u/RoundAd5911

Antizionism is just criticism of Israel. Totally. Obviously.

Also, Jews are not really a people — just a religion, except when they’re a race, except when they’re white, except when they’re white-adjacent, except when they’re useful as proof that antizionism cannot possibly be antisemitic.

Also, Israel is uniquely illegitimate. Not flawed. Not criticizable. Illegitimate. That's why we call it “settler-colonial,” despite the awkward lack of a mother country, empire, or resource extraction. Jews returned to Judea, which is colonialism because we said so.

Also, we need to update Jewish history... which is totally normal to do when you are just criticizing a group of people. So... Jews may have been indigenous yesterday, but today they are "settlers" and colonizers. Holocaust survivors may have been murdered for not being white, but today their descendants are white oppressors. Jews expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, Morocco, and elsewhere may have arrived as refugees, but today they are settlers. Very simple.

Also, it is a totally normal criticism to call Zionists supremacists. And this is important to do. It makes everything that follows sound moral.

And don't forget to call them genocidal. And to repeat “genocide” until it stops describing a crime and starts describing a people. Hamas? Irrelevant. Human shields? Hasbara. Rockets? What rockets? Hostages? Changing the subject.

Once “Zionist” means white-colonial-apartheid-genocidal-supremacist, excluding Zionists from campuses, workplaces, panels, co-ops, bookstores, unions, medical associations, and cultural life becomes justice.

It's also completely normal not to mention any inconvenient "facts": Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Holocaust survivors, Arab citizens of Israel, Druze Israelis, Bedouin Israelis, peace treaties, repeated rejected partition plans, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, October 7, suicide bombings, rockets, tunnels, hostage-taking, or the fact that “Zionist” usually means most Jews.

And absolutely do not compare how minorities are treated across the Middle East and North Africa — where Kurds, Copts, Yazidis, Baháʼís, Amazigh, Assyrians, and others enjoy such famously robust protections, equal rights, and zero persecution that it would be terribly unfair to bring them up.

Also don’t ask what happens to the seven million Jews already living there. That question is rude. Just say “decolonization” and let everyone fill in the blanks.

And when people start shouting outside synagogues, vandalizing Jewish institutions, harassing Israeli athletes, boycotting Jewish-linked businesses, threatening Jewish students, demanding loyalty tests, or trying to purge “Zionists” from public life, act shocked.

Because antizionism is definitely not a hate movement and we Western antizionists are impartial judges of Israeli behavior. Our own guilt about colonization and the Holocaust and the convenience of having a "get out of moral jail free" card plus righteous permission to hate has nothing to do with any of this.

Also it is totally impossible for anyone on the Western left to be fooled by propaganda from a "failed" totalitarian movement (the Soviet Union and all communist countries only "failed" because the US used its power on them... power which the US got by using a successful economic model, which is obviously an immoral and evil thing to do).

And the Gazan government is oppressed so definitionally they are not responsible for any messy yet completely necessary acts of violence that happen on their watch.... and might happen to be planned, incited, and financially rewarded by them... I mean, they are not criminal masterminds or anything ruling their own people with an iron fist. Billions in the bank, you say? Probably Netanyahu is responsible somehow. Torturing and murdering Gazans who protest? Oh they are just agents of Israel.... who cares???

Plus no Arab states are powerful or rich or intelligent enough to fuel propaganda campaigns that could fool a sophisticated Westerner. And certainly China has no ability to participate in a narrative war. "Cultural revolution"? What does history have to do with any of this?

Let's just focus on what's amazing about our movement... it gives permission to do evil things to diaspora Jews with a clean conscience! And the 2,000 year long history of most of the world using demonizing narratives about Jewish illegitimacy to fuel all sorts of violence toward Jews? Why do you keep bringing history into this as if it is relevant?

Our cause is totally different -- just normal criticism of a country, which must be protected at all costs (to Jewish communities). Because.... reasons!

Antizionism is just criticism of Israel. Totally. Obviously.

Also, Jews are not really a people — just a religion, except when they’re a race, except when they’re white, except when they’re white-adjacent, except when they’re useful as proof that antizionism cannot possibly be antisemitic.

Also, Israel is uniquely illegitimate. Not flawed. Not criticizable. Illegitimate. That's why we call it “settler-colonial,” despite the awkward lack of a mother country, empire, or resource extraction. Jews returned to Judea, which is colonialism because we said so.

Also, we need to update Jewish history... which is totally normal to do when you are just criticizing a group of people. So... Jews may have been indigenous yesterday, but today they are colonizers. Holocaust survivors may have been murdered for not being white, but today their descendants are white oppressors. Jews expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, Morocco, and elsewhere may have arrived as refugees, but today they are settlers. Very simple.

Also, it is a totally normal criticism to call Zionists supremacists. And this is important to do. It makes everything that follows sound moral.

And don't forget to call them genocidal. And to repeat “genocide” until it stops describing a crime and starts describing a people. Hamas? Irrelevant. Human shields? Hasbara. Rockets? What rockets? Hostages? Changing the subject.

Once “Zionist” means white-colonial-apartheid-genocidal-supremacist, excluding Zionists from campuses, workplaces, panels, co-ops, bookstores, unions, medical associations, and cultural life becomes justice.

It's also completely normal not to mention any inconvenient "facts": Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Holocaust survivors, Arab citizens of Israel, Druze Israelis, Bedouin Israelis, peace treaties, repeated rejected partition plans, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, October 7, suicide bombings, rockets, tunnels, hostage-taking, or the fact that “Zionist” usually means most Jews.

And absolutely do not compare how minorities are treated across the Middle East and North Africa — where Kurds, Copts, Yazidis, Baháʼís, Amazigh, Assyrians, and others enjoy such famously robust protections, equal rights, and zero persecution that it would be terribly unfair to bring them up.

Also don’t ask what happens to the seven million Jews already living there. That question is rude. Just say “decolonization” and let everyone fill in the blanks.

And when people start shouting outside synagogues, vandalizing Jewish institutions, harassing Israeli athletes, boycotting Jewish-linked businesses, threatening Jewish students, demanding loyalty tests, or trying to purge “Zionists” from public life, act shocked.

Because antizionism is definitely not a hate movement. Don't be ridiculous.

What makes the endless dissection of "Zionism" I see in my professional community so strange to me is that Zionism is not, in reality, a single coherent doctrine. It is a broad, internally diverse set of historical, political, religious, cultural, and national attachments. Yet people routinely scrutinize it as though it were a unified metaphysical force responsible for explaining vast swaths of the modern world.

That only makes sense if the exercise is not really about understanding Zionism.

If you understand antizionism as constructing "the Zionist" as a symbolic figure, the whole obsession starts to make more sense. The purpose is no longer to analyze an ideology but to manufacture a villain—or, more precisely, a sacrificial figure onto whom societies can project their own unresolved anxieties.

For parts of the Western left, "the Zionist" often becomes the embodiment of colonialism, allowing Western antizionists to externalize guilt over their own colonial histories.

For some Europeans, "the Zionist" becomes a vehicle through which unresolved guilt and shame surrounding the Holocaust can be transformed into accusations against Jews, allowing Europe to imagine itself morally redeemed.

For parts of the developing world, "the Zionist" becomes a stand-in for broader grievances against Western power, imperialism, globalization, and inequality.

These anxieties are real. Colonialism was real. European antisemitism was real. Western domination of much of the globe was real.

But rather than confronting the specific histories, institutions, and societies responsible for those phenomena, antizionism compresses them into a single symbolic target.

The result is that "the Zionist" comes to represent everything: colonialism, racism, apartheid, militarism, capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, imperialism, and even unrelated domestic grievances.

No actual political movement could bear that explanatory burden. Only a mythological figure could.

This is why debates about Zionism often feel surreal to me. The discussion is rarely about the beliefs held by actual Jews. It is about a symbolic character that has been constructed to absorb the fears, guilt, frustrations, and moral dramas of the modern world.

Historically, antisemitism functioned in a remarkably similar way. It was never genuinely a response to Jews as they actually existed. It constructed an imaginary Jew—a secret manipulator, corrupter, parasite, conspirator, bloodsucker, or racial contaminant—and then blamed that figure for society's problems.

The content changed. The structure remained.

Today, antizionism constructs "the Zionist" and assigns that figure responsibility for the moral struggles of our time.

This has implications for how Jews respond.

Jews often respond to antizionism by trying to explain Zionism more carefully, define it more precisely, or defend it more passionately.

But we don't fight antisemitism by defending "Semitism."

We don't fight blood libels by explaining Jewish dietary laws.

We fight antisemitism by identifying, exposing, and confronting the ideology that constructs the myth in the first place.

Which makes me wonder whether we're spending too much time arguing about what Zionism is, and not enough time asking why "the Zionist" has become such a powerful symbolic villain in contemporary discourse.

My own view is that until antizionism itself is examined—not as a critique of Zionism, but as an ideology that constructs a symbolic enemy—the conflict will remain impossible to resolve.  That antizionism is what turned Israel's existence into a never- ending war war and still perpetuates it.  At this point,  there are a whole constellation of interests and actors holding the conflict in place,  but dissolving its core will get us to the beginning of a solution because once the conflict no longer has symbolic value,  its value to those actors will diminish greatly and solutions will begin to seem appealing. 

In other words,  in trying to solve the conflict without addressing global antizionism first, we are putting the cart before the horse.  

And it is antizionism and its construct of the "Zionist" that we need to analyze and deconstruct if we ever want a resolution.  The narrative war must be brought to an end before the physical war can be. 

Thoughts?

I wanted to share some thoughts I had about how strange I find the endless dissection of "Zionism" that some antizionists do. Because Zionism is not a single coherent idea. It is a broad, internally diverse set of historical, political, religious, cultural, and national attachments. Yet people routinely scrutinize it as though it were a unified metaphysical force responsible for explaining vast swaths of the modern world.

That only makes sense if the exercise is not really about understanding Zionism.

If you understand that antizionism operates by constructing "the Zionist" as a symbolic figure, the whole obsession majes more sense. The purpose is not to analyze an ideology but to manufacture a villain—or, more precisely, a sacrificial figure onto whom societies can project their own unresolved anxieties.

For parts of the Western left, "the Zionist" has become the embodiment of colonialism, allowing Western AZs to externalize guilt over their own colonial histories. For European AZs, the "Zionist" becomes as a vehicle for unresolved guilt and shame surrounding the Holocaust and the desire to transform Jews from victims into perpetrators to escape it and "redeem themselves". For parts of the developing world, "the Zionist" has become a stand-in for broader grievances against Western power, imperialism, globalization, and inequality.

These anxieties make sense. Because colonialism was real. European antisemitism was real. Western domination of much of the globe was real. But rather than confronting the specific histories, institutions, and societies responsible for those phenomena, antizionism compresses them into a single symbolic target.

The result is that "the Zionist" comes to represent everything: colonialism, racism, apartheid, militarism, capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, imperialism, and even unrelated domestic grievances. No actual political movement could bear that explanatory burden. Only a mythological figure could.

This is why debates about Zionism so often feel surreal. The discussion is rarely about the beliefs held by actual Jews. It is about a symbolic character that has been constructed to absorb the fears, guilt, frustrations, and moral dramas of the modern world.

Historically, antisemitism functioned in a remarkably similar way. It was never genuinely a response to us as we actually existed. It constructed an imaginary Jew—a secret manipulator, corrupter, parasite, conspirator, bloodsucker, or racial contaminant—and then blamed that figure for society's problems.

Same hatred, different century. Antizionism now constructs "the Zionist" and assigns that figure responsibility for the moral struggles of our time.

So I just wanted to explain how I think this affects what responses to antizionism will work.

We often respond to antizionism by trying to explain Zionism more carefully, define it more precisely, or defend it more passionately.

But we don't fight antisemitism by defending "Semitism."

We don't fight blood libels by explaining Jewish dietary laws.

We fight antisemitism by identifying, exposing, and confronting the ideology that constructs the myth.

The same principle applies here.

The central question is not "What is Zionism?" Or "How do we solve the conflict in the Middle East?"

The central question is: Why has the antizionist made "the Zionist" such a powerful symbolic villain?

If we can get everyone to see this and finally push back on antizionism in a united way worldwide, maybe the conflict in the Middle East can actually be solved. And it will not until then. Because it is AZ that makes the conflict intractable in the first place.

Antizionism is an ideology that constructs its own "Zionist"—just as antisemitism constructs its own "semite"—and then assigns that figure the role of villain, scapegoat, and sacrifice for the anxieties of the age.

One thing that strikes me about antizionism is how often it functions less as a political position and more as a form of moral narcissism. I can't tell you how many times I have called people on statements that directly undermine my safety and they have responded that their intentions are good, as if that should matter to me, as if I'm judging them morally rather than simply telling them to stop demonizing me and my family. I don't care about their intentions, I just want them to leave me and my people alone. That's what got me thinking about this.

Moral narcissism is when the primary goal is not solving a problem or helping people, but displaying one's own virtue. The issue becomes a stage on which the activist performs goodness. In that framework, complexity is a threat. History is a threat. Facts that complicate the narrative are a threat. The point is not understanding reality but maintaining a self-image as one of the righteous.

That helps explain why antizionist discourse often demands impossible standards from Jews and Israel that are applied to no other people. If the goal were consistency, activists would be equally focused on problems with Gazan leadership (Hamas kleptocracy anyone? PA lack of democracy and incitement and incentivization of violence?). Not to mention, there are dozens of ethnic conflicts, occupations, and nationalist movements around the world with death tolls that are far higher. Turkey occupies and ethnically cleanses Christian from Cyprus... they're a NATO ally too. Hamas kills Palestinians with zero survival concerns at stake, just to maintain their political stranglehold on Gaza. But instead of trying to chart a path to genuinely improving a complex world with many problems, instead the Jewish state becomes the unique symbol of evil so people can play a modern game of "Cowboys and Indians" and pretend they're the "good guys". The more singular the villain, the more satisfying the moral performance.

This also explains why Jewish perspectives are frequently dismissed. A movement genuinely concerned with justice would want to understand how Jews experience the rhetoric directed at them. Moral narcissism works differently. The feelings and experiences of Jews become inconvenient because they interfere with the activist's preferred role as hero.

The result is a politics built around self-congratulation rather than outcomes. Chanting slogans, posting infographics, and publicly denouncing Zionists become ways of signaling virtue to one's peers. Whether the rhetoric does anything to improve the condition of actual Palestinians who arguably suffer more from their own leadership than from Israel (it is their leadership who actually bears the responsibility to attend to their safety security and economic welfare, not the neighboring community your leaders just savagely attacked). Not only is there no concern for the hard work of genuine progress toward peace, this rhetoric drowns out those efforts, diminishes trust, *plus* it fuels harassment, exclusion, or hostility toward Jews in the West, spreading violence into societies that have until now enjoyed relative peace and trust within their borders.

Ironically, these proud antizionist "moralists" are displaying the opposite of moral courage. Real moral courage requires questioning one's own assumptions, examining evidence that challenges one's worldview, and treating other people as human beings rather than symbols. Moral narcissism requires none of that. It only requires an audience.

I am curious whether others have noticed this dynamic. Does antizionism attract moral narcissism more than other movements, or do you think is this a broader phenomenon in modern activist culture?

Anti-Jewish violence is at an all-time high and the vast majority of lethal violence today is motivated by antizionism.

Therefore libraries should have books about antizionism as hate movement available for people to read, particularly when antizionism libel texts like "Israel: What Went Wrong" are on prominent display.

Here are my two favorites:

Antizionism and Antisemitism (Dynamics of Delegitimization) by Rosenfeld

Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight by Lyn Julius

It's the American way to beat bad speech with better speech. I'm planning to say something to my local libraries about this lack of representation and request that they please purchase copies and display them immediately. And I would like to see way more books written and publicized on this topic. What do others think?

The City of David shows Jewish residence in East Jerusalem since 1,000 BCE. East Jerusalem was known as the Jewish quarter. Our places of worship, our sacred burial grounds, our most treasured place honored in our sacred texts and in our liturgy was Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria... and now Jews living there are "settlers" because Jordan conquered it for 19 years and cast us out, using our burial markers to build roads and latrines?

The narcissistic abuse dynamic in libelling returning Jews as "settlers" is breath-taking.

One can debate how to best arrive at a reasonable situation in Judea and Samaria now, but to deny Jewish indigeneity there through using this "settler" term is an erasure of Jewish history.

I know people will say it's the same term in Hebrew... but the term in Hebrew has no direct translation. It also means "dwell" and it is literally in the Bible to describe a commandment to Jews to dwell in that land and cultivate it thousands of years ago. It relates to ancient Jewish kingdoms. It comes from the same root as "inheritance" (n-h-l).

It has nothing to do with "settler colonialism"... you might as well call Mayan ruins "ancient Mayan settlements".

It truly just makes no sense except if you understand it's a libel. This term is used to delegitimize Jews. If you believe that Jews didn't just spring up out of nowhere and actually have an origin, then describe Jews living in Judea/Samaria fairly -- just call them Jews living in Judea/Samaria. Or Jews living in Area C.

I like to keep it brief and simply point out the tactics to any healthy others who are watching.

They don't have many tactics. Mostly it is many varieties of libel. I point at them using the "^".

Like: "^ blood libel"

There's also, "denial", "riling the mob", "doubling down", "libel-vomit", "Jew-blaming", and simply hiding behind the idea that "everyone" agrees with them or they're in a "humanitarian movement".

Libel = a totalizing accusation that demonizes and dehumanizes Jews and marks us for violence. Typically libels are non-falsifiable... they simply get repeated and repeated and there is no allowable disproof of them.

And since the earliest times, these narratives have been repeated by intellectual classes and moral authorities. Today it's the UN.

AZs typically get mad and libel-vomit or eventually they give up. Regardless, everyone reading the exchange can see them more clearly. There's a cruelty to the movement, a joy in persecuting and verbally torturing Jews in the guise of righteousness. I find it empowering to go on the offensive and stop turning out my pockets for a change. People need to see that AZ is not a way to score free morality points. It's a hate movement. And it has no more to do with Zionism than antisemitism had to do with "semites". These words are just constructs, verbal fig-leafs so Jews can be more freely demonized and there's plausible deniability. The pretense collapse the moment you shine a light on it. It's actually quite envigorating after years of feeling fearful and shut down by these verbal attacks. If anyone tries it as well, I'd love to know your experience.