They don't hate Israel. They hate losing.

"Anti-Zionists" aren't really protesting Israel. They’re protesting being part of a losing cause — and protesting makes them feel like noble losers.

photo: Sophie Popplewell/Unsplash

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The people who have been flooding Western streets under Palestinian flags insist they’re protesting Israel.

But watch closely, and you’ll see something else entirely.

They’re not rebelling against Israeli policies, nor are they striving for Palestinian statehood. What they are truly protesting is their own defeat: the collapse of a fantasy that once made them feel righteous and powerful.

The “anti-Zionist” movement today is less a campaign for justice than a therapy session for the humiliated. Its protests are rituals of denial, where the defeated dress their loss in moral costume and call it virtue. They’re not protesting Israel; they’re protesting the unbearable feeling of belonging to a losing cause — and protesting makes them feel like noble losers.

This isn’t merely a political observation but a psychological one. Much of the Arab and broader Muslim world operates within an ancient framework of honor and shame, a worldview that prizes public dignity and perceives humiliation as a collective wound. Honor (sharaf) is not personal but social, a shared currency that defines a people’s standing in the eyes of others. Shame (‘ayb) is not guilt for wrongdoing but disgrace for weakness, dependency, or defeat. In such a culture, to lose is to be dishonored, and to be dishonored is to be diminished in the very order of the universe.

When the modern State of Israel won its independence in 1948, this wasn’t just a geopolitical event; it was a spiritual earthquake. A small, scattered, often despised minority that had lived as second-class subjects under Christian and Muslim rule for centuries suddenly stood triumphant on its ancestral soil.

For the first time in more than two millennia, Jews were not petitioners, refugees, or subjects. They were sovereign. They ruled themselves, defended themselves, and, most scandalously, defeated those who had long regarded them as inferior. For neighboring Arab nations (and for many within Islamic civilization) this reversal was not merely defeat. It was cosmic humiliation.

In classical Islamic thought, the world was divided into Dar al-Islam (the realm of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the realm of war). Within that framework, Jews and Christians could live in Muslim lands as dhimmis — second-class citizens who were tolerated but subordinate. They could pray, trade, and exist, but only under the acknowledgment of Muslim supremacy.

Jewish sovereignty, then, was a theological impossibility. The return of the Jews to power was not supposed to happen — and yet it did. Israel’s victories in 1948, 1967, and 1973 overturned a thousand years of assumed hierarchy.

An essential tenet of Islamism adds that any land once ruled by Muslims must remain forever Islamic; once incorporated into Dar al-Islam, it cannot legitimately pass into non-Muslim hands.

The re-emergence of Jewish sovereignty in the very heart of what had been Islamic territory therefore violated not only political pride but religious doctrine. The return of the Jews to power was a theological impossibility, and yet it happened.

For many Muslims, the mere existence of a thriving, self-governing Jewish state at the center of the Middle East is not just a political affront; it is a metaphysical insult. Admitting that Jews have triumphed is to admit that the cosmic order has shifted — that perhaps divine favor has moved elsewhere.

That admission is intolerable. So, rather than accept defeat, the narrative was inverted. Israel’s survival was no longer seen as Jewish resilience or historical justice, but as theft, colonialism, and oppression. The psychological pain of losing to the Jews was reinterpreted as moral superiority over them.

Thus was born the doctrine of “anti-Zionism” — not as a coherent political program, but as a coping mechanism. It allowed the defeated to believe they were, in fact, the righteous. If Israel could not be destroyed physically, it could at least be condemned morally. The battlefield was replaced by the boycott, the warfront by the protest march, and the dream of conquest by the comfort of perpetual outrage.

Over the decades, Arab leaders found this narrative extremely useful. Rather than confront the failures of their own societies — the corruption, stagnation, and despotism that left millions impoverished — they redirected public anger toward Israel. “Palestine” became a vessel for all that had gone wrong in the Arab world. The “Palestinian” cause became not just a political struggle but a repository for collective shame.

To denounce Israel was to absolve oneself. The flags, the chants, the slogans all became ways to externalize humiliation and turn it into something noble. The Arab world could lose wars, squander wealth, and oppress its own people, yet still see itself as morally superior, because it “resisted” Israel.

But this wasn’t just an Arab story anymore. Over time, the emotional grammar of honor and shame migrated into Western discourse — though dressed in different vocabulary. In the post-Christian West, guilt has replaced shame as the dominant moral currency. Westerners do not fear dishonor; they fear being complicit. They seek redemption not through victory but through confession.

Yet “anti-Zionism” gave them a way to borrow the moral intensity of the old honor culture. By aligning with “Palestine,” Western leftists could feel both pure and brave. They could perform solidarity without risk, absolve themselves of colonial guilt, and channel moral anxiety into spectacle. They could rage without reforming themselves.

This is why “anti-Zionism” has become the universal language of moral theater. It merges the honor-shame dynamic of the Muslim world with the guilt-redemption obsession of the West. Together they produce a powerful psychological cocktail: shame transformed into moral purity, guilt transmuted into righteousness.

For both the Middle Eastern zealot and the Western protester, Israel plays the same symbolic role — the mirror that reflects back everything they cannot face in themselves. Israel’s existence exposes the failure of their ideologies, the hollowness of their civilizations, and the bankruptcy of their moral pretensions.

This explains the perplexing paradox has taken shape across the West. Progressive activists — champions of feminism, LGBTQ rights, and free expression — have embraced a cause that rejects all three. Palestinian rulers in both Gaza and the West Bank criminalize homosexuality, restrict women’s rights, and crush dissent, yet Western radicals fly their flag at pride parades and campus rallies.

How did this inversion occur?

The answer lies in a subtle exchange of narratives. Arab and Muslim activists in the West have learned to speak the language of post-colonial grievance, presenting themselves not as heirs to old civilizations but as “underserved minorities” in need of protection. This rhetoric taps into the Far-Left’s moral reflex: to side automatically with whoever seems powerless.

Once that emotional frame is set, facts about ideology, governance, or repression no longer matter. “Palestine” becomes a symbol, not a society — a mirror for Western guilt, not a reality to be examined. The alliance is therefore less ideological than psychological: The modern Far-Left finds in the Palestinian story a stage on which to reenact its own myths of oppression and redemption, even when those myths contradict everything it claims to believe.

And so they protest. They march not toward change but toward catharsis. Each rally, each chant, each boycott is a small act of psychic repair, an attempt to turn the shame of failure into the pride of rebellion. The West’s activists, with their megaphones and hashtags, reenact the Arab world’s humiliation ritual, cloaked in the language of liberation. The Arab world, in turn, cheers them on, finding in their rage a reassuring echo of its own. Together, they form a community of the defeated: a global movement of people who have mistaken moral noise for moral courage.

The irony, of course, is that Israel continues to continue. It is a society of builders surrounded by societies of blamers. It has turned deserts into research parks, refugees into inventors, and trauma into art. Its people, far from being demoralized by hate, draw strength from survival. Every new Israeli innovation, peace accord, or cultural export is a reminder of what the “anti-Zionists” most fear: that history has chosen a different victor than the one they imagined.

For a group of people addicted to narratives of victimhood, Israel’s unapologetic success is intolerable. It breaks the script. It forces the realization that perhaps virtue is not found in weakness after all.

This is why the protests grow louder as their substance grows thinner. When reality no longer cooperates, shouting becomes the last refuge. The “anti-Zionist” needs the protest not because it accomplishes anything, but because it keeps despair at bay. It transforms helplessness into identity. It allows them to keep losing while feeling noble about it.

They are addicted to the drama of defeat — a performance that spares them from introspection. If the Arab world must forever resist, the Western world must forever empathize. Both need Israel to play its role: the eternal villain against whom their moral stories make sense.

But Israel refuses to play that role. The Jewish People have reentered history as agents, not subjects. They are no longer waiting for others to grant them safety, dignity, or permission to exist. For the first time in 2,000 years, we have reclaimed the right to define ourselves. That act of self-definition, Jewish sovereignty, is what “anti-Zionism” cannot forgive. It violates the deepest psychological assumptions of both Islamic supremacy and Western self-loathing. It asserts that Jews are neither oppressors nor oppressed, but something far more disruptive: free.

In that sense, the war on Zionism is not really about territory or policy; it is about the meaning of history itself. Israel represents the possibility that weakness can become strength, that the despised can endure, and that moral clarity can coexist with power. It is a living rebuttal to the idea that justice requires victimhood or that goodness demands submission. Much of the world has grown comfortable dividing humanity into victims and villains, and Israel refuses to fit neatly into either category. That is why so many cannot stand it, because it forces a reckoning with the moral laziness of their worldview.

The “anti-Zionist” protests, then, are less political than psychological. They are the howl of those who cannot accept that the Jews are no longer the world’s cautionary tale, but its counterexample. Their chants of “liberation” mask a deeper wish: to undo the reversal of history that Israel embodies. To restore the world to its old moral order, where Jews were dependent and Muslims supreme, where the West could pity them and the East could patronize them. The fury on display is not about Israeli power, but about Jewish equality. It is not about “Palestine,” but about pride.

So, no, the “anti-Zionists” aren’t protesting Israel. They’re protesting their own irrelevance. They are raging against a future that has already arrived, one in which Jewish sovereignty is normal, permanent, and thriving. Their protests are the noise of a world order dying, a last attempt to sanctify failure by calling it resistance. They march not for justice, but for the lost illusion of supremacy. They shout not because they are strong, but because they cannot bear silence; for in silence, they might hear the truth, that Israel is not their shame, but their mirror.

And that mirror shows something they can’t accept: that history has moved on, and they have not.

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