Can the Antizionism Framework Really Solve Israel’s Problems? |
Recent polling on U.S. attitudes toward Israel points to a troubling and accelerating shift. Favorability has declined sharply, particularly along partisan and generational lines. Among Democrats, unfavorable views now exceed favorable ones. Among Americans under 30, surveys routinely place unfavorable views in the range of roughly 60–70%, with favorable opinions well below a majority. These numbers vary across polls, but the trend itself is consistent and difficult to ignore. Given that Israel has relied on a strategic, diplomatic, military, and cultural alliance with the United States for decades, this shift carries obvious long-term implications.
Unsurprisingly, these trends are gleefully welcomed by all actors openly hostile to Israel: Islamist supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, the anti-colonial left, and elements of the antisemitic right feel quite comfortable in the common anti-Israel bed, even if they arrive there through entirely different ideologies, arguments, and moral convictions.
Also unsurprisingly, many supporters of Israel look for an explanation for this deterioration in its standing. The most common theory, especially in social media discourse, is that what we are witnessing is simply a new form of Jew-hatred, often labeled antizionism (deliberately written without a hyphen). The omission serves an ideological purpose: it signals that this is not genuine opposition to Zionism, but a rebranded hostility toward Jews in a more socially acceptable form. Adherents of this view point to the afterlife of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, academia’s embrace of anti-colonial frameworks, and a well-funded ecosystem of anti-Israel advocacy.
There is some truth in this. Scrolling through social media can feel like living in the middle of a worldwide pogrom. The volume of hatred, distortions of Israel’s actions, and falsifications of Jewish history is staggering. It is difficult to see it as purely spontaneous outrage; it often resembles a sustained campaign that demoralizes Israel’s supporters and erodes sympathy for Jews.
It is also true that many of these narratives originate in seemingly respectable academic settings, where concepts such as “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” or “apartheid” are stretched well beyond their conventional meanings to fit Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. In the process, scholarly integrity gives way to intellectual dishonesty, blurring the line between the pursuit of knowledge and political activism. These reframings are then adopted by mainstream media and repackaged in the language of human rights—focused on the plight of Palestinians or Christians, or whoever happens to be cast as oppressed by evil Israelis today. By the time they reach the broader public, they carry the imprimatur of scholarship, even as context has been stripped away and the concepts themselves are emptied of meaning.
Emotionally, it is very understandable to look at all of this and conclude that one is dealing with a hate movement, and to stop there. As one of my friends said: “I have no wish and no strength to dig through all this shit.” I understand this reaction. I see exactly where it is coming from. But understanding it does not mean accepting it. Emotions are a poor guide to understanding complex problems, and an even worse guide to solving them. Declaring that antizionism is simply a new form of racism, solely responsible for the reputational decline of the Zionist project, may get you invitations to podcasts, interviews with like-minded audiences, and publications in sympathetic media ecosystems. It works very well within its own echo chamber. What it cannot do is provide real understanding of the phenomenon. And without that, there is no serious path toward restoring Israel’s standing.
In the meantime, everything Israel has reason to be proud of, its achievements in science, technology, medicine, agriculture, is being buried under tons of this shit. And someone, whether we like it or not, has to dig through it.
The central problem with the “everything is antizionism” framework is not that it is entirely wrong. It is that it is intellectually lazy. It collapses fundamentally different phenomena such as garden-variety antisemitism, ideological hostility, political disagreement, disillusionment, and visceral reactions to images coming from Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon into one convenient moral category: hate. This collapse substitutes moral clarity for analytical precision. It focuses attention on the loudest and most extreme voices while treating them as representative of the broader public reflected in polling data. And most importantly, it removes Israeli agency from the analysis. If attitudes of the public are driven primarily by prejudice and propaganda, then the actions of Israel’s political leadership cease to matter. What Israel does becomes secondary to what Israel is.
While there are certainly people who oppose Israel’s existence regardless of its behavior, it is implausible that they account for the scale of the shift reflected in recent polling. The breadth and composition of that shift suggest a more complex process. Moreover, a significant share of those expressing critical views are themselves Jewish, and recent polling shows increasing division, and in some cases outright repudiation, among American Jews with respect to Israel and its policies. This is not a marginal phenomenon. Omer Bartov, for example, in his book “Israel: What Went Wrong”, goes so far as to accuse Israel of genocide. Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist, has produced widely viewed commentary sharply critical of Israeli policy in the West Bank and Lebanon without any meaningful acknowledgment of the context in which these policies operate, commentary that many of Israel’s defenders dismiss as superficial, selective, or simply wrong. It may well be that some of these critiques of Israel are deeply flawed, overstated, or fail to grasp the strategic constraints Israel operates under. But it is simply not plausible to interpret them primarily as manifestations of antisemitism or antizionism. Doing so explains nothing.
A more straightforward explanation is that many people, rightly or wrongly, are reacting to what they perceive as a troubling direction in Israeli policy. At a personal level, this produces a very recognizable tension. For me, and for many other Jews, Israel remains a source of historical attachment and cultural identification, while at the same time becoming an object of growing concern. Some resolve this by distancing themselves sharply from the Zionist project altogether and returning, in one form or another, to the old Bundist slogan: “Do iz undzer land” (“here is our land”), and to the broader idea of doikayt, the belief that Jewish life should be rooted wherever Jews happen to live. This tradition has recently been revived for a wider audience in works like Molly Crabapple’s The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Resistance. To me this idea seem to be deeply ahistorical: to revive old pre-Holocaust inter-Jewish debates to justify current anti-Israel hostility is deeply misguided. Illusions that Jews can safely anchor themselves within the political structures of the host countries was decisively shattered by the Holocaust. I, and others like me, try to hold the line and maintain a distinction between the general idea of Israel as an undeniably necessary Jewish homeland and the actions of its present government. In the current media environment, driven by simplified and emotionally charged narratives, maintaining this distinction requires significant intellectual and moral effort, as well as a tolerance for ambiguity. One has to hold two opposing views at the same time without going crazy, and that is not easy.
This is precisely the kind of mechanism the “antisemitism-only” framework fails to see. Public opinion is not formed in a vacuum. It is shaped by how events are perceived and represented. Legal nuance rarely survives this process; what survives are images and narratives rooted in the actual actions of the Israeli government and its representatives, which can be made morally legible with very little mental or emotional effort. The desecration of Christian symbols by IDF soldiers in Lebanon—an incident acknowledged by the IDF itself—did nothing to improve Israel’s image. Reports and video evidence of abuse of Palestinian detainees have likewise contributed to public outrage. These events, which are real and quite disturbing by themselves, often become the raw material for a second layer of discourse populated by exaggerations, distortions, and, at times, outright grotesque fabrications. The result is not clarity but a chaotic mixture in which fact and fiction become increasingly difficult to distinguish and end up reinforcing negative image of Israel in the public imagination.
Ignoring this dynamic, and dismissing all criticism as simply another manifestation of ancient hatred, is not just analytically weak. It is strategically self-destructive. The consequences of this analytical error are not only external, but internal as well. By treating external criticism as illegitimate by definition, it lowers the internal cost of controversial policies and removes incentives for restraint. The result is a feedback loop: criticism is dismissed as antisemitism, which reinforces a sense of siege, which pushes politics further to the right, which generates more criticism. Each cycle then serves as confirmation that the world is irredeemably hostile, even as policy choices help produce the very reactions being cited as evidence.
This logic is not new. It echoes, in a more sanitized form, arguments associated with Meir Kahane, who treated hostility toward Jews as permanent and largely immune to context. The relevance of the comparison lies not in equivalence, but in the shared premise: that external opinion is fixed. Once that premise is accepted, the strategic value of restraint, legitimacy, or persuasion collapses.
A more adequate framework would restore Israeli agency to the analysis. It would distinguish between ideological hostility and reactive disapproval. It would take seriously the interaction between policy choices and perception without assuming that all criticism is valid or all hostility is fabricated.
The polling data are not abstractions. They reflect a structural shift with real consequences. Explaining them entirely through antizionism may offer rhetorical comfort, but it leaves Israel without the tools to respond to a changing reality. Eli Kowas, in a recent essay, places much of the blame for Israel’s deteriorating standing in the United States on Netanyahu’s political missteps, particularly his alignment with the GOP and Trump at the expense of relations with Democrats. This was, indeed, a significant miscalculation. But the problem runs deeper. It lies less in Israel’s positioning within the American political landscape than in its internal trajectory, its shift toward the extreme right expressed both in the evolving relationship between the state and its own public and in its approach to the Palestinian question.
What is needed is a fundamental shift, a bifurcation in Israel’s relationship with the world: a turn from belligerence toward reconciliation; a serious effort to clamp down on abuses perpetrated by the most extreme settler elements; the enforcement of state authority over all Jewish settlements, including the dismantling of illegal ones. This is not without precedent. One of David Ben-Gurion’s central fears was that Jews might become ungovernable and defy the authority of the state. He spent a great deal of political capital asserting that authority. The culmination of that effort was the Altalena Affair of 1948. Menachem Begin, to his credit, ultimately yielded to Ben-Gurion’s demands, preventing a Jewish civil war in the midst of an already existential conflict.
Today, the situation in the West Bank develops in the opposite direction. The rule of law is eroding, and the government appears either unwilling or unable to curb settler excesses. A broad, visible, and unequivocal crackdown on settler violence, including the dismantling of groups such as the so-called “hilltop youth”, would not only restore internal order but also materially improve Israel’s standing in European capitals and among American Jews.
The same applies to the treatment of Palestinian detainees. Reports of abuses – some credible, others clearly grotesque fabrications – circulate widely and shape public perception regardless of their accuracy. Addressing this requires both transparency and substance: improving conditions, restoring certain basic privileges such as access to education, and demonstrating that abuses are neither tolerated nor ignored.
A less bellicose posture toward the Palestinian Authority, coupled with a willingness to engage in dialogue, would help ease not only Israel’s external image but also the deepening internal divisions within Israeli society itself, much of which is concerned about the continuation of military rule over millions of Palestinians. This does not mean ignoring internal Palestinian dynamics: the Palestinian Authority is weak, and significant parts of Palestinian society are supportive of Hamas and view Israel with deep animosity. I am not suggesting that this reality be viewed through rose-colored glasses or ignored. There is no quick solution to the Palestinian problem. But even a change in rhetoric can have a measurable effect. There are, moreover, concrete examples of Israel–Palestinian cooperation, such as Rawabi. While cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli businesses there remains uneven and politically constrained, its very existence demonstrates that a path beyond the current hostility is possible. It may be long and arduous, but it is not hopeless.
Finally, open and thorough investigations of alleged war crimes, along with the punishment of those found responsible, would help remove the Damoclean sword hanging over Israelis traveling abroad, where legal actions, sometimes indiscriminate, increasingly target anyone associated with the IDF.
Proponents of the antizionist paradigm will, of course, object that none of these measures will have any effect on the anti-Israel crowd, because, in their view, the problem is not what Israel does, but that it exists. The response to this objection is twofold. First, these measures are necessary regardless of their external effect: they are needed to stabilize Israeli society itself and to pull it back from a potentially self-destructive drift toward unbridled ultra-nationalism and a Kahane-like mindset.
Second, the public-relations dimension of these policies is not primarily directed at activists, whose views are indeed fixed. The real audience is the much larger “silent majority” in Europe and the United States. Shifting perceptions there would help repair Israel’s standing with European leaders and across both American political parties.
I do not believe that any of this is possible under the current government. Ultimately, it is up to Israelis to decide which direction the country will take—whether to continue along its current, increasingly destructive path, or to shift toward the center, toward more sustainable relationships with the outside world, and toward a more workable coexistence among the different factions within Israeli society itself.
None of this means that Israel should abandon its fight against Hamas and Hezbollah or cease efforts to dismantle their infrastructure. Nor does it mean that Israel should stop preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. But all of these objectives will be far more achievable if Israel steps back from the brink of becoming a pariah state and restores normal relations with the European Union and American Jewry. If it continues on its current path, effectively doing some of its enemies’ work for them, it risks losing support even among its most steadfast allies, particularly within American Jewry.
Israel has agency in how it is seen by the world. It should not allow its enemies to define it. Declaring that antizionism has nothing to do with how Israel conducts itself does exactly that—it hands over the narrative to those who are most hostile to it.