“It has never been more acceptable to criticize Israel or Zionism.” The Forward (NYC), 23 April 2026.

“What has unfolded over the past two years is not simply criticism of Israel, nor even obsessive hostility. It is the emergence of a totalising world view in which Israeli wickedness becomes an all-encompassing explanation for global ills….” The Jewish Chronicle (London), 24 April 2026.

In the past year Adam Louis-Klein, a Ph.D candidate at McGill University, has placed the term “antizionism” at the forefront in the Jewish world of ideas. In podcasts, magazine articles and his own website, Louis-Klein has worked to remove antisemitism as the “ism” that best explains the threat faced by Jews in the Diaspora. In his view, the older term, “antisemitism,” must yield to this new terminology. Antizionism, as Louis-Klein explains in his website, “now operates with distinct libels, moral languages, aesthetics, and mechanisms of enforcement that make it analytically and politically legible as a phenomenon in its own right.”

I argue that it is the term “antizionism” that is not “politically legible.” While the term “antisemitism” is easily recognized as a form of historic anti-Jewish bigotry, the purportedly “distinct libels” associated with the term “antizionism” are less obvious to the public. For example, a July 2023 survey conducted for the Brookings Institution reported that 58% of respondents in the U.S. characterized attitudes against Jews as antisemitic but only 15% agreed that attitudes against Zionism constitute antisemitism. Condemning “antisemitism” in its classic form has been the bedrock of Jewish advocacy for a century, notes British sociologist David Hirsh, and that is why he is “reluctant to abandon antisemitism” as the term that defines the ideology that defames the Jewish people. Because antisemitism as a defamatory ideology is in ill repute in the post-Holocaust West, it makes sense to tar the latest version on the continuum of bigotry with the well-known and historically familiar term, “antisemitism.”

Antizionism should not be elevated as the master standard by which attitudes and policies are measured. “Antizionism” draws attention to Zion, the ancient Jewish homeland, rather than the full scope of Jewish life in the Diaspora and Israel. In addition, the more broadly applicable term, “antisemitism,” deserves continued use because the term conveys a measure of historical opprobrium not attached to “antizionism.”

As will be argued below, antizionism – the ideology calling for the eradication of the Jewish state – is antisemitism. I am not talking here about criticism of Israeli policy regarding borders, court reform and other such matters not involving the sovereignty of the Jewish state. For example, advocacy of a “two-state solution” does not constitute antizionism as long as one of those states is a Jewish state.

By “antisemitism” I mean a conspiratorial fantasy – not a theory – that centers “the Jews” and the Jewish state as the source of evil in the world. Antisemitism is thus a utopian ideology, one that predicates the redemption of the world on the resolution of the “Jewish problem.” As the term is used here, “antisemitism” is not merely a personally held “prejudice” based on negative stereotypes. Rather, as Professor David Paterson of the University of Texas observes, the “first principle” of antisemitism “is not that all Jews are evil but that all evil is Jewish.”

In this article, contemporary antizionism refers to violent and non-violent measures calculated to end the Jewish state. The Israeli public intellectual and podcaster Haviv Rettig Gur (“Ask Haviv Anything”) put it simply: “Antizionism to me is so obviously antisemitic.” One cannot call for the end of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state and be anything other than an antisemite.

Louis-Klein needlessly complicates what should be plain to see. It is regrettable that Jewish public intellectuals like Louis-Klein and others raise doubts about the commonality of the two isms even though a branch of Evangelical Christianity recognizes that antisemitism and antizionism are identical twins. In April 2026, The Christian Post featured an article (“Yes, anti-Zionism is Antisemitism: Why the Distinction Collapses Under Scrutiny”) that characterizes antizionism as camouflage for antisemitism. “…[M]odern anti-Zionism increasingly serves as a socially acceptable cover for the same old fixation [i.e., antisemitism].” Or, as Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Amery put it 50 years ago, antizionism presents itself as the “virtuous antisemitism.”

Antisemitism hidden by such virtue threatens Jewish security by blinding the Jewish people and the wider public to the danger that is afoot. Antizionism threatens the Jewish people by creating a clean wrapping around anti-Jewish bigotry. Thus, bigots may argue that this or that verbal assault against the existence of the Jewish state does not “cross the line” into antisemitism. Invocation of antizionism allows bigots to try to conceal their bigotry by proclaiming “I don’t hate Jews, I just hate Israel.”

Failure to unambiguously condemn contemporary antizionism as antisemitism allows opponents of Israel to hide behind a curtain of respectability while spreading an ideology that defames the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Antizionism gives vent to th eantisemitic libel du jour yet the mass media, elite universities and the faith-based community allow this new ideology of defamation to pass for respectable opinion. Indeed, the moral panic about Israel’s effort to defend itself has seeped into establishment Jewish thought which seeks to “decenter” Diaspora Jewishness from the Zionist project. Far from promoting the safety of the Diaspora, political distancing from Israel works to validate the claims of the antisemites and justifies policies adverse to the Jewish people. And without Israel, the Diaspora has no place of refuge if the impossible happens again.

Both antisemitism and its twin, antizionism, denies the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s place in the world. That denial was obvious when England expelled the Jews in 1290, was obvious when the Allies failed to block the Nazi’s plans made at the 1942 Wannsee Conference and was obvious on October 8, 2023 (and thereafter). The defamatory lineage is not hard to trace.

Writing in Sapir (Winter 2026), Louis-Klein makes the following argument distinguishing new “antizionism” from the old “antisemitism: “Antizionism is the ideology that treats Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty as an intrinsic injustice. It is today’s evolved form of anti-Jewish hate, less crude than classical antisemitism, but no less potent. Antizionism is more abstract, systematized and rhetorically refined [than “classical” antisemitism….”

This assessment does not stand up to the historical record. Like antizionism, antisemitism regards Jews as the historic perpetrators of “injustice” in the capitalist marketplace and in world affairs. Antizionism with its hideous depiction of Israeli leaders is just as “crude” as the classical antisemitic renditions of the Jewish people. And antisemitism in its medieval theological incarnation is just as “abstract, systematized and “rhetorically refined” as the ideology spewed by those classified as “antizionists.”

Louis-Klein’s elevation of antizionism as an ideology distinct from antisemitism (operating with “distinct libels”) allows social justice progressives to avoid the shame linked to antisemitism by invoking a “virtuous” excuse for their bigotry. Antizionism must be exposed as an ideology as disgraceful as antisemitism.

Just as the civil rights movement in America ultimately made the utterance of anti-black racial epithets intolerable in polite society, Jewish advocacy organization should work to make the presentation of antizionist libels similarly repugnant. It must be considered a shanda for anyone, Jew or Gentile, to call for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Not only does Louis-Klein’s elevation of antizionism as distinct form of anti-Jewish bigotry work to mitigate the shame associated with antisemitism it presents an analysis that is not supported by the historical record. Louis-Klein’s tripartite catalog of “anti-Jewish Hate” allows the inference that the periods denominated as “Anti-Judaism,” “Antisemitism” and “Antizionism” constitute discrete entities. In doing so, he gives insufficient attention to the ways in which the libels used in one era are found in another. We need, as social theorist and lawyer David Seymour argues, a “recognition of the ways in which the ideology of antizionism has incorporated the ideology of antisemitism.”

The three-part designation presented by Louis-Klein minimizes the extent to which the libel of one era became part of the discourse in another era. For example, the Nazis in Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer supplemented racial theories – a largely late nineteenth century invention – with the blood libel, a medieval calumny that started in the early 12th century when the Jews of Norwich England were charged with the ritual murder of a young boy, William.

And while Spain’s 15th century “purity of blood” laws oppressing Jewish converts to Christianity had theological roots, such blood-based anti-Jewish ideology would later find a home in Nazi-occupied Europe. The mid-15th century blood libel named after Simon of Trent found expression in 2019 when the gunman in the Poway, California synagogue shooting included in his manifesto a reference to the famous cult commemorating the murder of the Christian boy. Even more recently, in March 2026, opponents of Israel set up a display on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia that conjured up the blood libel in predatory depictions of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Jeffrey Epstein.

Consider also the link between the Nazi-era requirement that Jews wear a yellow star on their clothing and the decree in 1275 by King Edward I that England’s Jews wear a yellow badge showing the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Both the Edwardian and Nazi requirements rested on libels rooted in the alleged inherent evil of the Jewish people and promoted the otherness of this despised minority group.

The notion that Jews are disloyal residents of the nations they inhabit, popularized by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), bears a discomforting connection to the pogrom associated with the coronation in London of King Richard I in 1189 where it was believed that the gift-bearing Jews attended the ceremony so as to cast a spell on the newly crowned monarch. In the same way, contemporary antisemites recite the libel alleging that “the Jews” dictate U.S. foreign policy by donating cash to politicians who then make decisions adverse to the interests of the United States and consistent with the interests of Israel.

Moneylending in medieval Europe provided the backdrop for art depicting hook-nosed, physically unattractive and very distinctive Jews engaged in this disfavored financial practice. Laws restricting economic opportunities forced Jews into becoming the financial backers of sometimes unpopular Christian elites and set the stage for modern-era libels targeting the “wire-pulling” multinational Rothschild family operating as the “puppet masters” for greedy capitalists, which again aligned the Jews with Christian elites.

Contemporary cartoons, borrowing themes from the Rothschild era, depict Jews in finance as fat, greedy, animal-like, balding, big-nosed and diabolical. A temporary and controversial and the Nazi-like London mural (entitled “Freedom from Humanity”) drawn by an American artist in 2012 continued the tradition of art presenting distinctly Jewish bankers in a hideous way. As an opinion writer for The Guardian put it in 2018: “It’s not just the big, hooked noses and evil expressions that make this iconography offensive and troubling, these depictions mirror antisemitic propaganda used by Hitler and the Nazis….”.

Emphasis on continuity is needed so that those who espouse antizionist ideology (and those who listen) are made to understand the ugly heritage of such views. The canard, “I’m not antisemitic, I am just antizionist,” lets the antisemite off easy. Because antizionism dresses up as “virtuous antisemitism,” it allows entry to the social justice corridors that would otherwise be off limits to confessed antisemites.

Those who trade in antizionist fantasies should recognize a heritage that begins with the medieval Church’s intolerance of Judaism and continues a thousand years later with the catastrophic application of “racial science” during the Second World War. As historian Jeffrey Herf put it: “Since the writings of the Book of John, the accusations of the Spanish Inquisition, and Luther’s rage at the threat supposedly posed by the Jews, the antisemitic tradition has depicted the Jews as uniquely powerful and evil.” It is this tradition that must be exposed in public discourse.

Louis-Klein falters on precisely this point. By characterizing antizionism as a “hate” movement, he shifts the focus from the conspiratorial Jewish cabal that cruelly manipulates world affairs to a prejudice that stubbornly denigrates an unpopular minority group. As the London-based podcaster (“Radicalism of Fools”), Daniel Ben-Ami puts it: “Where Louis-Klein goes wrong is in reducing anti-Zionism to a hate movement. By doing so he implicitly makes it comparable to other type[s] of hatred.” Professor Shaul Kelner (Vanderbilt University) also steers the discussion away from “hate” noting that antisemitism at its core operates as a political process that seeks to disempower Jewish
people.

The most worrisome aspect of an emphasis on antizionism is that it puts at issue the very existence of the State of Israel. Zionism, the ideology that gave birth to the Jewish state, exists in opposition to antizionism, the ideology calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state. Thus, antizionism by its very nature invites a discussion of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. As philosopher Sam Harris observed on “Ask Haviv Anything,” emphasis on antizionism puts supporters of Israel on the “backfoot”, forcing them to defend the existence of Jewish statehood decades after the establishment of that state. “Israel exists,” says Harris, and Zionism is not needed as a “permission slip.” An even playing field in the world of ideas must start with the existence of the Jewish state rather than the “Zionist entity” imagined by jihadists. Elimination of the “Zionist entity” is the next and final step after the completion of the demonization project undertaken by the enemies of Israel.

People of good will should be ashamed of harboring views that demonize the Jewish people. Those who espouse (or accept) such views are the inheritors of an ugly heritage that mere wordplay does not expiate. Antizionism only pretends to be a redemptive idea that leads to the way to the salvation of the world. That pretense should be pierced by opinion leaders willing to expose the morally rotten antisemitic heart of antizionism. There’s nothing new to see here.