Anti-Zionism and the Inverted World: Recasting Jews as Colonial Villains |
What happens when theory collides with history, data, and lived Jewish experience—and loses.
I used to be an anti-Zionist. I wasn’t militant about it, but I agreed with most of the arguments. They struck me as serious and morally grounded. I first held these views while attending Boston University—hardly a place lacking Jewish presence or debate—and, in a characteristically Boston moment, I even spoke with one of my former heroes, Noam Chomsky. He’s not pro-Israel, to put it mildly.
At the time, I was in graduate school studying philosophy and religion. Wanting to better understand Judaism and Jewish history, I took courses at Hebrew College, studied under Jewish professors, and spoke with rabbis. This was, after all, the university of Elie Wiesel. The irony is that alongside my study of Buber and Frankl, I was also learning post-colonial theories that denied Israel’s right to exist as a state. To complicate matters further, some of the anti-Zionism I encountered came from Jewish scholars. Naively, I assumed they represented at least a significant portion of American Jews.
—I wasn’t on the fence: I had come to see Israel’s unjustified existence as a fait accompli.
After October 7—and the study that day compelled—I began to reassess my ideas about Israel. The tragedy itself mattered deeply, but what forced the issue was how suddenly anti-Zionism became ubiquitous. The responses that followed made it impossible to look away, especially when they came from people and movements I recognized. Anti-Zionism was suddenly everywhere. There was the “academic” version, with figures like Chomsky at the podium; then the aggressive kind who shouted “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea” outside synagogues; and the softer, ostensibly “reasonable” middle path, embodied by figures like Mayor Mamdani, whose calm progressive tone cast a wide and inviting net.
What struck me as most telling was the collective fury directed not at the massacre itself, or the taking of 251 hostages and the murdering of 378 innocent concert-goers, but at Israel’s response to it. However it was framed, the core claim didn’t change. I was hearing it from Russia, Iran, and Iraq; from Hezbollah, Houthis, and Hamas; and echoed by neo-Nazi groups like accelerationist’s, the Goyim Defense League, and the Patriot Front. From the soil of Gaza to the snow of Iceland, to the professors who once instructed me, the convergence was unreal—and inescapable.
Israel was not treated as a flawed state among others, but as uniquely illegitimate. No other country is judged this way. When Turkey wages war against the Kurds, China represses Uyghurs, Saudi Arabia devastates Yemen, we condemn the actions—not the state’s right to exist. Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not led to calls for Russia’s dissolution. With Israel alone, it seems, violence becomes a referendum on statehood.
While anti-Zionists consider themselves as merely voicing a political critique—what they think is within the scope of reasonable discourse about the Israeli government—I had the sense they had a much grander take. It seemed like an entire mythology people inhabited. Adam Louis-Klein understands where my mind went. He had a similar experience. He writes that “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.” This “cosmology” is what I was thinking about. A whole world of villains and heroes; a fantasy of fetishistic exaggeration. And this world was inverted. The Jewish people were colonizers, and groups like Hamas were the resistance. Jews no longer were the scattered diaspora of an ancient tribe, persecuted by almost all historical Empires; they were the conquering fulcrum of power in this bizarre cosmos.
“In the same........