Antizionism Is Sexy, Again
Young people tend to believe that they invented sex. With that same solipsism, they imagine that they originated antizionism. While they suppose that antizionism (progressive and sexy!) is entirely separate from classical antisemitism based on religion or race (reactionary and uncool!), these two ideologies have been in bed together for a long time. This well-documented relationship began with Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery published in 1903, and continued with the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1925. The intimate connection between the two ideologies grew during the period of Soviet Russia, both within Russia itself and in its client states. Religious extremism has a particularly fertile ground for the propagation of these twinned theories. Now these ideologies are spawning young new followers on college campuses across the country. For faculty, meanwhile, the embrace of antizionism brings them back to the orgiastic days of their youthful protests, when they were, they know perfectly well, the ones actually inventing sex.
Early anti-Jewish propagandists falsely claimed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were the actual minutes of the First Zionist Congress, which Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, organized and chaired in 1897 in Switzerland. The Protocols, which investigators and historians have thoroughly proven was forged independently by the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, spell out the alleged secret plans of Jewish leaders seeking to attain world domination. According to this booklet, which predated the establishment of the State of Israel by over four decades, Jews were “creating wars and revolutions” so that “Jews may seize the power during the resulting chaos.”
Adolph Hitler, while seeking to render Europe Judenrein, completely free of Jews, not only hated Jews but also rejected Zionism as a legitimate national movement. He declared that by seeking a national homeland, Jews really sought “a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its sovereign right and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.”
In Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks operated under the slogan “We are not anti-Semitic; we are just anti-Zionist.” While claiming to eliminate traditional tsarist antisemitism, the Soviet regime discriminated against Jews through university enrollment quotas that limited Jewish access to higher education; criminalization of Hebrew instruction and closure of Jewish cultural and religious institutions; exclusion of Jews from elite professions; denial of exit visas to Jews seeking to emigrate, particularly to Israel; and harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment of ‘refuseniks,’ those Jews who applied to leave.
In Communist Poland, a 1967-1968 antizionist campaign functioned as an explicit antisemitic purge. Jews were systematically dismissed from government positions, the military, party ranks, universities, and professional workplaces. State-controlled media launched aggressive propaganda campaigns targeting “Zionists” without explicitly using the word “Jew.” Those who lost their jobs and faced severe social harassment were pressured to leave the country. Emigrants were forced to formally renounce their Polish citizenship, register as stateless or departing for Israel, and pay for their abandoned property and education. Between 1968 and 1972, approximately 13,000 to 20,000 Jews fled Poland, effectively dismantling what remained of the post-WWII Polish Jewish community.
Hamas, founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, calls for violence against Israelis and Jews interchangeably. The 1988 Hamas Charter, which the organization has never renounced, declares that the movement’s “struggle against the Jews is very great,” it endorses the view that “Israel will … continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” and it encourages Muslims to “fight the Jew” and “come and kill him.” This ideology has driven attacks on Jews around the world. Between 2012 and 2019, jihadist terrorists targeted Jews in a series of deadly attacks on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, and the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen, murdering Jewish children, worshippers, shoppers, and community members because they were Jewish.
These same theories have migrated to college campuses here in New York and around the world. While the vocabulary has become more “progressive,” from “rootless cosmopolitan to “white settler,” from “Jewish financier to “Zionist colonialist,” the message remains the same. Any Jewish collective dedicated to Jewish peoplehood and self-determination, whether the nation of Israel or a Jewish civil rights group like the ADL, is considered toxic, conspiratorial, and inherently illegitimate.
Antizionism, over a century old, titillates today’s youth because it offers the opportunity to conceive of oneself as an underdog bravely fighting oppression, while simultaneously providing the safety of joining a large mob that has amassed against a minority group. What could be sexier to these youth than getting to feel like the victim while actually engaging in domination? For older generations, the appeal may be different: a familiarity, a palimpsest, evoking an earlier time when they were young and fighting the powerful. This eternal enemy allows rebirth of youthful vitality and passions. The lust for life is so intoxicating and the potential for the destruction of Jewish bodies offers just the right amount of danger for a frisson of radical pleasure.
