Why it matters: antizionism ≠ antisemitism.
A handy guide to anti-Jewish conspiracies
For more on antizionism in Australia:
1. Jewish Antizionists ("Asajews")
2. How hate becomes fashionable
3. Can courts handle antizionism?
4. Anti-Zionism v Antizionism
5. Violence and antizionism
6. Psychology of antizionism
7. Strategic advocacy and antizionism
8. Institutional antizionism
9. Antizionism and Bondi
10. Post-Bondi reflection
More recently:
11. Personal Submission to Royal Commission
12. MAAZ AU Submission to Royal Commission
13. A polite takedown of Randa Abdel-Fattah
14. Antizionists are not “pro-Palestine”.
15. When Jews mistake abuse for “criticism” (Grace Tame)
16. When Jews mistake abuse for “criticism” (again)
17. Why I stopped defending “Zionism”
18. Royal Commission’s false start
19. Antizionism in Victorian Labor
20. Psychoanalysing antizionist’s quest for redemption
Latest:
21: Our new strategy to fight antizionism
Please note: X ≠ Y still holds if one considers X a form of Y. What matters is that they are not the same thing. Treating X as Y has significant consequences if combating X requires tools different to those designed to combat Y.
Our Language Is Failing Us
We rely on the word antisemitism to describe all forms of anti-Jewish prejudice, conspiracy, exclusion, hatred, demonisation, and violence.
We also use the same word to describe antisemitic behaviour as as we do to describe the harm it causes. The antisemitic behaviour of one person causes antisemitic harms to another.
This instinct is understandable, but we must separate the what from the how. Today, classical antisemitism—the kind deemed socially reprehensible in the West—is not the primary conduit for the ‘antisemitic’ (as per the IHRA definition) harms today.
European anti-Jewish sentiments resulted in uncounted pogroms, anti-Jewish exclusion, executions, and the eventual extermination of 6 millions in the Holocaust—which remains in living memory.
But there are many ways to hurt Jews, and antisemitism is only one of them. Its predecessor, antijudaism, and its successor, antizionism, are no less conspiratorial and inhumane.
Reducing all anti-Jewish sentiments to ‘antisemitism’ creates a category error: one in which something has to be proven to be ‘antisemitic’ in order to be considered harmful.
This has produced policy no longer fit-for-purpose, dated strategy, and impotence in the post October-7 world.
Antizionism now causes much more harm to Jews than traditional antisemitism.
We have two options:
i) continue to perpetuate this category error by making the argument that antizionism and antisemitism are the same thing, or
ii) accept that antizionism causes harm to Jews—the same harms caused by antisemitism, but through a permissible rhetorical framing of Jewish self-determination being uniquely evil.
Antizionism kills
By relying solely on ‘antisemitism’ to describe the ways in which anti-Jewish hostility is produced, we lose the ability to recognise and confront its ongoing permutations.
Antijudaism, antisemitism, and antizionism are all different libel systems.
They’re produced in different contexts by different groups, they all harm Jews, and all require different strategies to combat.
But even as antizionists maim or kill Jews, our vocabulary is lagging. Is it any less horrifying that antizionism is responsible for the murder of Jews on Bondi Beach? What about the purging of 13,000 Polish Jews in 1968? October 7? Washington? Manchester?
Antisemites do not have a monopoly on killing Jews.
The dangerous asymmetry between anti-Jewish libel systems means that some are treated as inherently illegitimate and pre-emptively dangerous (antisemitism), while others are tolerated, laundered, or even celebrated (antizionism)—simply because they do not resemble the historical image most people associate with the word antisemitism.
To correct this failure, we need to understand what these words mean and how they manifest.
Three anti-Jewish libels
Anti-Jewish hostility reappears across history, reshaping itself to fit new eras while keeping its basic structure intact. Anti-Jewish libel systems and conspiracies tend to cluster into three dominant configurations. Each is a product of what its context deemed socially permissible, and each targets a different aspect of Jewish life with its own politically-inspired, distinct justification. All manifestations stigmatise Jews, mark them for violence, and deny the moral seriousness of the violence produced.
1. Antijudaism (religion-based)
Object: Judaism as faith, covenant, and religious persistence.
• Earliest and most overtly theological form of Jew-hatred.
• Late antiquity to the medieval period: casts Jews as defiant against divine truth—spiritually obstinate, morally compromised, and resistant to redemption.
• Across both Christian and Islamic traditions: polemical argument often treated Jewish survival as a theological problem.
• Libels were theological in character: accusations of sacrilege, poisoning, and ritual murder.
• Responses were coercive: exclusion, forced conversion, legal inferiority, periodic violence.
• Antijudaism did not require Jews to be powerful to snowball: it required only that they endure.
• Antijudaism offered itself as a logical, moral response to the Jewish problem.
2. Antisemitism (race-based)
Object: Jews as a racialised, biological category.
• In modern Europe, religious animus was rebranded as secular, scientific, race-based, and modern.
• Wilhelm Marr claimed to move beyond “old” religious hatred by presenting Jew-hatred as race theory.
• Marr coined ‘antisemitism’ as a more scientific and modern analysis of the Jew, morally seperate from antiquated Jew-hatred. This moral distinction is similar to that of antisemitism/antizionism.
• Jews were presented as an alien, immutable strain within the nation—corrupting national identity, culture, politics, and modernity itself.
• Middle Ages to the modern era: antisemites frequently portray Jews as vermin and various other animals.
• Statue above depicts three pigs in traditional Jewish garb sitting on a bench in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, a popular spa town frequented by prewar European Jewry. A prohibition on Jewish settlement existed in Karlsbad from 1499 to 1793, and until 1848 Jewish residence there was contested in protracted litigation.
• Conspiratorial texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: offered an all-purpose explanation for social anxiety, portraying Jews as hidden, omnipresent, and malign.
• Antisemitism informed Nazism, where Jews were transformed into enemies of the state and their elimination into a moral cause (again.)
• Jews targeted not for belief, but for being foreigners.
• Antisemitism was innately xenophobic.
• Antisemitism reguglarly insisted that “Jews go back to Palestine.” This slogan appeared in graffiti and on pamphlets for decades throughout Europe.
• Nazism pivoted: instead of continuing with “Jews go back to Palestine”, Nazis resorted to exterminating these foreigners.
• Nazi antisemitism saw the Jew as not only foreign, but disloyal. This disloyalty often slated the Jews as communists, turning the Jewish race into both an impurity and a traitor to Germany.
3. Antizionism (self-determination-based)
Object: Jewish collective existence expressed politically—Jewish self-determination and the Jewish state.
Antizionism inverts the antisemites’ insistence on the Jews as Levantine foreigners. The antisemitic push to drive Jews back to their ancestral homeland is turned upside down, erasing not only Jewish history and ancestry, but centuries of persecution based specifically on their position as foreign aliens in Europe.
In the contemporary world, anti-Jewish libels and harm most often move through antizionism. Rather than targeting Judaism or Jews as individuals, antizionism attacks Jewish peoplehood once it becomes political sovereignty. The Jewish state is depicted not as a disputable project with disputable policies, but as uniquely illegitimate in principle, morally stained by definition, and beyond rehabilitation.
Like antisemitism, antizionism does not respond to the real Jew or the real Jewish state, but instead offers itself as a solution to libels about Jewish enterprise of its own making. These libels insist that the Jewish state was born in sin, innately nefarious by design as a colonial, apartheid, genocidal entity from its conception.
The antizionist’s position is not a criticism of Israeli policy. It is an ideology in which the existence of a Jewish state is itself the crime. Jews who affirm Jewish collective existence—wherever they live—are labeled “Zionists” and subjected to social, cultural, and institutional exclusion.
This pattern has precedent. The Soviet Union punished Jews as “Zionists” while dismantling Jewish culture. The Soviets careful to not lean on antisemitism—insisting that their vilification centred attacking Jewish statehood as opposed to Jewish ethnicity. Regimes across the Middle East and North Africa branded Jews “Zionist conspirators” amid expulsions and erasure. In each case, “Zionist” functioned as a moralised proxy that allowed Jews to be targeted without naming them as such.
Soviet antizionism took on an increasingly Cold-War-inspired tenor. That the Americans might have an ally in the Middle East was considered a threat, informing their savage propaganda campaign against Israel’s legitimacy despite having voted in favour of its creation.
Rain, Steam, and Hail.
These three forms are distinct reconstructions of the same underlying hostility, shaped by different historical and moral environments. A useful way to think about this is through the physical states of water.
Water remains chemically identical whether it appears as liquid, steam, or ice. But those different molecular configurations cause harm in radically different ways. You can drown in a flood or be burned to death by steam. Ice in the form of hail can maim or kill. Each is recognisably water, just as antijudaism, antisemitism, and antizionism are recognisably libels that cause Jewish suffering. Each is dangerous. And each requires a different response.
A snorkel might help you survive a flood, but it will not protect you from steam burns. An umbrella might shield you from hail, but it will do nothing underwater. Treating all three hazards as the same is not sophistication—it is misdiagnosis.
Antijudaism, classical antisemitism, and antizionism are environmentally-rearranged pathways that achieve the same ends. Each targets a different object—Jewish belief, Jewish bodies, Jewish collective existence. Each mobilises different justifications. Each produces harm through different mechanisms. And each therefore requires distinct tools of recognition and response.
Strategies developed to confront racial antisemitism are not working against antizionism.
Appeals that eroded theological and racial prejudices are no match for libels that present themselves as a virtuous response to evil. When we insist on using one word for all three, we walk out into a hail storm with a snorkel.
In the video below: watch as the eyeball is passed between ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. We have been taught to think of antisemitism as a ‘shape-shifting virus’. This is poetically potent, but technically misleading. Instead, think about Jew-hatred or anti-Jewish libels as ‘shape-shifting’, and consider antisemitism to be one of the shapes it shifts into. Let the eyeball represent anti-Jewish hatred, and watch as it is wielded in different forms representing different contexts. One of them could represent anti-Judaism, one could represent antisemitism, one could represent antizionism, and all might need completely different context-specific tools to combat.
Precision is a moral obligation
Today, antisemitism functions as a catch-all term for anti-Jewish hostility. This has to stop. When a word is stretched to cover everything, it explains less and persuades fewer. The truth is that most people hurting Jews genuinely hate Nazis.
To those insisting that all forms of anti-Jewish hatred should fall under ‘antisemitism’: how’s that going?
Precision is not a fragmentation or watering down of ‘antisemitism’. There is no point in recognising the harm causes while failing to recognise the socially permissible levers producing it.
Antizionism has become one of the most widespread and least scrutinised ideological formations of the present moment, often conflated with anti-Zionism and presented as a ‘form of political critique’ that can ‘cross a line into antisemitism.
Political criticism is anathema to antizionism. Antizionism weakens Jewish life in the diaspora, endangers Israeli Jews, distorts Palestinian aspirations, and corrodes moral coherence in liberal societies. It persists in part because it is misnamed—or not named at all. It’s killing Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, Israelis in the Holy Land, and diaspora Jews in Bondi.
Australian leaders, Jewish and not, continue to position antizionism as something that genuinely engages with Israel’s actions. In truth, Israel’s actions are retroactively fitted to antizionist bigotry. Most zionists are critical of Israel. If criticism of Israel was synonymous with antizionism, there’d be no zionists left.
The only reason the word ‘zionist’ remains in use is because of the antizionist movement. The ‘zionist’ is no longer a Jew establishing a state, but a symbol of all that is hated, imbued with libels told and repeated ad nauseam by propagandists.
Threats to the existence of the Jewish State keep have kept the word ‘zionist’ alive; as though the zionists did not achieve their goal of creating a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland 80 years ago. The antizionist is not here to criticise, but to re-write history, using the blood of people far away to wash away the shame of the West’s gory transgressions. The zionist has been painted through decades of libels to represent something that it isn’t, no different to the decades of libels that constructed the Jew as worthy of elimination.
The calcification of these libels positions Israel as a tumour containing the entirety of Western sin—a ball of shameful exploits wrapped tightly in a pekeleh far away. Psychologists call this ‘transference’.
To kill the state whose existence embodies ‘colonialism’, ‘apartheid’, and ‘genocide’, is not about justice: it’s about atonement.
To confront hatred truthfully, we must describe it truthfully. Distinct reconstructions of the same hatred demand distinct language, distinct analysis, and distinct strategies.
Dismissing this disambiguation as an academic exercise is a deadly mistake.
Here is a three part series written to distill the entirety of my work on this topic:
With many, many thanks to:
- Adam Louis-Klein
- Andrew Pessin
- Naya Lekht
- Alasdair McCallum
for providing the research, vocabulary and scaffolding we so desperately need.
Here are some great resources if you’re looking to learn more:
Everyone should read this! Illuminating article about the hatred of the collective Jew in different epochs
I don’t necessarily disagree with this framing but I have a somewhat different take, and it draws on the works of Dara Horn, Deborah Lipstadt, and other scholars of Jewish history and anti-Jewish bigotry:
Medieval Christian anti-Jewish bigotry, Islamist anti-Jewish bigotry, 20th century European anti-Jewish bigotry, and modern antizionism actually function quite similarly. They all posit the Jew — whether the Jew as a Christ killer or as an infidel or as a race defiler or as a genocidaire — as the thing holding back civilization from redemption. You can see that in the language used by antizionists today (“if only we destroy Israel, all of our problems with racism and police brutality and colonialism and capitalism will be absolved”) in much the same way the same language was operative to excuse harm against Jews in order to redeem civilization in years past and across geographies.
Whether we use an umbrella term of antisemitism to group all the different blockers the Jew poses in the way of redemption in the conspiratorial mind of the Jew hater is secondary, in my opinion. The semantic warfare plays into the antizionist hands by appearing as if we are trying to police language rather than eliminate harm.
I think it’s more important to point to the actual harm and how it is in fact conspiratorial and parallels anti-Jewish bigotry of years past. We are seeing convergence between modern day Neo Nazis and antizionists for a reason — they echo more than they differ.
George Orwell’s essay on antisemitism in the UK in 1945 I think illustrates this well: in the UK, AFTER the War, Orwell identified deep seated antisemitic sentiments by those who just fought the Nazis. The Brits quoted by Orwell had similarly conspiratorial ideas about Jews as the Nazis, but saw themselves as opposing Nazism.
I think, overall, tackling individual manifestations of anti-Jewish bigotry is a game of whack-a-mole. There will be a new manifestation of anti-Jewish bigotry post-antizionism. And those bigots will go around saying “it’s X, it’s not antizionism!” And they will go around crying the Jew is inventing new made-up theories to silence them, while we simply try to mitigate the same old harm stemmed from obsessive and conspiratorial nonsense about Jewish polity. And they too will team up with antizionists and Neo Nazis and make up mumbo jumbo about the Talmud and Jewish rituals that have nothing to do with reality. Will we then dissect that supposedly new anti-Jewish bigotry as a new, unique thing?