By Adam Louis-Klein
Thursday, June 18, 2026
In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in
Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following
day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of
Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the
punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create
the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and
conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he
was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take
place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of
whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of
anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone
associated with it.
The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries
across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but
even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named. The
displacement of so many Jews from their ancient home becomes a kind of tit for
tat—a balancing act of victimhood against the hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of
independence. The fact that accusations of “Zionism” were what legitimized
anti-Jewish violence—whether during the Tripoli pogroms of 1945, 1948, and
1967; the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, and synagogue bombings in Damascus and
Aleppo in 1949; or the expulsion of Egyptian Jews in 1956 by Gamal Abdel
Nasser—drops out of the calculus.
How can it be that an ideology that has produced repeated
acts of discrimination, dispossession, and violence now bears the mantle of
progressivism in the West and has been normalized within the Democratic Party?
Like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge, anti-Zionism represents a wrong turn for the
left. Anti-Zionism claims to be concerned with rights of minorities, opposition
to racism, and universal justice. In truth, though, it has appropriated the
language of anti-colonial liberation to justify oppression, transformed
anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global
ritual.
Anti-Zionism has hijacked the left, and it did so through
exploiting the left’s tendency toward internationalism and its skepticism of
nation-states. It transformed Jewish peoplehood into a crime and charged that
Jewish difference amounted to a claim of supremacy, even as it demanded that a
persecuted minority submit to the dominance of the majority. Yet the public
reckoning with anti-Zionism still awaits its moment.
I am a Jew who supports women’s rights, gay rights, and
trans rights, and who believes that climate change will pose a major challenge
to human society. Opposing anti-Zionism is, similarly, a natural extension of
my concern for truth and equality. If the Democratic Party wants to maintain an
authentic commitment to human rights, it must oppose the movement that seeks
the elimination of Israel and the purging from civil society of those marked as
Zionists.
***
Decades before the creation of the state of Israel,
Vladimir Lenin laid the groundwork for anti-Zionism. In his early-20th-century
polemics, Lenin cast Zionism, the movement to found a Jewish state, as a form
of “bourgeois nationalism,” a scheme by privileged Jews to divide the working
class. Either Jews should dissolve into the universal proletarian movement, he
argued, or expect to be marked as class enemies. “Jewish national culture is
the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies,” he
wrote. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Jewish section of the
Communist Party, or Yevsektsiya, would systematically dismantle Jewish life, as
synagogues and the Hebrew language itself were branded as Zionist.
Once Israel was created, the Marxist-Leninist ideology
that cast Zionism as bourgeois nationalism flowed into a more developed
propaganda apparatus, which coded Israel as the center of Western imperialism
while elevating other nationalisms as virtuous expressions of opposition to
capitalist power. A new definition of Jews emerged, inverting the classical
anti-Semitic claim that Jews were non-European race polluters to charge instead
that Zionists were “European colonizers.” As the 1956 Suez Crisis helped crystallize
an alliance between Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union, this anti-Zionist
ideology took root in the Middle East.
In 1965, Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in
Palestine, an ahistorical argument that Jews are not truly from the Land of
Israel, but an alien people. Jewish indigeneity is but a settler fabrication,
he charged, a 19th-century construct in which biblical fundamentalists invented
the notion that Jews see the Land of Israel as their origin and destiny. In
Sayegh’s work, and in that of his followers, Jewish history and belonging were
erased, the truth of Jewish life made to dissolve in the face of a political
project that cast elimination as justice.
Sayegh and other Arab nationalists believed that Zionism
dismembered Arab unity and violated the universal norms of the post–World War
II international order. These writers transformed theological polemics against
the “chosen people” and accusations of “Jewish superiority” into the claim that
“Zionism is racism.” Jewish nationhood was inherently “exclusivist,” whereas
Arab nationalism could be framed as emancipatory, part of a global struggle
against oppression.
Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of
state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state,
just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing
concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of
Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that
transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the
Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would
itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an
endless trial of elimination.
Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism
obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in
intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under
international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups,
including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis
qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.
The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of
progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs,
mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that
circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a
state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of
the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue
state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.
The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the
freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live
under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern
countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by
the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from
other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same
allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an
acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.
Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the
emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements
in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American
Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have
fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now
seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.
But the left must adhere to its own standards,
irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused
by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle
East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish
violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.
The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a
vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system
that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian
territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that
anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism
itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the
Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.
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