What Anti-Zionism Really Is

By Adam Louis-Klein

Monday, October 06, 2025

 

After three months in a remote Amazonian village with no internet or phone signal, I returned to a small Colombian town on October 9, 2023—still in the rainforest, but now with internet—and checked social media for the first time. The jungle was still in my ears—squawking macaws, torrential rain, the low hum of a generator—when my screen filled with images from another world entirely: young people sprinting through dust and gunfire at the Nova music festival in Israel.

 

I had crossed between worlds, only to find that the world I returned to was no longer the same.

 

The deeper shock came in the hours that followed, as I scrolled through the reactions of friends and colleagues. Denial, justification, and open hostility toward anyone who expressed care for Israelis. I typed a simple phrase—Am Yisrael Chai, “the people of Israel live”—and learned that, in my circles of left-wing academia, that too was considered an act of aggression.

 

Almost immediately, I saw that a colleague had commented with a photo of people burning an Israeli flag. A former friend declared that my words revealed me as nothing but a “filthy Zionist.” Longtime intellectual collaborators informed me it was unacceptable to work with me given my support for the Jewish people. For them, even calling Jews a “people” was offensive and “right-wing.”

 

In the days following October 7, I was already experiencing what Marion Kaplan, in her study of Jewish life under Nazi Germany, terms “social death”—complete ostracization and the cutting of one’s previous social bonds. I was beginning to understand that to be a Jewish intellectual—to be a person who speaks in a Jewish voice, and who sees his fate as bound up in the collective fate of the Jewish people—was simply not something the academy could accept.

 

But I wasn’t about to submit. I knew that Jewishness was as legitimate a site as any identity from which to think, reason, and argue.

 

That was two long years ago. I have learned much in refusing to submit. Not just about the marginalization of Jews in the universities of the West, but about the enduring value of distinct peoples and voices—even in the face of a powerful ideological movement that uses the language of pluralism to conceal its demand for total conformity.

 

The Anti-Zionist Worldview

 

I had always been a good student. At my prep school, we read Antigone in Greek and the Aeneid in Latin. At Yale, I worked my way through the Western canon, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, in the Directed Studies program.

 

I first became an anthropologist because I was searching for something beyond the Western philosophical tradition I had studied. I wanted to understand worlds that were not my own. What I didn’t quite understand was that the twenty-first-century academy would demand that I disavow my own.

 

By the time I began my PhD, I was fully immersed in the critical, anti-colonial thought that now dominates the academy—an orientation bent on interrogating and dismantling the West. But living alongside the Desana, an indigenous group in Brazil and Colombia, ultimately brought me back—back to an embrace of my own Judaism and back to my Western inheritance as one tradition among others. Instead of thinking against the West, I came to see the value of thinking across civilizations, between living peoples and the worlds they continue to sustain.

 

The Desana of the Vaupés region, in today’s Brazil and Colombia, are often described as marginal to the global economy. But in their own eyes, they stand at the center of the universe—a chosen people with a unique story. They call themselves the Ümücori Masa, the universe-people, descended from the universe-person, or God.

 

For them, chosenness simply means peoplehood. In the early twentieth century, Catholic missionaries destroyed their traditional longhouses and forced them into mission towns. The surrounding Spanish-speaking society showed little interest in their memory or survival. In response, the Desana have fought to preserve their sacred names and endure as a people.

 

Today, we work together to translate old texts about the Desana into their own language—restoring the name of their God, re-centering their sacred lineages, and helping turn the historical record into a living part of their future.

 

Their struggle to remain themselves in the face of erasure echoed 3,000 years of Jewish history and what I found on my return: a so-called liberal world where Jewish distinctiveness is no longer tolerated, where Jewish continuity is recoded as a threat, where Jewish power is seen as illegitimate.

 

Nowhere is that worldview more powerful than in the academy. There, educated elites are being taught that it is righteous to hate Jews.

 

They call that world view anti-Zionism.

 

While anti-Zionism introduces itself as a “political opinion,” I came to see that it was something else entirely. Anti-Zionism, like antisemitism, is an entire cosmology. In the same way in which antisemitism once cast the Jew as the world’s metaphysical enemy, anti-Zionism now casts Israel and its supporters in the same role.

 

I began to study anti-Zionism the way I might study any culture’s system of meaning: its myths, rituals, and taboos. It functioned as a symbolic system, its force drawn from recurring metaphors—genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid—ritually deployed not to clarify but to accuse, forming a closed circuit of moral judgment, reproduced across academia, media, and international organizations.

 

A major mistake would be to think that anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism as an actually existing political ideology. Instead, it constructs a fantasy “Zionism” as a cosmic symbol of global injustice itself, one in which every possible crime—including U.S. police violence, trans exclusion, 9/11, even the climate crisis—converges in the image of Israel’s evil.

 

The central operation of anti-Zionism is libel. Anti-Zionists bypass the charge of antisemitism by redirecting their defamation at Israel and “Zionists” rather than Jews. By repeating accusations without serious demonstration or credible sourcing, they produce the appearance of an incontestable reality: a displaced evil attributed to “Israel.”

 

Anti-Zionists repeatedly claim that they are simply criticizing Israel. What makes the difference between critique and libel is not what is said, but how it is proffered, whether it belongs in the space of reason—answerable to refutation—or travels merely through repetition.

 

People who have been targeted by anti-Zionism know the difference. They are not reacting to individual opinions but to an organized movement that marks Jews as suspect through their association with a libeled Israel. The common deflection—that Jews “assume” criticism of Israel is antisemitic because they believe in some “inherent link” between Israel and all Jews—misses the point entirely.

 

In truth, it is a projection by those uncomfortable with being called antisemitic, who may not understand how anti-Zionism actually works—as a closed system of accusation, designed to force Jews to disavow their identities.

 

What makes anti-Zionism so seductive in academia is the way it cloaks itself in the moral language of human rights. Words like decolonization, anti-racism, and solidarity circulate as moral currencies, exchanged for prestige and authority in the academy. Yet behind this pose of inclusion, anti-Zionism works as an exclusionary ritual.

 

For example, when I proposed hosting a single academic talk at my university, McGill, on the antisemitic genealogies of anti-Zionism, particularly on the Soviet roots of so much of today’s anti-Israel sloganeering—amid at least 10 events in my department on the so-called Gaza genocide—my request was denied without explanation.

 

Another colleague warned that the journal I worked on would become “untenable” if it published anything that spoke positively about Jews. The perspective rooted in Jewish peoplehood was simply not to be part of the conversation.

 

The Forgotten History

 

To understand how the anti-Zionist worldview took hold, we have to look at the history it so carefully avoids. For a movement so obsessed with historical injustice, it remains almost entirely ignorant of its own origins.

 

But its genealogy is not mysterious, if you care to look.

 

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with the Nazis, met with Hitler, and broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world. Husseini worked closely with the Muslim Brotherhood, one of whose offshoots eventually became Hamas.

 

Following Israel’s victory over the Arab League in the Six-Day War of 1967, the Soviet Union took up the cause. Their strategy was clear: After the Soviet proxies lost on the physical battlefield, they turned to ideological and information warfare.

 

As Izabella Tabarovsky and others have documented, Soviet “Zionology” turned classical antisemitism into a global discourse of liberation. Zionism was no longer a Jewish national movement of Jewish liberation, but rather, a world conspiracy of “U.S-Israeli stooges” to undermine socialism and Third World revolution. Zionism was cast as a form of “Jewish imperialism”—a term with Nazi origins—and Israel as the world’s moral pariah.

 

Inside the Soviet Union, the consequences were stark. Jews were barred from emigrating to Israel, Hebrew was outlawed, and Jewish cultural associations were shuttered. Those who persisted were arrested and tried as “spies” or “traitors” to socialism. To live openly as a Jew, to insist on belonging to the Jewish people, was recast as political criminality—a climate that echoes in today’s elite institutions. These Jews became known as refuseniks: refused visas to Israel, but also refusing to submit to an anti-Zionist regime determined to crush their Jewish spirit.

 

Born out of the alliance between Nazism and Islamism, the rhetoric that was adopted by the Soviets ultimately found a global audience through the UN and its web of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In 2001, at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, these ideas went mainstream—thanks to a decades-long campaign by Arab nationalist regimes, Soviet propagandists, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an umbrella group for the Muslim-majority states within the United Nations. The NGO forum revived the Soviet slogan “Zionism is racism,” circulated leaflets comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, and helped cement the “apartheid” libel in progressive discourse.

 

This is how antisemitism got repackaged in the moral idiom of human rights. The tropes migrated across different aesthetics and discourses—Nazi, Islamist, Soviet, and now the postcolonial left—each time repositioning “Zionism” as the axis of global evil. What started as Nazism became human rights, while Zionists—the modern name of Jews—were recast as “the new Nazis.”

 

The Genocide Libel

 

Nowhere is the logic of anti-Zionist accusation more stark than in the charge that Israel is committing genocide. This claim also dates back to Soviet propaganda in the 1970s—and within days of October 7, it was being triumphantly revived by activist professors across the West. Having reframed Jewish peoplehood as inherently oppressive, anti-Zionism seeks to criminalize it altogether—by redefining Israel’s very being as genocide: the “crime of crimes.”

 

This maneuver rests not just on propaganda, but on explicit efforts to rewrite international law. A small circle of academics has worked nonstop over the past two years to erase the distinction between war and genocide. Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research—which in 2024 devoted an entire issue to accusing Israel—has argued for abandoning genocide’s core requirement of intent to destroy a people. In its place, he proposes that all “settler-colonial” states are guilty by definition. Within this logic, Israel does not need to commit extermination to be genocidal; it is guilty simply for being.

 

While millions today are told that a “majority of genocide experts” believe Israel is committing genocide, few realize that this supposed consensus rests on a very small circle of academics whose self-avowed project is to redefine and even abolish the concept of genocide itself.

 

Meanwhile, another group of scholars, including leading experts on antisemitism, have rejected the genocide libel outright. Yet their voices receive virtually no coverage in the mainstream press, which prefers the spectacle of accusation to the discipline of debate—excluding Jews from the conversation unless they serve as tokens to legitimize anti-Zionism.

 

Legal scholar Avraham Russell Shalev, for example, has argued that October 7 itself meets the legal threshold for genocide, given Hamas’s clear intent to annihilate Israeli Jews. He also notes that genocidal actors have often made reverse accusations—a pattern seen with the Nazis, the Serbs, and the Hutus.

 

Anti-Zionism is not a spontaneous reaction to Israeli policy. It is a symbolic ideology with a specific history. Its moral authority depends not on truth, but on inversion—of victims and aggressors, of genocide and self-defense. It thrives not through argument, but through erasure. This is its deepest function: to delegitimize the Jewish claim to peoplehood by refashioning an old hatred in the language of justice.

 

What Indigenous Really Means

 

To truly understand anti-Zionism, we must examine what it seeks to erase: the indigenous connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

 

Anti-Zionism construes Jews as “colonizers”: an alien, outsider presence in the Middle East. The colonizer libel not only erases Jewish belonging, but enlists Jews as scapegoats for everything modern Western culture now seeks to disavow: racism, imperial violence, settler domination.

 

In the months following October 7—while still engaged in my work with the Desana people in the Amazon—I set out to peel back the ideological layers wrapped around this fashionable term and recover what indigeneity really means.

 

At bottom, indigeneity is simply a way of being a people, one in which land and lineage are braided together at the root of identity itself. For the Desana, peoplehood is inseparable from the Vaupés River and the sacred sites along its banks. Their ancestors are said to have arrived upriver in a snake-shaped canoe, guided by primordial beings, who established the clan houses from which souls are born and to which they return.

 

In today’s academy, however, indigeneity has been reduced to a claim of victimhood at the hands of European colonialism. It is fundamentally a reactive identity—defined only in opposition to “white settler” power. This narrowing of meaning flattens the richness of civilizational difference. By this logic, Jews—now cast as symbols of whiteness, empire, and Western dominance—are excluded in advance.

 

Such a framework cannot account for histories of conquest and displacement carried out by non-Europeans. The Arab conquests of the seventh century reshaped the Middle East and North Africa in ways that perfectly fit the “settler-colonial” model now applied to Israel. As Egyptian Jewish historian Bat Ye’or has shown, these conquests suppressed local languages, marginalized non-Muslim peoples, and absorbed indigenous populations into an imperial order—not unlike the Catholic missions in the Amazon.

 

Yet none of this fits the fashionable narrative. So it is ignored.

 

Anti-Zionism erases the Jewish story by casting Jews as foreign oppressors. Yet that story is one of exile and return: from Ur to Canaan, from Egypt back to the land of Israel, and after centuries of dispersion, return again. Indigeneity, in this fuller sense, is not a reactive label for the colonized but a structure of peoplehood—a way of inhabiting place, memory, and time.

 

The Desana, too, tell of a great migration—from the mouth of the Amazon upriver to the Vaupés, where the world took form. For the Desana, to belong is to descend from a journey and to return to its source. What the Desana are to the Vaupés, the Jews are to the land of Israel: a people at the center.

 

The Space of Reason

 

I had gone to the Amazon to learn how a people could live at the center of their own world—defined not by others, but by their own destiny. I came back to the erasure of my own.

 

In all of the spaces I had once thought of as home—universities, cultural institutions, humanitarian NGOs—an ideology that demands the erasure of me and my people has taken hold.

 

Anti-Zionism’s spread through the institutions of our liberal democracy is a test case for whether equality and justice can survive once they’ve been hollowed out and turned into weapons of exclusion.

 

This is not only about academia, and it is certainly not only about Jews. It is about defending the right of any people to exist as themselves, to live in security, and to speak in their own voice.

 

If we fail to defend those basic values, the future will belong to those who erase entire peoples from the human story, twisting the language of justice into tools of violence, intimidation, and propaganda. We cannot let that happen.

 

The right of every people to stand in the space of reason—to speak, to be heard, and to be recognized as equals—is not a gift from the powerful. It is the birthright of humanity.