popular antizionist libels

Now we come to the contemporary libels, which revive ancient patterns of hostility. Antizionism frames itself through postcolonial, antiracist, and human rights discourse, recasting old hatreds as “ethical concern.” Like the libels of earlier eras, these accusations claim moral purpose while organizing social hostility toward Jews and Israel.

The Colonizer Libel

This libel paints Jews as the world’s last colonial power, foreign to the land that has shaped their prayers and memory for millennia. It turns the story of return into a story of invasion, recasting survivors of exile and genocide as heirs of empire. The charge sounds righteous—anti-imperialist, global, humane—yet it repeats the oldest inversion: Jews as the source of oppression, never its target. Behind the slogans of “decolonization” lies the same reflex to deny Jewish belonging, to strip a people of indigeneity and home.

The apartheid Libel

Antizionists invoke the moral prestige of South Africa’s freedom struggle to brand Israel as an apartheid state. In this narrative, security checkpoints become symbols of racial hierarchy, and self-defense transforms into domination. The story circulates easily because it feels familiar, carrying the rhythm of moral triumph. Yet within Israel’s borders, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and LGBTQ citizens work, vote, and argue side by side—the only plural democracy in a region where minorities are silenced or expelled. The libel thrives not on fact but on borrowed moral glamour, hijacking the vocabulary of justice to cast Israel as villain in a ready-made morality play.

The ethnostate Libel

In the antizionist imagination, Israel stands accused of being an “ethnostate,” a fortress of exclusion built on bloodline and privilege. The word itself sounds damning, evoking purity, segregation, tyranny. Yet Israel’s reality is far more porous and human: a refuge for a people who nearly vanished, open to all who live within it. Non-Jewish citizens—Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins—serve in medicine, politics, and the army. The libel depends on moral pretense, ignoring that dozens of nations define themselves through ethnicity or faith, yet only the Jewish one is condemned for surviving on its own terms.

The famine Libel

Across the centuries, anti-Jewish libels have often clung to food, as if to profane the act of nourishment itself: the blood libel accused Jews of using Christian blood in matzah, the host libel imagined them defiling the Eucharist, plague panics claimed they poisoned wells, and later whispers painted Jewish innkeepers as exploiters. The modern antizionist “famine” libel drifts in this same current, charging Israel with deliberate starvation even as it channels unprecedented aid to its enemies. Hamas hoards, resells, and profiteers, while tales of “aid massacres” dissolve under the scrutiny of the GHF.

The genocide Libel

Accusations that Israel commits “genocide” have circulated since the mid-twentieth century. Soviet and Arab propaganda in the mid 20th century recast Israel’s wars of survival as wars of extermination, appropriating the language of human rights to indict the very people for whom the term genocide was coined. Over time, this framing became embedded in activist discourse, awaiting each new conflict as confirmation of its claim. When Hamas massacred Israelis on October 7, 2023, the accusation was instantly revived—antizionists agitators cried “genocide” within hours, a narrative prepared in advance. In this inversion, Israel’s efforts at self-defense are presented as evidence of mass atrocity, while the perpetrators of slaughter assume the mantle of victimhood. Repeated across NGOs, international forums, and media platforms, the libel acquires the moral weight of truth, corrupting the language of justice and obscuring the eliminationist aggression that drives it.

The child killer Libel

Few images wound moral sense as deeply as the death of a child. Societies understood that long ago, when they invented the blood libel in 1144, accusing Jews of using Christian children’s blood to bake Passover bread. Today, that same story returns, its symbols updated and its targets broadcast. Israel is accused of murdering children deliberately, of making innocence its enemy. “Baby-killer” has become a street chant, a slogan of rage disguised as compassion. To call a people child-killers is to strip them of humanity—and that, as always, is the libel’s real work.

The journalist killer Libel

This accusation claims that Israel hunts journalists, silencing truth itself. The image is designed for outrage: the bullet-riddled press vest, the fallen witness, the state that fears exposure. Yet in Gaza, Hamas uses that same vest as camouflage—arming “reporters,” embedding fighters among civilians, and executing real journalists who refuse to obey. The libel spreads because it flatters the teller: to accuse Israel of silencing truth is to imagine oneself as its brave defender. In this projection, violence masquerades as virtue, and propaganda wears the face of moral courage.

Flashpoint libels

During war, antizionists generate flashpoint libels—viral performances of suffering that spread faster than truth can intervene. Hamas understands that its most powerful weapon against Israel is not the rocket but the image. Amid real civilian hardship, it stages scenes of catastrophe for the cameras, knowing that each fabrication will circulate as evidence before it can be verified. The Gazawood project has documented this machinery: actors smeared with fake blood, using Instagram filters to simulate soot or injuries that flicker on and off, and staging famine just steps from ordinary life. International media and social platforms amplify these images uncritically, rewarding emotion over accuracy. The pattern recurs in each flashpoint libel: the Al-Ahli Hospital libel, which falsely claimed Israel bombed a hospital; The Lancet 186,000 Deaths libel, which turned speculation into data; The Harvard 400,000 Missing libel, which laundered fabrication through academia; The UN 14,000 Babies libel, which twisted bureaucratic phrasing into atrocity propaganda. Others drew on conspiracy and spectacle: the Oxycodone Flour libel, which alleged that Israel poisoned aid; the Aid Convoy libels, including the Aguilar case, which misrepresented chaotic encounters as deliberate killings; and the Flotilla libels, orchestrated to manufacture libels for global broadcast. Even Jews who challenge these falsehoods are smeared as paid propagandists, accused of earning “$7,000 per post.” Each libel converts deception into moral theater, exploiting empathy and the reflex of outrage to turn Israel’s survival into the world’s scandal.