'Anti-Zionism' is not what it says it is.

What presents itself as ethical opposition to a state is, in practice, the rejection of Jewish existence as a people.

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is a persistent effort to present “anti-Zionism” as nothing more than “criticism of Israel.” It allows its adherents to pretend they oppose a state rather than a people, and thus to see themselves as acting ethically.

But this is a sleight of hand. “Anti-Zionism” is no more criticism of Israel than antisemitism is criticism of Jews. It does not argue about actions or policy; it rejects existence.

For much of the past two years, I have tried, with limited success, to argue that “anti-Zionism” is antisemitism; that familiar hatreds and libels have simply been transferred from Jews to the Jewish state. But that framing falls into a trap. It treats antisemitism as self-evidently evil while allowing “anti-Zionism” to masquerade as something principled. In reality, “anti-Zionism” poses a far greater threat to Jews today than classical antisemitism ever could.

It was only recently that I came to see “anti-Zionism” clearly for what it is: a hate movement that must be understood on its own terms, not as a diluted or softened alternative to antisemitism, but as a modern ideology drawing directly on Nazi and Soviet propaganda traditions.

It is the only global movement organised against the existence of a state. From that premise flows a coherent system of hostility, with its own vocabulary, slurs, and libels. This is why its language speaks of the “Zionist entity,” why dismantling Israel replaces reform as the goal, and why Israel’s very existence is treated as uniquely evil among nations.

Where classical antisemitism cast Jews as alien and racially non-white, parasitic, or subversive, “anti-Zionism” inverts the frame by casting the Jewish state as hyper-white, colonial, genocidal, and apartheid by design, the ultimate oppressor in a moral universe obsessed with power hierarchies.

What the two share is the same moral structure: condemnation not for actions, but for existence, rendered respectable through the moral language of the age. The difference lies in the mechanism. Where earlier hatreds named the people directly, “anti-Zionism” redirects the logic onto Jewish peoplehood. It claims to oppose sovereignty rather than existence. But when only one people on earth is told its right to collective nationhood is inherently immoral, sovereignty becomes the proxy through which existence is denied, and the Jewish state is marked not for reform, but for eradication.

What gives “anti-Zionism” its peculiar power is that it does not merely permit hostility; it rewards it. In a moral culture steeped in guilt, Israel becomes a convenient proxy onto which Western sins can be outsourced. Demanding the destruction of another state is easier than reckoning with one’s own failures. Casting Israel as the ultimate oppressor offers instant moral atonement without self-implication.

This is why I have spent hours explaining why these particular claims — genocide, apartheid, colonialism — are demonstrably false. They are not matters of nuance, but straightforward errors, asserted with a remarkable confidence completely out of step with their grounding in reality, and far more applicable to dozens of other states that provoke no comparable moral fixation.

Each claim is more implausible than the last. Each time, I expect the spell to break. It never does. Facts do not correct the story; they bounce off it, while the narrative grows ever larger and more resistant to reality, as if certain words now confer automatic immunity. At that point, repetition and consensus is mistaken for evidence, as if the mob were a reliable measure of truth.

To accuse a people repeatedly expelled and ethnically cleansed from the Middle East over two millennia of now being the region’s ethnic cleansers is a profound historical inversion. To accuse Israel of genocide, despite both its capacity to do so and its demonstrable refusal, collapses on contact with reality. To call Jews “colonisers” in their ancestral homeland is parody worthy of a “Monty Python” sketch. And to label Israel an apartheid or ethnostate, when it has a larger Arab minority with equal rights than any European country making the charge, requires a complete suspension of reason.

And yet these accusations persist with startling tenacity.

This is because the accusation is not the consequence of hostility; it is the precondition for it. Israel is not targeted because it commits “genocide”; it is accused of genocide so that it can be targeted. The charge has been levelled against Israel since its inception, even as the Palestinian population has grown faster than almost any in the region.

Once words like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism” are recognised not as analytical terms but as rhetorical weapons, the futility becomes clear. No amount of evidence or common sense can dislodge a libel, because it was not evidence or reason that produced it. Libels are not meant to be disproved; their power lies precisely in their immunity to evidence.

“Anti-Zionism” does not seek persuasion, nor does it offer it. It seeks accusation — the classic posture of the bully. Once absorbed, this logic reorganises perception itself: Every action becomes confirmation, and every counterexample is dismissed as “Hasbara” (Israeli public diplomacy) or paid propaganda. The purpose is singular: to cast the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely evil, and ultimately undeserving of existence.

At this point, a question suggests itself: Where have we seen this before?

The Nazis did not focus on specific Jewish actions or policies in any reality-based sense. They constructed Jews as an existential threat, holding them collectively responsible for imagined crimes against civilisation itself. Libels were transformed into moral certainties, and violence was justified not as punishment for wrongdoing, but as a necessary defence against Jewish existence. “Anti-Zionism” operates by the same moral logic. Jews are condemned not for what they do, but for what they are, now refracted through the existence of a Jewish state.

In theory, this hostility is framed as a response to Israel’s actions. In practice, it is immune to them. No ceasefire, no concession, no quantity of aid, and no change in policy alters the verdict. The target is not criticised but condemned, whatever the protestations to the contrary. The evil is located not in conduct, but in existence, manufactured and sustained through libels, propaganda, and the steady normalisation of collective guilt.

This is where many Western liberals lose sight of cause and effect altogether. They insist, often sincerely, that they oppose antisemitism while continuing to circulate the core libels of “anti-Zionism.” Attacks on Jews are then experienced as tragic aberrations, mysteriously disconnected from the language they themselves have normalised. But when Israel is framed as uniquely criminal, genocidal, and illegitimate, Jews are rendered legitimate targets in the real world.

When Palestinian activists plot bombings of civilian spaces, or when a shooter guns down individuals outside an Israeli embassy while shouting “Free Palestine!” this is not a slippage into something else. It is “anti-Zionism,” carried to its logical conclusion.

This moral blind spot reveals a familiar double standard. The same people who would rightly condemn a skinhead torching a synagogue will often excuse, minimise, or even justify identical acts when carried out under the banner of “anti-Zionism.” The difference is not the target, but the story told about it. Hatred wrapped in a swastika is recognised for what it is. Hatred wrapped in the language of “anti-Zionism” is granted moral cover.

The vocabulary and moral framing of contemporary “anti-Zionism” increasingly overlap with that of the far right. Terms like “Zio,” now common in activist spaces, were popularised decades ago by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan figures. This is not coincidence but lineage. Nazi symbology and Mein Kampf (Hitler’s autobiographical and political manifesto) circulate openly in Palestinian societies and appear regularly at anti-Israel rallies, reflecting ideological roots that trace back to Nazi propaganda. Whether hatred is wrapped in an armband or a keffiyeh, its function remains the same.

This is not a misunderstanding to be corrected, but a permission structure already in place; one that marks its targets as acceptable objects of ostracisation, expulsion, and eventually violence.

Jews are reclassified as “Zionists,” stripped of individuality and transformed into moral contaminants. Libels are circulated, exclusion is normalised, Jews are pushed out of public life, and violence against them is rendered intelligible. At every stage, the insistence is the same, delivered with studied sincerity: the target is not Jews at all, but a state. What follows is then presented as nothing more than “criticism of Israel.”

In this framework, the word “Zionist” no longer operates according to its actual meaning, Jewish self-determination, a principle routinely granted to every other people. Instead, it functions as a mark of ethical stigma. It is applied loosely, often retrospectively, to license exclusions that would otherwise be indefensible. Once assigned, it strips its bearer of ordinary moral consideration.

This is why events like the attack at Bondi Beach in Australia are so easily folded into the libels against Israel. When Jews are already cast as embodiments of a uniquely criminal state, violence against them ceases to feel aberrant. It becomes explicable, even justified. That this logic is applied uniquely to Jews, and to no other people on earth, rarely registers with those who rely on it.

This same logic is visible in how any isolated Israeli wrongdoing is treated as existential proof. A single case involving a rogue Israeli soldier, prosecuted by Israel itself, is routinely cited as evidence that Israel is a terrorist state that must be destroyed. No distinction is made between individual crime and state policy. Wrongdoing is treated not as failure, but as original sin and proof of collective guilt.

By contrast, states and movements that openly embrace the killing of civilians as a matter of policy inspire no comparable campaign to erase their existence. Iran carries out public hangings in town squares, including for political dissent and homosexuality. China runs mass detention camps, enforces collective punishment, and has extinguished entire cultures under state direction, without facing a comparable global movement demanding its abolition.

Hamas has committed atrocities in full view of the world, filmed them, celebrated them, and vowed to repeat them, explicitly targeting civilians as strategy. And yet it is still routinely rewarded with calls for recognition, legitimacy, and statehood by world leaders.

Recently, Palestinian terrorists breached the very checkpoints “anti-Zionists” cite as evidence of “apartheid,” stabbing a 19-year-old and killing a 68-year-old in a car-ramming attack. For Israel, this kind of violence is a recurring reality, and it long predates both checkpoints and occupation. Yet the attackers are publicly celebrated and financially rewarded through “pay-for-slay” schemes, while large parts of the international community continue to insist their cause is more deserving of statehood than Israel itself, recasting deliberate civilian murder as an understandable response to “occupation.”

Other states’ histories are treated as complex, their violence contextualised, their crimes acknowledged as tragic but survivable. Israel alone is denied this category. Its failures are not understood as errors within history, but as evidence that history itself went wrong when the state was created. Where others are judged by what they do, Israel is judged by the fact that it exists.

This asymmetry is not accidental. It is the product of a long ideological campaign rooted in Soviet strategy and Nazi propaganda, origins that remain largely unfamiliar to many of its most fervent advocates.

Modern “anti-Zionism” was systematised by the Soviet Union as part of its Cold War strategy. Slogans like “Zionism is racism” and “Zionism is Nazism” were not analytical claims but moral weapons, designed to place the Jewish state beyond legitimacy and align Arab nationalism with Soviet power. These formulations migrated into international institutions, activist movements, and Western academia, where they remain largely unquestioned.

When they arrived in the West, they found fertile ground. “Anti-Zionism” offered universities, NGOs, and media institutions a ready-made moral script that required little historical literacy and rewarded ideological conformity. Complex conflicts could be flattened into childlike morality plays of good and evil. Once embedded institutionally, the libels no longer needed to be argued; they merely needed to be repeated.

That history is rarely acknowledged, perhaps because it sits uneasily with the movement’s self-image as progressive and enlightened. Yet ignorance of an ideology’s origins does not absolve responsibility for its effects.

Far from being a recent phenomenon, “anti-Zionism” has been lethal for over eighty years. It began with the expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from their ancient homes across the Middle East and North Africa, carried out as collective punishment for the creation of Israel. This was followed by pogroms and massacres across the region, discrimination, purges, and executions in the Soviet Union, and an ongoing cycle of violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, driven by eliminationism, rejectionism, and the scapegoating of the Jewish state.

In Poland in 1968, “anti-Zionism” became the language through which Jews were driven from public life. In Munich in 1972, Israeli athletes were murdered in the name of the Palestinian cause, a movement that emerged in the 1960s explicitly in opposition to Zionism, with the massacre applauded as “resistance.” In Argentina in 1994, Jews were killed at a community centre for crimes attributed not to them, but to Israel. The same moral transfer appears again and again: on October 7th, in Washington, in Manchester, in Bondi.

What links these events is not geography, ethnicity, or proximity, but ideology. Violence becomes thinkable once Jews are treated not as individuals, but as embodiments of a uniquely criminal state.

“Anti-Zionism” is not a harmless political posture. It is a hate movement whose consequences are written in blood. And in the end, “anti-Zionism” has not only harmed Jews. It has hoarded moral attention, eclipsing real genocides, wars, and colonial projects beneath a fixation on crimes Israel is falsely accused of committing. In doing so, it has offered entire societies a substitute for self-examination.

Israel is not incidental to this dynamic. It functions as the test case — the small, defiant anomaly against which a broader hostility is rehearsed. In the language of that hostility, Israel is cast as the “Little Satan,” America as the “Great Satan,” and Jewish sovereignty as the first intolerable offence.

“Anti-Zionism” is the culturally acceptable language through which this hostility enters Western institutions. An ideology that cannot tolerate the existence of a small, imperfect state will not ultimately tolerate pluralism, complexity, or restraint anywhere else.

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