Antizionism: Today’s Jew-Hatred

Antizionism is antisemitism. Do not be fooled.

A call for the death of all Zionists or to “globalize the intifada” is not criticism of Israel, its policies, or its government. It is an expression of hatred directed at the Jewish People.  The terms “Jew” and “Zionist” are used interchangeably, by design, as antisemites seek to disguise their Jew hatred in the language of politics, social justice, and artistic expression.

Antizionism is the central ideology of the Free Palestine movement in a decades-long campaign (“Mass Manipulation Campaign”), one which relies on the repeated assertion of lies about the Jewish people and the Jewish state to normalize antisemitism and antisemitic incitement. The movement constructed a deliberate vocabulary consisting of words and phrases, chosen for their association with the concept of “evil,” and which are designed to demonize both the Jewish People and the Jewish State. Labels like “apartheid” and “genocide” and “starvation” are asserted as indisputable fact or truth, despite the absence of any evidentiary basis.

Narratives once widely recognized as expressions of antisemitism are increasingly repackaged under the  pretense of “antizionism” and falsely characterized as political speech, social justice activism, artistic expression and/or education. Language invoking "human rights" and “free speech” is frequently used to obscure their deliberate campaign. The result is that this rhetoric has become accepted as ordinary political and other discourse rather than recognized for what it is: a modern iteration of antisemitism and antisemitic incitement.

Antizionism is the ideology which tells the world Jewish suffering does not count because Jews are now recast as the ultimate evil. They are the building blocks of a false ideology to isolate the Jewish people with the ultimate goal of eradicating Jewish existence.  

Hamas' October 7th Jihadist massacre did not launch the Mass Manipulation Campaign; it supercharged it. The attack handed the movement exactly what years of groundwork had been building toward: an emotionally overwhelming, geopolitically complex event which could be immediately seized, reframed, and weaponized before the bodies were even counted.  The movement understood what propagandists and political strategists have long known: moments of chaos, grief, and moral confusion create fertile ground for manipulation and October 7thprovided the perfect opportunity.

The inversion was not new; it had been practiced and perfected for decades. It had built the infrastructure: the language, the networks, the institutions, the primed audiences on university campuses and in the streets. October 7th gave the movement its most powerful raw material yet. The deliberate slaughter of babies, the elderly, women, festivalgoers, all stripped of its context within hours and fed into a narrative machine which had been running for decades. For a campaign which had spent years normalizing the vocabulary of demonization: "apartheid," "genocide," "settler-colonialism," October 7th was the culmination of the perfect synthesis to maximize and advance their evil ideology.

Simple examples of what antizionism targets and how it is expressed in practice, reveal its underlying function: Jew-Hatred.  

● Antizionism is what people scream before Jews are attacked.

● Antizionism provides moral cover for celebrating the massacres on October 7th.

● Antizionism is what was spray-painted on Jewish-owned businesses the morning after October 7th.

● Antizionism is what protesters chanted outside the Cooper Union library while Jewish students barricaded themselves inside.

● It is what mobs chant while they surround synagogues.   

● Antizionism is what was written on the signs of those who blocked Jewish students from crossing a university campus.

● Antizionism is what student encampments chanted outside Jewish student centers while demanding that Jews inside denounce Israel to earn safe passage.

● It is what masked keffiyeh-clad mobs express while they protest in our streets waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags and shouting to globalize the intifada.

To understand antizionism, one must first understand Zionism. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish People constitute a Nation with the right to a Homeland in their ancestral Homeland, the Land of Israel, now the State of Israel.  The promise of a Homeland is foundational to the religious and cultural beliefs and historical identity of the Jewish People throughout the world. For Jews, expressing support for their Ancestral Homeland is not a political position detached from personal identity but rather is a sincere and deeply felt expression of a shared religious faith and history, and ethnic belonging. Harassing, marginalizing, demonizing, and excluding Jewish people on the basis of a basic component of their Jewish identity - their Zionism, is no less discriminatory than attacking a Jewish person for wearing a kippah, a religious head covering.  

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (“IHRA”) adopted by over 35 national governments and hundreds of institutions worldwide is unambiguous: what is being described under the guise of antizionism is antisemitism.Criticism of Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, does not constitute antisemitism. But demonizing the Jewish State, calling for its destruction, holding Jews and Israelis responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, and/or applying double standards to Israel, are the classic markers of antisemitism under IHRA.

History has shown where this road leads.  Sick societies which normalized Jew hatred inevitably led to their destruction.

Tsarist Russia institutionalized antisemitism through state-sponsored pogroms, legal restrictions confining Jews to the Pale of Settlement, and government propaganda portraying Jews as enemies of the Russian People. That society did not survive. The regime which made Jew-hatred a pillar of its social order collapsed in revolution and chaos.

Medieval Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492 under the Inquisition, stripping the country of merchants, physicians, scholars, and financiers who had sustained its civilization for centuries. What followed was not a purified nation, it was an accelerated decline.

The normalization of Jew-Hatred is what permitted the Nazi genocide of six million Jews. A nonstop campaign teaching Europeans that Jews were evil and the enemies of humanity, made extermination not only possible but righteous and justified.

The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a warning.

When a society loses the ability to name Jew-Hatred for what it is, it has already taken the first step toward tolerating what comes next.

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