Want to Fight Antizionism? Start at City Hall

As a Jewish news reporter covering antizionism in the United States, readers often ask me what they can do to fight back in this new era of Jew-hatred. Many want to take action but feel helpless in the face of antizionist abuse and demonization. Jews, they know, are being purged from supposedly inclusive spaces across the US Anti-Jewish conspiracy narratives involving Israel are increasingly being accepted as fact by millions of our countrymen. And while most American Jews recognize the mortal threat posed by antizionism, many aren’t sure how to confront it.

I tell them to start at city hall.

Make time to visit your next city commission or town council meeting. Speak at a local school board hearing or address your county commission. You don’t need to be an expert on the Middle East or an experienced public speaker. You don’t even need to be Jewish. All you need is a willingness to call out the anti-Jewish politics poisoning our democracy and the courage to stand before your neighbors and speak the truth.

I’ve been doing this advocacy myself for the past year, educating elected officials about the lethal nature of antizionist ideology by speaking at commission meetings in Coral Springs and Pembroke Pines, Florida, before Kansas City’s mayor and city council, and at other municipal meetings across the US. During a recent Miami-Dade County Commission meeting, I called out a group of antizionists spreading lies about Israel to the commission.

It’s not easy, but I’ve found these appearances to be an effective way to spread knowledge about the libel-fueled mass movement that is antizionism. Even a few minutes of testimony can expose elected officials and meeting-goers to information and history they don’t encounter in mainstream media.

I’m sharing these experiences, including some of the words I’ve used at city hall microphones, because I want other Jewish Americans and our allies to feel equipped to do the same.

One of the hardest things about speaking publicly against antizionism is deciding what to say. Most local governments allow speakers only a few minutes, hardly enough time to explain last week’s events in Israeli politics, much less an entire ideology focused on destroying the Jewish state and rolling back equal rights for Jews.

Because time is short, I’ve learned to concentrate on a few key points elected officials should understand about antizionism. When I addressed the Coral Springs City Commission, I started with the distinction between criticism of Israel and antizionism.

“Antizionism is not criticism of Israel. Criticism targets policies and factual actions,” I said in remarks later shared by the Israeli Embassy in the US. “Antizionism targets the existence of the Jewish state. It is categorical, obsessive, totalizing, and ideological.”

That introduction offers a starting point for anyone preparing their own remarks. It helps officials understand that criticizing an Israeli prime minister, opposing a military operation, or disputing a government policy is different from antizionists’ targeting synagogues, Jewish businesses, Jewish schools, and Jewish homes; tactics used to abuse, frighten, intimidate, exclude, and justify violence against Jews.

When speaking to audiences, I make sure I describe the antizionist movement’s eliminationist goal.

“It’s a hate movement, and at its core, it’s an eliminationist ideology, one that seeks to dismantle the world’s only Jewish state and purge Jews who support Israel from public life,” I told Coral Springs commissioners.

Then I asked them to take a specific action: adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, specifically because of its examples addressing Israel-related Jew-hatred. Those examples identify Holocaust inversion, including comparisons between contemporary Israeli policies and those of the Nazis; portraying Israel’s existence as a racist endeavor; applying double standards to Israel; and holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. All are tactics antizionists rely on to target Jews.

“I urge you to… take a clear, unapologetic stand against antisemitism and antizionist bigotry,” I told the commission.

The mayor responded that he would bring up IHRA for discussion at a future workshop. My two and a half minutes of public testimony had prompted at least one elected official to commit to a next step in fighting antizionist hate.

Later, when I addressed the Kansas City Council’s Finance, Governance, and Public Safety Committee, I had another goal: to help elected officials recognize the distinction between antisemitism and antizionist bigotry.

“Antizionism is the form of hate and abuse that’s impacting my community right now,” I told them.

“In many ways, it’s even more dangerous because it disguises itself as social justice when it’s really just abusing Jews and targeting us for hatred.”

Those excerpts show how advocates can voice a concern to elected officials without delivering a lecture on the history of the Middle East. You can speak from your own experience as a Jew or as an ally who refuses to accept the normalization of antizionism.

Preparing those few minutes of testimony begins with understanding the movement we are confronting.

Before speaking publicly, I encourage would-be advocates against antizionism to learn about its history. Understanding the lies at the heart of this ideology helps explain why Americans too often fail to recognize it as a form of bigotry.

Dr. Naya Lekht, a scholar of Jew-hatred and co-founder of Stop Antizionism, is doing vital work to raise public awareness. In her analysis of antizionism, Lekht chronicles the three major historical forms of hatred directed at Jews. Religious anti-Judaism accused Jews of violating Christianity, killing Christ, and murdering Christian children. Racial antisemitism portrayed Jews as biologically inferior and a threat to national purity. Antizionism, the newest of the three, depicts Jews and their national movement as violators of human rights, accusing Israel and “Zionists” of racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

In this framework, antizionism is a distinct form of Jew-hatred alongside antisemitism. It has its own ideological foundations, conspiracy theories, mythology, libels, propaganda, and symbols.

One way you can educate officials about antizionist bigotry is by explaining how to spot antizionist libels. These are recognized as false, obsessively repeated accusations that target Israel’s right to exist, rather than valid critiques of specific government policies. Antizionist libels can take a partial truth or real historical event and distort it into a larger lie. For example, the fact that suffering Jewish refugees who survived the Nazi genocide emigrated to Israel from Europe became the lie that Jews were European “colonizers,” instead of a lethally persecuted minority returning to their indigenous homeland.

According to the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), antizionist libels typically manifest as three weaponized narratives: the aforementioned “Colonizer” libel, which denies Jewish indigenous history by framing us as white European invaders; the “Apartheid” libel, which distorts Israeli security measures enacted after waves of deadly Palestinian terrorism as “racial segregation”; and the “Genocide” or “Child-Killer” libel, which falsely claims Israel’s military defense and attacks on Hamas are actually a deliberate, industrial mass slaughter of Palestinians. You can often identify antizionist bigotry by its inversion of history, repetition of cult-like slogans, and targeting of diaspora Jews with actions that hold Jews collectively responsible for actions (some real, but most imagined) of the Jewish state.

Antizionists regularly propagate new libels, including outrageous lies about Israelis sniping children, poisoning aid, deliberately killing journalists, harvesting organs and skin, training dogs to rape people, poisoning water and air, carrying out the October 7 massacre as a false flag operation, controlling the media and Western nations, and protecting pedophiles, alongside the falsehood that Israel has no right to exist.

Joshua Dabelstein of the Movement Against Antizionism Australia argues that presenting antizionism as criticism of Israel obscures its role in demonizing Jews, much as describing antisemitism as criticism of Jews would conceal its bigotry.

These are the kinds of talking points we need to share with audiences and officials in the public square to combat the global hate campaign that treats Jews as “Zionist” proxies for Israel.

Antizionists seek to portray us as racist genocidaires and apartheid supporters who delight in the deaths of children, then work to reshape reality around the contours of their lies. A fictional version of reality is being imposed that falsifies Jewish history, justifies the atrocities of October 7, appropriates Jewish trauma, and places a target on the backs of Jews across America. That’s why the number of recorded acts of bigotry targeting US Jews since October 7 has reached the highest levels on record.

At government meetings and public talks, I aim to educate audiences about how we reached this point, touching on antizionism’s roots in Soviet, Nazi, and Arab propaganda, and the history of antizionist purges of Jews in the Arab world, Soviet Union, and Poland.

I recently attended a Stop Antizionism lecture in which Lekht talked about the usefulness of the label “Zionist” to Soviet authorities. The totalitarian regime formally prohibited discrimination against national and religious groups, seemingly limiting its options for targeting Jews. But by identifying “Zionists” as evil, authorities justified their purges, murder, and imprisonment.

“This is why Jew-hatred is so insidious: it wears the mask of morality,” Lekht wrote. “Jew-hatred is repackaged as virtue, so calling it out feels like attacking progress itself.”

Adherents of today’s antizionist movement promote ideas about Jewish collective guilt, Holocaust inversion, sinister Jewish power, and the threat posed by Jewish nationhood and political participation. But they do it through a vocabulary that bears little resemblance to the language of the Nazis. In fact, antizionists consider themselves the moral opposites of earlier Jew-haters, even while promoting hate narratives with obvious historical antecedents.

Americans have been taught to condemn antisemitism, but few have received any education about antizionism as a form of Jew-hatred. The resulting ignorance has allowed this ideology to operate under the cover of political respectability.

Inversion is one of antizionists’ key tactics. They accuse Israel of crimes committed by antizionist terrorists themselves, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing, subjugation of minority populations, territorial expansionism, religious supremacy, and systematic rape.

Their movement operates within a vast disinformation environment shaped by authoritarian governments in Iran, Qatar, Russia, China, and the Hamas police state in Gaza. Propaganda laundered through universities, NGOs, and news media has repeated so many lies about Israel and Jews since October 7th that much of the world now accepts them as fact.

It’s important to tell audiences that antizionism isn’t just about Jews; it threatens American democracy itself. As a fundamentally illiberal movement, antizionism uses intimidation and harassment to enforce ideological conformity and silence dissent. Anyone who challenges its false claims can be branded an apologist for genocide and purged from organizations and professions. The threat of becoming the next target discourages many Jews and allies from speaking out at all.

Stop Antizionism’s advocacy asks how societies come around to accepting the destruction of a demonized population. In this case, “Zionists.” How long does it take for a country, a continent, or the world to reach a point of what Stop Antizionism calls “genocidal consent”? When does a critical mass of people become willing to excuse or support eliminating a group they have been taught to regard as evil?

Those questions are why we cannot leave the responsibility for educating the public to Jewish organizations or elected officials, especially when so many people governing our communities have little understanding of the hate confronting us today.

When you speak before your local government, you can talk about your own experiences or those of other Jews. You can describe incidents of antizionist hate in your community or those nearby, explain how anti-Israel bigotry affects Americans, or honor victims of antizionist violence like Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. Start with a point you feel is important and are comfortable discussing.

There are organizations that have developed resources to help you. The Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) offers a toolkit for identifying and challenging antizionist behavior. Stop Antizionism provides education and training on the ideology and history of antizionism. 

Look up the public comment procedures in your city and write down the two or three points you most want officials to understand about antizionism. Then practice saying them aloud so you know they fit within the time limit.

Bring a friend or encourage a non-Jewish ally to speak. Attend more than once, because relationships with local officials develop over time. Don’t wait until the next anti-Jewish incident occurs in your city to speak out.

The next public meeting is an opportunity to expose this hatred and ask the people governing your community to do something about it.