What Anti-Zionists Learned from Segregationists

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

I used to wonder how segregationists could unabashedly espouse their ideology while also insisting that they harbored no hate in their heart—that they just wanted what was in everybody’s best interests.

 

Then I listened to Western anti-Zionists, and I stopped wondering. It’s like having a time machine.

 

I understand why pundits and activists and politicians would insist they aren’t anti-Semitic. The question that has vexed me is: Why would anyone self-identify as an anti-Zionist?

 

Let’s be extra-generous and pretend for a moment that “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism,” as the human bumper stickers constantly chirp. I think the past few years have made this assertion, which has always been wrong but at least facially plausible, an entirely irrational and self-discrediting pose.

 

But even if we grant a meaningful distinction, it’s a bit like pleading down from murder 1 to reckless homicide. It’s certainly not an assertion of innocence.

 

Anti-Zionism is the opposition to Jewish self-determination. In purely practical terms, that requires the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of empowering those who proclaim their desire to murder all the Jews. So the key distinction is that the anti-Zionist claims to be unprejudiced as he brings about the conditions of the inevitable mass killing of Jews.

 

Because anti-Zionism is literally an anti-rights ideology, it also gives us a glimpse into the politics around segregation at a time when opposition to it was not yet the broad consensus and required an attempt at finessing the difference between bigotry as a motive and bigotry as an end goal. (George Wallace’s public speeches are a good example of this rancid Orwellian demagoguery.)

 

To be an anti-Zionist now, at this moment, is to be, by definition, the adherent of a violent ideology. It is to be an enemy of peace. To pretend otherwise is to be the defensive coordinator of a football team while claiming to be “personally anti-tackling.”

 

And so, again, I just keep wondering: What kind of person identifies with this? What kind of person claims to oppose scientific bigotry but embraces practical bigotry? And how on earth would a person expect this to be exonerating?

 

We can be even more generous to the anti-Zionist and say the following: Perhaps they haven’t thought at all of what this means for the status of certain nation-states; they oppose a movement for equal Jewish rights out of some other ideal.

 

That ideal would be irrelevant. No one should care why someone opposes equal Jewish rights. An admission of such opposition is enough to tell me this person is both refreshingly honest and reprehensible.

 

All of which makes the constant stream of artists and celebrities and pundits and others staking their claims to be “just anti-Zionist” so strange. And it conflicts with their other excuse: that they’re just criticizing a foreign state.

 

Criticism of Israeli policy isn’t anti-Zionism; in fact, it can arguably conflict with anti-Zionism in interesting ways. Anti-Zionism holds the state of Israel to be illegitimate. It therefore doesn’t fully recognize Israeli state policy as state policy. If you believe that “Palestine is occupied,” for example, Israel’s legitimate nation-state authority is unrecognized.

 

Accepting the legitimacy of the State of Israel is the key. If you do so, you aren’t anti-Zionist. (Though you might still be an ignoramus; there are many of those around too.) If you are anti-Zionist, it’s much harder to claim you’re just criticizing policy within the nondiscriminatory norm of such criticism.

 

Either way, anti-Zionism itself is an essentially violent ideology that a society dedicated to freedom and democracy and human rights would oppose unreservedly. “I’m just an anti-Zionist” is still an embarrassing self-incrimination.