We Must Expose the Antizionist Libel Machine

On October 8, 2023, in Times Square in New York City, the pro-Hamas movement renewed its call for the Intifada to be globalized.

Hamas’ massacre of Israelis was still underway. But the “Free, Free Palestine” movement had been ready to capitalize on the horror of October 7th for many years. Their chants of “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!” weren’t a byproduct of insensitivity or obliviousness. Theirs was a callous and calculated decision to strike while the iron was hot, while the blood of Am Yisrael—the Jewish People—was still seeping into the ground and the fires in the kibbutzim were still burning.

That was a little over two years ago. Yet here we are again. Even as the victims of the massacre at Bondi Beach are fresh in our collective memory, the antizionists are rallying once more. Activists, students, professors, doctors, former allies, and even tokenized antizionist Jews are following the same playbook: striking while the iron is hot and before our blood has dried.

Antizionism is the “microplastics” of hatred. It’s in everything now. For the antizionist, Jewish tragedy isn’t a tragedy at all—it is a political, moral, and social triumph. Their hate movement feeds off Jewish suffering.

It is a cycle that will never end until we find the courage to name it and expose it.

A Failure of Leadership (and Imagination)

The Australian government is not alone in its failures, but its complicity through years of silence and avoidance has made the world increasingly dangerous not just for Australian Jews, but for our entire People.

After the Holocaust, around 30,000 Jews fled to Australia—as far across the world as they could go—to rebuild a life they had once known, one with at least a chance for safety, for peace, perhaps even for strength. But for years, Australian leaders have acceded to the demands of pro-Islamist extremists and cowered in fear of radical political and social forces they either did not comprehend, or were too naïve or afraid to rein in. This is despite clear and repeated warnings from the Australian Jewish community, and the existence of a readily-available and growing body of scholarship on antizionism that could have saved us if only our leaders had been prepared to listen.

Now, those same Australian Jewish communities are left to pick up the pieces of what they had built, shattered by the same vulnerability they and their ancestors lived and died through in Europe. And the antizionist hate movement continues to capitalize on our suffering.

When confronted, their habitual inversion shields them from meaningful consequences; after all, the cause of Jewish suffering isn’t the bullets aimed at Jews, it’s Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. It’s the Jews’ irrational fear of radical Islam. It’s literally anything but what it is: Jew-hate.

So, how did we get here?

A Pretty Hate Machine Built on Language

Antizionism thrives on the dishonest manipulation of language. It works tirelessly to distance classical “racial” Jew-hate (antisemitism) from its more modern strain (antizionism). The distinction is a genuine one—antizionism and antisemitism do have markedly different origin stories and use entirely different lexicons to foment hatred. But antizionists go a step further by framing their movement as a virtuous political belief system, one founded on “legitimate criticism” of Israel and of Zionism.

Antizionist framing is pure linguistic legerdemain, a bad-faith parlor trick. For starters, antizionism is not a rejection of Zionism. As Naya Lekht notes, antizionists “… begin by defining ‘Zionism,’ as if Zionism were the antipode of anti-Zionism, and a necessary preamble. This would be akin to insisting that we define ‘semites’ before engaging in a serious discussion of antisemitism as a historicized 19th and 20th century movement.”

No, for antizionists, “Zionism” is a fresh, empty signifier, ready to be filled with whatever evils Israel or the Jews are accused of at any given moment. Genocide. Apartheid. Colonizers. Ethnostate. Famine. Baby-killers. Any (preferably all) antizionist libels will do.

More Antizionist Word-Games

And antizionists work overtime to redirect the world’s attention away from their own sophistries, toward a disingenuous question of line-drawing: when does criticism of Israel or Zionism “cross the line and become” antisemitism?

The question is a dangerous distraction. Criticism of any government that is grounded in truth, facts, and reason is inherently legitimate. But when those criticisms are grounded in libels, they’re no longer criticisms. And when those criticisms only ever target a single nation, they are irrational expressions of hatred.

What’s more, the antizionist lexicon is so dissimilar from that of antisemitism that its slickness easily evades our moral immune system. Gone are the claims of racial impurity, of the inherent inferiority of the scheming Jew. Instead, the Jew is the aggressor, the Goliath, the boot (“laced by the IDF”) on the world’s neck. Antizionism is a virtue, we’re told, and whatever antizionism is opposed to is a vice. And all one must do to defeat this vice is to stand up and take the rational, moral, and of course “purely political” stance of renouncing Israel.

Simply put, antizionism is rhetorical scam.

But from Munich to Entebbe to Istanbul, from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Toulouse, from Paris to Pittsburgh to Buffalo, from Amsterdam to Washington, D.C. to NYC to Boulder to Bondi Beach, this scam has created a global permission structure for Jew-hate. A permission structure that authorizes verbal and physical violence against Jews with total impunity.

Old Cures No Longer Work (if They Ever Did)

As I learned more about antizionism over the past two years—its century-long Middle Eastern and Soviet history, the Khartoum Resolution’s “Three No’s,” antizionism’s re-emergence in Europe in the late 1960s, United Nations Resolution 3379, the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa—I began to see the problem more clearly.

In the eight decades since the Holocaust ended, we’ve developed countless social and political and legal and educational structures to address antisemitism. If antizionism were “just antisemitism,” then all we should need to do is more of what we’ve already been doing: more Holocaust education. A stronger focus on teaching empathy and tolerance. More rigorous enforcement of existing hate-speech laws against known expressions of antisemitism. Right?

Unsurprisingly, antizionists exploit even this naïve but common “flattening” of Jew-hate strains, in order to divert attention and energy from developing effective defenses against their movement. To quote a December 21st Facebook post from the Australian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign for Palestine, “[W]hat we need are community-based responses that support people to come together and speak honestly and openly about violence here, in Palestine, and around the world.” Deflection, always.

Shining Light on Antizionist Libels

All the world’s weight is on our back, and we need new solutions. Urgently. The pursuit of “solidarity” rings hollow. “Rejecting hatred of all kinds” has become a politically convenient way to sweep Jew-hate under the rug for yet another electoral cycle. And funding yet more physical security for Jewish institutions? No walls will ever be strong or high enough to protect us.

We must learn to identify, name, and expose the libels that fuel antizionism. StopAZ.org notes: “As the third era of Jew-hatred, [antizionism] repackages old libels and demonization in the moral vocabulary of anti-racism, human rights, and decolonization.”

Each libel, each falsehood, is a gear in the antizionist libel machine, which grinds on endlessly to ensure that Jews will never be safe: These are some of the more common libels being used to batter and delegitimize Israel, Zionism, and Am Yisrael:

• The Genocide Libel: Reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator to justify violence against Jews, using the denial of anti-Jew violence to invert the October 7th invasion and massacre it against its victims.
• The Apartheid Libel: Dehumanizing the Jewish state with accusations of irrevocable and total racial intolerance and bigotry, to isolate Israel from the international community.
• The Colonizer Libel: Erasing thousands of years of indigenous Jewish history and squeezing the reestablishment of the Jewish state into an ill-fitting “settler colonialist” framework.
• The Ethnostate Libel: Turning the reestablishment of Israel on its head to deny Jews the same right to self-determination afforded to any other peoplehood on earth.

These libels are purpose-built to erode Jewish confidence and strength and pride, to splinter diasporic Jewish communities by enabling “good Jews” to tokenize themselves by renouncing their peoplehood, to erase Jewish voices, and to isolate Eretz Yisrael from the international community. There are countless others; as the news cycle shows, when one libel becomes even less tenable in light of the facts, two new ones will take its place. (If you need a longer list, the Movement Against Antizionism website can help.)

The Safety We Demand and Deserve

The ceaseless spread and repetition of antizionist libels is no accident, no mere byproduct of our war against Hamas. This is a machine that has been grinding on for decades. Because antizionism’s appetite for Jewish suffering is literally insatiable. It accepts no boundaries. It tests the limits of our society inch by inch: first with slogans and protests, then with tokenization, then with verbal violence, and inevitably, with murder and extermination.

We must demand that our leaders stop cowering and start recognizing that antizionism is not a political disagreement or a social justice cause; it is a predatory movement that feeds on Jewish blood. It is built on a closed loop of libels, each of which can be named and exposed if we just take the time to educate ourselves, to show up and speak out and cry: NO MORE!

Antizionism will never be satisfied until Jews are left with nowhere safe to go. And only when we start naming and exposing its lies will we begin to dismantle antizionism’s sophisticated libel machine and reclaim the safety that the global Jewish community demands and deserves. If we refuse to do so—whether through cowardice or naïveté or ignorance—well then, that’s on us.