Anti-Zionism is a new chapter of Jew-hatred that must be confronted head-on, say activist academics |
Adam Louis-Klein, a Jewish anthropologist, was living in an indigenous village in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest on October 7, 2023, studying the local Desana people, with no phone service or internet access.
Two days later, he made his way to a nearby town and reconnected to the wider world for the first time in months.
The first thing he saw was news of the Hamas slaughter in Israel. The second was his leftist colleagues justifying the terrorist invasion. He posted “Am Yisrael Chai” on Facebook and was berated for it.
“I was already starting to be purged. I soon lost virtually all of my social and professional contacts in academia,” he said. “I decided that it was important to have an intellectual response.”
Louis-Klein, 32, began to apply his background in philosophy and anthropology to studying anti-Zionism. He came to view the anti-Zionist movement as a new form of an old hatred — not a political ideology that bleeds into antisemitism, but a distinct chapter in the historical discrimination against Jews. He launched the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) earlier this year as part of that effort to push back.
Louis-Klein and MAAZ are part of a network of scholars and activists pushing the Jewish community to tackle anti-Zionism as a hate movement, not as a political ideology. They argue that anti-Zionism has its own history, ideology and tactics that are used to target Jews, but that differ from how most Americans have historically understood anti-Jewish hatred, allowing anti-Zionists to evade charges of discrimination. The activists want American Jews to move on from the antisemitism paradigm as a framework for understanding discrimination against Jews, to stop quibbling about when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism, and instead confront anti-Zionism head-on.
Academics, activists and professionals are increasingly adopting the message, with statements, protest signs and new groups appearing in recent months decrying anti-Zionism as its own hate movement. An understanding of anti-Zionism also appears to be coalescing, with many of the groups putting out similar messaging.
Louis-Klein was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, visited Israel as a youth, and was involved in Jewish life while studying philosophy at Yale University. He later became interested in Communist philosophy, adopted “radical leftist” views and moved away from his Jewish identity and connection to Israel, he told The Times of Israel in an interview.
That changed in the Amazon. Like Jews, the Desana, an indigenous tribe, view themselves as chosen by their God with whom they have “a distinct covenant,” Louis-Klein said. He had studied in an academy steeped in anti-colonial paradigms that he used to understand the Desana, and on October 7, saw those same ideas turned against Jews.
“We were being forcibly redefined as something we don’t define ourselves as — white colonists, European imperialists, people who have no history in the land of Israel,” he said. “Our voices were themselves being silenced. When we spoke back against this ideology, we were told that we were weaponizing antisemitism.”
Louis-Klein, currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, started engaging with anti-Zionists and studying their “stereotypical behaviors,” such as issuing anti-Israel “libels,” submitting others to litmus tests on Israel and marking out opponents as Zionists. He observed that scholars in his own area, anthropology, “reorganized the whole field around the genocide libel” against Israel since October 7.
He argues that libels, or false accusations of collective guilt against Jews, have been central to the persecution of Jews for centuries, from the medieval blood libel to the contemporary genocide accusation. In a recurring cycle, anti-Jewish societies invent libels, repeat them obsessively to stigmatize Jews, leading to violence, and after the violence, denial, he says.
‘Anti-zionism........