Libel Card Declined, Anti-antizionist |
Before the State of Israel was established, many early Zionists believed that the founding of the Jewish State would reduce or even eliminate the scourge of antisemitism.¹ The rationale was that a Jewish state would normalize the Jews within the world’s community of nations, rather than forcing the Jews to remain ethnic minorities in states where European antisemites insisted they could never fully belong, at which point the Jews would secure a respected national status, ending antisemitism.
To say this prediction has not aged particularly well would be an understatement akin to calling the Hindenburg a turbulent flight.
Today, both Israel’s defenders and its detractors would generally acknowledge that:
a) antisemitism remains a problem—though they might dispute the prevalence and significance of this problem b) the existence of Israel, the Jewish State, has had a consequential impact on the manifestations of contemporary antisemitism—though they might dispute the reasons why this is occurring.
Israel’s detractors often argue that Israel’s actions contribute to the rise in antisemitic attitudes in the diaspora, insofar as the conduct of The Jewish State is interpreted to be the collective responsibility of The Jews. Israel’s defenders, by contrast, argue that Israel is unfairly maligned, functioning as the collective “Jew of the world—scorned, scapegoated, demonized, and attacked.”²
Since the conclusion of the Six Day War in 1967, Israel’s defenders have incorporated this theory into their conception of antisemitism by calling it the ‘new antisemitism’. The limitations of this thesis have been critically examined in existing literature and will be further developed in future work. In any event, attempts to frame criticism of Israel as ipso facto antisemitic, broadly speaking, has not been effective in increasing Israel’s favorability, which has fallen to historic lows.
I suspect this might be why some supporters of Israel have instead begun to pivot towards a new argument more recently. In the autumn of 2025, an initiative called the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) was formed. This so-called anti-antizionism campaign is not (according to the website) supposed to be a movement for or about Zionism, as they believe that the realities of Zionism have no relevance to the “hate movement” that is the “antizionist complex”. Additionally, they argue that it is important to distinguish ‘antizionism’, which they define as irrational hatred of Israel based upon libels used to construct its inherent criminality and justify its elimination, from ‘antisemitism’, irrational hatred of Jews qua Jews.
These arguments are often circulated via infographics with vacuous sloganeering or funneled through AI slop on social media and ridiculed as such. Nevertheless, I do think they are worth taking the time to evaluate in a sincere capacity because these ideas have gained credence both in the media and in legal cases.
It is firstly important to note the fact that they do carve out one exception to the ‘hateful’ flavor of antizionism: Jewish anti-Zionism. (They remove the hyphen in this instance because here it is not a pathology). MAAZ makes clear that this does not cover Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which reject Zionism because they view its contemporary political manifestation as one that privileges Jews over Palestinians and therefore believe the existence of the Jewish State is inherently an impediment to equality and liberation. Rather, they use it to refer to the........