for branding Israel a pariah state, while NGOs and cultural elites polished the vocabulary of apartheid and settler colonialism. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch eventually adopted these charges, proof of how thoroughly decades of ideological labor had normalized them. What seemed like marginal rhetoric was, in fact, a patient project: to recode Jew-hatred as anticolonial virtue.
Then the mask slipped. On October 7, as Jews were slaughtered in their homes and dragged into captivity, student groups across Western campuses cheered in unison, chanting “we’re back!” within hours of the massacre. The libels—colonialism, apartheid, genocide—were unleashed with new ferocity, borrowed from Soviet and postcolonial scripts but now amplified by Western institutions. Hamas broadcast its atrocities; many in the West looked on without horror, others with justification, even elation. What had long simmered beneath the surface burst into flood, exposing how deeply the culture had absorbed the reflex: Jewish belonging tolerated only on condition of disavowal, Jewish life treated as expendable in the theater of virtue. The language was refined, but the pattern was ancient—the cycle of libel reborn as progressive creed.