Antizionism and the Ritual of Critique
In many cases, what antizionists mean by “critique”—beyond the reflexive denial of antisemitism—is the assertion of a right to hold up the Jews as a symbol of wrong: not that Zionism made this or that error, but that “Zionism is racism”; not that specific Jewish actions should be questioned, but that Jews can be made to signify a generalized moral or civilizational failure. The Jew becomes a floating signifier of the negative, such that non-Jewish society is never truly interested in who Jews are, but only in what they can be made to signify.
David Nirenberg captured this structure precisely in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, showing how the very category of “critique” in Western thought has often been articulated through the figure of the Jew. Jews have served as a symbolic vessel onto which social, political, and civilizational ills could be displaced, rendering Jewishness the mirror in which the West diagnoses its own internal failures.
In this sense, “critique” has never been neutral ground. It is a practice deeply entangled with Western civilizational self-reflection—often violent and displacing—and Jews have long been positioned as its negative pole: the bad religion, the bad subject, the bad citizen, the bad state.
This is why the left’s supposedly “anti-Western,” anti-colonial, or anti-American stance is in no way outside that tradition. It remains structurally Western in form, even in its inversions. Today, Jews are made to symbolize the very things the West now condemns in itself: colonialism, whiteness, nationalism, state violence. And in this process, Jewish indigeneity, decolonization, and stateless trauma are systematically inverted—rendered fraudulent precisely because they disrupt the preferred civilizational narrative. Zionism becomes not the return of a long-exiled people to their land, but its opposite: a sign of Western domination and racial supremacy. That inversion is not accidental—it is the latest form of the West working through its failures by symbolizing the Jew as its scapegoat.
At this level, the question of whether a given statement counts as “critique” or antisemitism is not entirely well posed. The category of critique itself has been historically shaped by the objectification of Jews as a screen for civilizational anxiety. Genuine, rational critique only begins when it thinks with the other—when it includes their voice in their own self-representation—rather than reducing them to a symbol within one’s own moral drama. And thinking with Jews means recognizing not only their historical trauma or individual dignity, but their collective existence as a People—with the right to persist, to speak, and to return. Critique is not the unilateral power to negate, licensed by popular consensus or ideological fashion—it is the openness to reciprocal obviation, the willingness to allow the other’s presence to reframe one’s own terms of thought.
And ultimately, the West can only overcome the true colonialism of erasing distinct peoples when it becomes capacious enough to recognize the one distinct People that has been most intimately part of its history without being reducible to it: the Jewish People.
