Anti-Zionists are at war with themselves.

Anti-Zionists don't argue Israeli policy anymore. Now they demand the exclusion of Israel (and Jews), revealing a movement that can no longer agree on whether it is practicing politics or persecution.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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

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Israeli President Isaac Herzog arrived in Australia this week under extraordinary security, greeted not as a visiting head of state but as a criminal suspect.

Protesters flooded city squares demanding his arrest for “genocide.” Police deployed in the thousands. Emergency powers were invoked. Streets were cordoned off as if a fugitive had landed, not a foreign president.

The stated reason for the protests is familiar by now: Israel. But the substance of what unfolded in Australia reveals something deeper and more troubling: Anti-Zionism is no longer operating as a political critique. It has become a logic of persecution — one that no longer distinguishes between policy and person, between power and identity, between a government and the people who come from it.

This matters because Isaac Herzog is not the caricature these protests require him to be. He is Israel’s president, a largely ceremonial role. He does not set military policy. He does not command the army. And before assuming the presidency, he was widely understood as a Left-of-center politician, precisely the kind of Israeli politician whose views once aligned with much of the Western progressive consensus: support for negotiations, concern for Palestinian welfare, belief in coexistence.

If these protests were truly about politics — about opposing Right-wing governance, specific military decisions, or concrete policy outcomes — Herzog would be an odd target. But he is not being protested despite these facts. He is being protested because they no longer matter.

That is the point.

What the crowds in Sydney and across much of today’s West were expressing was not opposition to a platform, a vote, or a doctrine. It was opposition to Israel as such, and to anyone who embodies its legitimacy simply by existing within or in association to it. Herzog’s function in this drama is symbolic: He is not a decision-maker to be argued with, he is a representative presence to be rejected.

This is where anti-Zionism begins to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

For decades, anti-Zionists have insisted that their cause is political, not antisemitic. “We oppose a state, not a people.” “Criticism of Israel is not hatred of Jews.” These distinctions were meant to reassure, to place the movement firmly within the bounds of liberal democratic discourse.

But persecution does not work that way. Persecution does not require ideological precision. It requires a target that can no longer be humanized, contextualized, or differentiated. And that is what we are now seeing.

When a ceremonial president, especially one with a dovish past, is accused of genocide simply by virtue of representing Israel, politics has ended. What remains is moral absolutism untethered from facts, roles, or reality.

The rhetoric gives the game away. “Arrest him.” “War criminal.” “Genocidaire.” These are not arguments; they are verdicts. They do not invite debate; they foreclose it. And crucially, they are applied indiscriminately, without regard to what the accused has actually done or believes.

This is not protest as persuasion. It is protest as proscription.

Anti-Zionism has crossed a threshold from arguing against policies to banning presence itself — from disagreement to disqualification. It is no longer enough to oppose specific actions; one must now be excluded for merely standing in symbolic proximity to Israel. The question is no longer “What do you believe?” but “Are you allowed to be here at all?”

This is why anti-Zionism is now at war with itself.

It still speaks the language of justice, human rights, and accountability, but it no longer practices any of them. Justice requires proportionality. Human rights require individual responsibility. Accountability requires evidence. When all Israelis, and increasingly all Jews connected to Israel, are treated as interchangeable agents of evil, those principles collapse.

The accusation of “genocide” plays a central role in this collapse. It is not being used here as a precise legal claim or a sober moral judgment. It is being deployed as a moral accelerant: a word designed to short-circuit thought and instantly transform political disagreement into criminality. Once that label is affixed, no further distinctions are necessary. Genocidaires do not get to speak. They do not get context. They do not get ceremonies. They get exclusion.

The protests in Australia did not emerge in a vacuum. They followed a terrorist massacre at a Hanukkah event in Sydney, carried out by a father and son motivated by Islamist ideology. In any sane moral framework, that attack would have centered the vulnerability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Instead, Herzog’s arrival was framed not as an act of solidarity or resilience, but as provocation.

This inversion is not accidental. It reflects a worldview in which Jewish presence itself has become suspect, where Jewish visibility is reinterpreted as aggression and Jewish safety is subordinated to the symbolic trial of Israel.

The logic does not stop at Israeli officials. If Herzog is criminal because he represents Israel, then anyone who defends Israel’s existence becomes suspect. If defending Israel is complicity, then refusing to denounce Israel becomes guilt. And once neutrality itself is redefined as moral failure, Jewish identity becomes permanently on trial.

This pattern is not new. Jews have often been told that they may belong — so long as they do not insist on collective self-definition. They may live among us, but not as a people. They may participate, but only as exceptions. Zionism disrupted that arrangement by asserting that Jews are not merely a religious abstraction or a tolerated minority, but a nation entitled to continuity, security, and self-rule. The fury directed at that assertion has never been purely political.

Anti-Zionists insist they are fighting power. In reality, they are fighting coherence.

They claim to oppose collective punishment, while practicing it rhetorically. They claim to defend minorities, while mobilizing crowds to intimidate one. They claim to reject essentialism, while treating nationality and identity as moral crimes. And they claim to champion peace, while erasing any distinction between those who wield violence and those who merely exist on the wrong side of their moral map.

At some point, the question must be asked: If even Left-leaning, ceremonial representatives of Israel are beyond the pale — if no Israeli voice is acceptable, no context sufficient, no role innocent — then what exactly is being opposed?

The answer reveals the final contradiction, and the deepest fracture.

There is now an internal fight underway within many Left-wing parties. On one side are those who still want anti-Zionism to function as a political position — however harsh, however misguided, but still anchored to policy, debate, and moral consistency. On the other side are those who are transforming anti-Zionism into a new, fashionable antisemitism: aestheticized, moralized, and detached from any obligation to truth or restraint.

The first group still believes in arguments. The second believes in erasure. The first insists it is possible to oppose Israeli policies while preserving liberal norms. The second has concluded implicitly, and increasingly explicitly, that Jewish collective presence is itself intolerable. That no Israeli may be untainted. That no Jewish connection to Israel may be innocent. That exclusion is not a tragic necessity, but a moral good.

This is why the movement feels increasingly unhinged even to some of its former allies. It is no longer clear what behavior would ever satisfy it, what concession would ever be enough, or what form of Jewish existence would be permitted. The goalposts move because the destination is not reform, but disappearance. A movement that cannot tolerate even the most anodyne representative of a people is no longer seeking justice. It is enforcing exclusion.

Anti-Zionism, in its current form, cannot sustain its own justifications. It demands universal moral standards while exempting itself from them. It invokes liberation while practicing erasure. And it insists on political critique while operating through collective condemnation.

That is what it means to be at war with yourself.

And until that contradiction is confronted, the movement will continue to radicalize — not toward justice or peace, but toward a politics in which identity replaces argument, accusation replaces analysis, and persecution is dressed up as principle.

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