This piece is a response to the preceding Flashpoint by Brad Rudin: “A Reply to Adam-Louis Klein.”

Brad Rudin reproduces a response to my account of antizionism that has become fairly common. It represents, in my view, an attachment to a paradigm that is not delivering on its promises. That paradigm holds that the central goal of Jewish advocacy is to show that antizionism is “antisemitism.” Rudin’s claim, like others of this nature, is both linguistic and conceptual: we should call antizionism “antisemitism”—i.e. our task is to rhetorically anchor antizionism in “antisemitism”—and also we should conceptually anchor antizionism in antisemitism, because, as Rudin claims, antizionism is not different from past forms of Jew-hatred.

It is important to be clear on this point, because two distinct positions are available. One could argue that we should continue to call antizionism “antisemitism” while acknowledging that it differs from the classical antisemitism of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, as well as from the theological anti-Judaism that dominated the Middle Ages (whether Christian or Islamic). The term “antisemitism,” even though it originally referred to a specific, political designation by self-termed “antisemites” following Wilhelm Marr in 1879 and grounded in a specific racialization of Jews as non-European “Semites,” could also function as a catch-all term. One could treat antisemitism as the umbrella term while clearly distinguishing antizionism as a specific category.

That position, however, is not the one we usually encounter. In practice, the argument tends to dissolve into what Rudin presents: that antizionism should be called antisemitism precisely because it is not genuinely different from classical antisemitism. It’s precisely because, in practice, rhetorically anchoring antizionism in antisemitism tends to accompany conceptually mapping antizionism onto classical antisemitism that I believe it is more useful—both as advocacy and as analysis—to treat antizionism on its own terms.

Rudin’s argument stands or falls with his claim that antizionism is not different from past forms of Jew-hatred. In holding this position, he is not only in disagreement with me, but also with the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who argued that Jew-hatred had mutated through at least three stages: religious anti-Judaism, (classical) antisemitism targeting Jews as a race, and now antizionism. It is also worth noting that Rudin disagrees with Hannah Arendt, who did not fold 19th century antisemitism into medieval anti-Judaism, but insisted on its sui generis nature in her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, “antisemitism” means the classic antisemitism of 19th and 20th century Europe, not the entire history of Jew-hatred. Rudin writes that “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,” but this confuses genetic origin with category, diachrony with synchrony. Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus; Homo sapiens is not the same as Homo erectus.

Rudin dismisses my claim that antizionism is based on “distinct libels,” yet he never engages with the specific libels I have identified: the colonizer, apartheid, and genocide libels. He points to a 2012 cartoon that drew on Nazi themes, but I have never claimed that medieval anti-Judaism or classical antisemitism no longer exist, nor that they are never projected onto Israel, as in accusations of AIPAC controlling the U.S. government or explicit blood libel imagery applied to Israeli leaders. What Rudin does not address is the institutionalized, fully mainstream, and permitted circulation of antizionist ideology: an ideology that has captured universities, mainstream media, the United Nations, and NGOs. That The Guardian could condemn a London cartoon while enthusiastically circulating the genocide libel illustrates the point precisely. Anti-Judaism and classical antisemitism are still taboo, though they have made a comeback within the broader anti-Jewish permission structure provided by antizionism. Antizionism is a systemic bigotry.

Jewish students on campuses saturated with antizionism are not being called “hook-nosed bankers.” They are being called white colonizers, Jewish supremacists, and genocide supporters. These simply are not classical antisemitic tropes. Classical antisemitism frames Jews as non-European infiltrators of European states. Antizionism frames Jews as European colonizers responsible for Western sin. The colonizer libel evolved from antisemitic mythologies of Jews as foreign invaders, but it was repurposed when appropriated in the Arab world, and today’s Western antizionists do not primarily accuse Jews of infiltrating Western nations, but of oppressing a non-Western people.

The apartheid libel evolved from theological polemics against Jewish “chosenness,” such as Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies, among other sources, but was adapted to target Zionism and the State of Israel as a racist “ethnonationalist” project. The goal was to make a comparison to apartheid South Africa, so as to legitimize the “dismantling” (genocidal annihilation) of Israel. It is, crucially, adapted to the post-war international order of human rights, anti-racism, and postcolonialism.

The genocide libel is the most robust innovation of antizionism. While early versions can be found in Nazi-Arab radio, which, as documented by Jeffrey Herf, circulated the theory that Zionism was a Western-Jewish conspiracy to steal Arab land and annihilate the Arab population, its full development is based on Holocaust inversion. The genocide libel requires the post-war formulation of genocide as the “crime of crimes” within international law, and it exploits the fact that Jews were victims of the paradigmatic genocide. Antizionism is fundamentally adapted to the post-WWII cosmology that positions Israel as the paradigmatic “rogue state” violating the international order of human rights. The connection Rudin makes to the Nazis seeing the existence of Jews as an “injustice” is vague and unsourced, and clearly the term would not mean the same thing for the Nazis as it would for a left-wing progressive student on Columbia’s campus.

Rudin claims that calling antizionism “antisemitism” is the only way to stigmatize it. As I have shown, his argument depends on a broader conceptual assumption: that antizionism and classical antisemitism are not genuinely distinct. But this is wrong, since the tropes, libels, and stereotypes differ. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes believes Jews are importing non-white populations to replace white Americans. The antizionist Hasan Piker believes “Zionists” are behind ICE crackdowns on immigrants. These are not merely distinct ideological beliefs; they are contradictory. Nor is it enough to claim that antisemitism itself is contradictory, since these views belong to distinct groups of people. Piker and Fuentes contradict each other, not themselves.

Rudin’s failure to engage with antizionist ideology as it is actually constituted is symptomatic. The antisemitism paradigm often expends too much energy mapping antizionism onto antisemitism while giving insufficient attention to confronting, naming, and building advocacy against antizionism itself, even as antizionism has become the dominant form of Jew-hatred today.

The goal is to stigmatize antizionism on its own terms. The retort “I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist” works precisely because antizionism has not been stigmatized, except in reference to antisemitism. If antizionism were also seen as wrong, as its own category, phenomenon, object, and bigotry, then the rhetorical maneuver would fall apart.

I believe that stigmatizing antizionism directly is both more intellectually precise and pragmatically necessary in the current moment. That does not mean antizionism is unrelated to antisemitism, or that it cannot overlap with classically antisemitic conspiratorial themes of power, domination, and control. It can resonate with past forms, and of course, at the most general level, it constructs Jews as evil. But to say that both antizionism and antisemitism view Jews as evil is hardly fine-grained. We need to look closer at the specific tropes, stereotypes, and libels used by antizionism.

Rudin writes: “Antizionism must be exposed as an ideology as disgraceful as antisemitism.” I couldn’t agree more.