Snorkels in a Hailstorm
A shifting perspective on anti-Jewish hate
If we want to fight anti-Jewish hate properly, we need to understand what gives it permission.
People rarely walk around saying, “I want to hate Jews.” They’re given a story that makes harming Jews feel righteous and deniable. Century after century, normal people can hunt some politicised element of Jewish existence in a way that makes them feel decent, moral, informed, brave, compassionate or politically aware. This moral hunt is always institutionalised, despite its proponents considering themselves some form of ‘resistance’ movement.
Couched in theological, scientific, academic, or political appeals to authority, otherwise reasonable people coalesce around conspiratorial notions of the Jewish religion, the Jewish ethnicity, or Jewish statehood, saying and doing things they simultaneously consider vulgar when levelled at other minorities.
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The stories they require to join the hunt change over time.
In premodern religious societies, Jews were often hated, restricted or humiliated through theological stories about Jewish collective guilt. Christ-killer libels, blood-ritual libels, and infanticide libels filled in the gaps where Jews failed to rubber stamp supersessionist religious authorities.
When the Black Death arrived, Jews were accused of poisoning wells. This may have had something to do with some Jewish communities not getting the plague as often - likely due to their observance of a magical practice now taught to pre-school children called ‘hand-washing’.
Stubbornness, impurity, and deceit characterised the Jews’ refusal to accept new dominant faiths — of which both, unlike Judaism, evangelised and conquered their ways across continents.
In Islamic societies, Jews were treated as subordinates under dhimmi status. Under both the ‘New Testament’ aficionados and, later, the purveyors of the ‘Final Truth’, Jewish existence involved legal inferiority, social humiliation, forced conversion, expulsions and massacres.
The story around what constituted ‘different’ or ‘traitorous’ shifted as Europe modernised. In the post-Enlightenment period, religious identification became less important. The binding of church and state dwindled as religious authorities lost absolute dominion over truth, law, and morality.
One could be Anglican or Catholic and still be French, Anglican or Catholic and still be German. Religious identification was slowly replaced with more ethnocentric, or state-centred community identifiers. The unification of the German states in the late 1860s-early 1870s gives us a taste of the allure of coalescing around the promise of national, ethnic identity. The Germanic peoples were no longer a variety of religious or regional peoples, but a united German front.
But where does this leave Jews?
Instead of being positioned as a theological problem in need of a solution, Jews again enter the anxieties of their contemporaries—only this time, as an ethnic deviation or racial problem; a splinter in the side of proudly unifying peoples.
Think you know everything about me? Think again! I opened up to Chavi Block on her podcast last week. Listen in full here.
In 19th and 20th Century modern racial antisemitism, Jews were imagined as a corrupt biological race: rootless, parasitic, conspiratorial, alien, and dangerous to the nation.
And of course, in the post-Holocaust period, the story changes again. New moral guardrails forbid racism. Antisemitism is considered vulgar in much the same way that antisemites had considered their forebears—the antijudaists—vulgar.
In the Soviet, Arab nationalist, Islamist and postcolonial forms of antizionism that became increasingly dominant after the mid-twentieth century, Jewish self-determination—not the Jewish religion or the Jewish ‘race’—becomes the dominant anxiety. The Jewish state is cast as uniquely evil, Jewish self-determination is treated as illegitimate, and Jews who defend, explain, mourn, fear for or refuse to denounce Israel are branded “Zionists”. Anyone considered proximal to Israel is fair game, no different from the hunt we’ve seen take place under different permission structures over preceding centuries.
The target changes shape, but remains Jewish. The permission changes shape, but remains anti-Jewish. The danger remains, and Jews are murdered from Israel to Washington, Manchester to Colorado, Argentina to Bondi.
Diagnosis affects treatment.
Why is it more important to name ‘antizionism’ than ‘antisemitism’?
A simple science lesson:
Different states
Water—or H₂O—can arrive as liquid, ice, or steam.
Each different molecular arrangement presents water in hugely different ways, and each poses its own threats.
Different Harms
Steam burns. Hail concusses. Floodwater drowns.
You would look absurd trying to stop a flood with the gloves you might use to protect yourself from steam. You would look just as absurd trying to protect yourself from steam with a snorkel.
Distinct reconstructions
The same basic point applies to anti-Jewish hate. When we misdiagnose the form it is taking, we use the wrong tools to protect ourselves. We hand the wrong tools to our kids, and blame the hail for not falling as rain — insisting that if we just repeat, ‘antizionism is antisemitism’ enough times, our strategies and legal instruments to combat racial vilification should suffice.
Our experiences are proof that they don’t. Current strategies have failed. They’re not fit for purpose.
We all know how to recognise old-fashioned antisemitism when it appears in familiar costume. Swastikas, Nazi slogans, Holocaust denial and racial slurs are easy enough to condemn. The difficulty begins when anti-Jewish vilification is dressed up as “politics”, “justice”, “anti-racism” or “social justice”. The KKK consider themselves a social justice movement.
Distinct permission for violence
The moralisation of bigotry can cause many people to lose confidence in their protestations. They can see the cruelty. They can hear the obsession and the contempt. They can feel the double standards. They know something ugly is happening. Yet the language surrounding it makes them hesitate. The language used to moralise the hunt always speaks to the dominant moral anxieties of the time.
That hesitation, created by slogans designed to pitch the antizionist movement as ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘pro-human rights’, is the very opening antizionism exploits. This hesitation provides the moral vacuum in which institutions have rushed to the defence of those who call for global violence, to make Jews unsafe, or to deny the rape of Israeli women.
Antizionism gives society permission to treat Jewish self-determination as uniquely evil—stigmatising as immoral and corrupt any who may be considered proximal to the mere existence of a Jewish state. It allows normal people to speak about “Zionists” in ways they would never speak about any other people. It makes the Jewish state appear so uniquely monstrous that hostility towards those of us who simply don’t think it’s reasonable to call for the elimination of a state feel righteous.
This is why diagnosis matters.
A strategy aimed only at “antisemitism” may identify the injury after it occurs while leaving the antizionist permission structure that produces harms towards Jews untouched. It may condemn abuse after Jews have been targeted, while leaving intact the worldview that made the targeting feel justified in the first place.
A targeted strategy asks a sharper question: what story made this hate feel permissible?
If the answer to what today leads the hunt against Jews is antizionism, then the response has to name antizionism.
Modern responses to anti-Jewish vilification and violence must teach people the difference between criticism and vilification. They must show how “Zionist” is being used as a moral laundering device for old hatreds in newer language. They have to explain why, when it’s so easy to criticise Israeli governments, policies, wars, leaders and decisions, that we are seeing Jews on campuses, in workplaces, in arts and cultural spaces, in politics, and on the streets hounded.
This is the practical difference between shouting at the weather and preparing for a storm. We prepare for extreme weather by first diagnosing it. We don’t put out sandbags without checking whether we’re expecting drought or flood. We shouldn’t hand out snorkels in a hailstorm.
If we are dealing with steam, we need protection from burns. If we are dealing with floodwater, we need drainage, barriers and evacuation plans. If we are dealing with hail, we need shelter.
If we are dealing with antizionism, we need strategies that confront the thing that makes today’s anti-Jewish vilification feel respectable. Denouncing antisemitism does not work. Explaining Zionism does not work. We’re being abused by people who aren’t even talking about Zionism—much the same way Nazis were not actually talking about “Semitism”. Would better information about “Semitism” have halted The Holocaust?
Our goal must be precision. The better we diagnose the permission structure that encourages the vilification of Jews, the better we can interrupt it. And the better we interrupt it, the harder it becomes for anti-Jewish hate to present itself as virtue.
From diagnosis to treament
Next time you go to denounce antisemitism—regardless of whether you believe antizionism is antisemitic—ask yourself: is this working?
The West’s most infamous abusers of Jews all stop to denounce antisemitism before going on antizionist tirades.
It’s time to remove the permissibility of antizionism, and it begins by naming it. We don’t need to actively stigmatise antizionism. It will stigmatise itself—if we let it.
It starts like this. Pick any of them. Each will go miles further than another condemnation of antisemitism.1
“Antizionism spreads libels that stigmatise Jews worldwide, marking them for violence.”
“Did you know that when Poland criminalised antisemitism, they still exiled 13,000 “Zionists” in 1968? Do you know how they worked out who was a “Zionist”? Same way those who doxxed 600 Jewish creatives did in 2024—they looked for people with Jewish names.”
“Antizionists told me I couldn’t live in our sharehouse anymore.”
“The only Jewish artists I know who are doing okay are the ones who have been able to hide themselves from the antizionists.”
“Antizionism is not “pro-Palestinian” — stop laundering their propaganda. Antizionism feeds Arabs and Jews into a forever war because they’re obsessed with the removal of the only Jewish state.”
“Antizionism is a hate movement.”
A Brief Spiel
This piece was written in response to a request from a live training participant last night in Melbourne.
I do everything I can to facilitate the requests that are made, with my only constraints being time and financing.
MAAZ Survival
Failure to pay for our services is making our work unsustainable.
My work with Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ AU) has involved (but not been limited to) liaising with most major Jewish organisations in Australia, consulting with editors at Australia’s largest newspapers, television and radio appearances, live and online trainings to thousands, interstate travel, and uncountable hours spent assisting with personal and organisational submissions to the Royal Commission.
Our training participants include staff from AUJS, Melbourne Holocaust Museum, Jewish Communal Appeal, AIJAC, JBOD, ZCNSW, B’nai B’rith Victoria and Habonim Dror, as well as years 10, 11, and 12 students from Bialik, Moriah, and Emanuel Schools. I feel like I’m missing some. It’s late…
Live trainings have been open to the public at Dover Heights Shul, Limmud, Kehilat Nitzan, Beth Wiezmann/Lamm Library, and at The Kimberley last night.
We have trainings scheduled over the next two months with ECAJ, Zionism Victoria, and The Dor Foundation, with further live events at Cremorne, Central, and Caulfield shules.
If we had received $18 from every person trained, MAAZ AU would have ~$35,000-$40,000—money which we’d be able to invest in things we’re constantly being asked for.
There’s so much work we have the unique expertise to handle, but lack the time (funding) to get done.
An $18 donation request made to participants upon booking their training, emailed prior to training again, issued minimum twice during the training, and re-issues after the trainings.
Payment has been left optional, with an honour system designed to allow those who cannot afford payment to attend.
This honour system has left us at least $30,000 short.
I send heartfelt thanks to the small handful of supporters who have helped us cover costs, and to those who are now helping us work out new ways to move forward.
At the moment, we are self-funded and operate entirely on a volunteer basis. MAAZ AU is a registered charity awaiting DGR status approval.
If you value the work:
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Standing on the shoulders of giants:
🔗Adam Louis-Klein
🔗Naya Lekht
🔗Andrew Pessin
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Joshua Dabelstein
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maaz.aus@maazaction.org
Movement Against Antizionism Australia (MAAZ AU)
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The Barghoutifly Effect
Delegates at Victorian Labor’s state conference have voted to further institutionalise the apartheid libel against the Jewish state, while calling for the release of convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti and refusing to condemn the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses.
 | A guest post by
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