The Paranoid Style in Pro-Israel Polemics

Alan Wald

Jewish Voice for Peace protest at Joe Biden’s State of the Union Speech, March 2024.

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” —Jewish Labor Bund leader Marek Edelman (1919-2009)(1)

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs.” —Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)(2)

I. Disingenuous Allegations

STRAWMANNING LIKE THERE’S no tomorrow, pro-Israel partisans are working double-time to drive anti-Zionist activists back into the closet. Their ruse is to fabricate a fictional Left-wing pro-Palestinian movement for popular consumption: the equivalent of a digitally altered image with anti-Zionism serving as a mask for terrorist-linked antisemitic threats to “Jewish safety.”(3)

The more Israel’s international isolation grows, due to its war crimes and ethnic cleansing, the more frenetic and desperate this over-torquing becomes. Not at all what happens on a sinking ship, right?(4)

To those of us with a first-hand familiarity with the writings, actions, debates and discussions of the actually existing movement against the Israeli state’s genocidal behavior, theirs is a gallingly disingenuous allegation. It’s not merely a speculative fantasy combined with a pathological generalization confected from the complex and nuanced tapestry of a dissenting political movement.

The pro-Israel fabulists relentlessly push into their own heart of darkness to cross over to the wrong side of a moral dividing line. They thus take a place in history as shameless betrayers of a global commitment to universal human rights, international law, and the fair treatment of a stateless population facing an asymmetrical military onslaught.

Yet the grievously curated reality the pro-Israel partisans present is one circulated by more than just journalists in the mainstream press and through social media. This essay will focus on the contribution of a cohort of academics, many of them one-time radicals, that has been congealing into a coherent pro-Israel political bloc around a species of liberal Zionism.

Through books and articles that will be described in Part III of this critique, they have forged a partnership normalizing falsehoods that give fodder to Right-wing zealots as they progressively recapitulate the earlier trajectory of Cold War liberalism.

Like these ignominious predecessors, who first talked of a “Vital Center” to fight “the international communist conspiracy” and then supported the escalation of the Vietnam War, they have been moving steadily toward a parallel, closed ideological system marked by a fixation on Left-wing enemies.

Worse still, these apologists for the Israeli ethno-state are giving credence to a treacherous manipulation of Jewish identity; their fearful exaggerations and misrepresentations are empowering the worldwide nationalist movements looking for vehicles to quash the rights of minorities and dissidents.

Despite Right-wing nationalism’s own history of persecuting the Left out of antisemitic motives, its populist and dictatorial leaders have found it handy to cynically repurpose the allegation of “Left antisemitism” as their newfangled weapon. In the West their main targets include people of color, LGBTQ+, anti-racists, anti-colonialists, immigrants, and radical scholars with whom Jews ought to be united to fight all such intolerance without exception.

The upshot is a campaign for actions on behalf of sequestered demands for “Jewish safety,”(5) invoking special privileges and treatment for this specific group. Thus Jews are placed at odds with the genuine pro-democracy forces that are necessary for future security for everyone in a pluralistic society.

Instead of working for “safety through solidarity”(6) in the United States, these pro-Israel apologists are forging nothing less than a dishonorable tacit alliance with an ominously antisemitic Right in thrall to the Trump administration.

II. An Anti-Zionist Left

To be sure, radicals themselves have long acknowledged and deplored a small antisemitic presence on the Left. This was unmistakable in the 19th century writings of collective anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in their depiction of Jews as conspiratorial, blood-sucking capitalists. It was also evident in the appalling metaphors of the pre-communist Karl Marx about “Mammon as the worldly god of the Jews” — although never in his political policy.(7)

Nonetheless, antisemitism remained a minor, nearly (but not totally) irrelevant factor in the 20th century Left, where there appeared figures like the French syndicalist Georges Sorel, who eventually collaborated with the monarchist Action française.

The most shameful case was the Stalinist Soviet Union, where antisemitism emerged at the state level in the late 1930s, a matter candidly appraised in Columbia University History Professor Mark Mazower’s On Antisemitism: A Word in History (2025).

This is a well-reasoned book that condemns the equation of harsh criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism. Mazower also judges the uproar over “Jewish safety” at Columbia as a transparent excuse to crack down on legitimate protest on behalf of Palestinian rights.

Radical individuals and organizations opposing Zionism, while not always the clearest and most diplomatic in their slogans, have overwhelmingly focused on critiquing Israel’s state policy and nationalist ideology. Although the primary objective has been to defend the human rights of Palestinians and hear their voices, criticizing Jews qua Jews is categorically inconsistent with an anti-Zionist Left.

A mandate to judge all people by behavior, not by religious or ethnic identity, is common sense, because those on the Left are not simply “anti.” In fact, to be exclusively “anti-Zionist” does not address anyone’s motivations and ideas about alternatives. In countering Zionism, and the Israeli state’s form and practice, we on the Left mostly adhere to a positive agenda of socialist, anti-racist ethics and a vision of working-class democracy.(8)

Still, it’s an inescapable fact that no large protest movement can eliminate entirely the uninvited participation of unhinged individuals and provocateurs. There will always be some in a crowd who carry odious signs and shout wretched slogans during a demonstration. Just because they are noisy and visible doesn’t mean that they are politically representative.

Where atrocities are being committed by a state on a massive scale, it is also understandable (although not necessarily condoned) that individual protestors may behave in a violent or destructive manner. One doesn’t always gain notice by being polished and restrained; bullying and intimidation are unacceptable, but there are certainly occasions where one must be loud and radical.

The U.S. Left, as many have authenticated, has been disproportionately Jewish in its composition and leadership, and Jews (especially women) are over-represented in today’s pro-Palestinian campaigns.

In books such as Benjamin Balthasar’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (2025) and Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone’s The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands (2026), the long history of opposition to antisemitism fused with anti-Zionism is documented and discussed.

All the activists I know would forcibly eject genuine Holocaust-deniers and conspiracy theorists from the ranks of any event they organized and exclude them from Left-wing publications.

A primary educational concern of the Left is rebutting the conspiracy theory that Jews as a group are synonymous with Zionism, or collectively responsible for the Israeli state and its brutal actions.

The Left’s differentiation between a millennia-old ancient religion (Judaism) and a relatively recent 19th century nationalist political choice (Zionism, especially statist political Zionism) stands in dramatic contrast to both Right-wing antisemites and mainstream Zionists who equate the two.(9) One pro-Israel Professor of Philosophy has declared: “To be anti-Zionist …is to be anti-Jew.”(10)

In a split screen that perfectly frames the problem, Zionism and the conspiracy-minded Right mutually announce Zionism as central to Jewish identity. In contrast, whatever rubbish may appear deprecating Jews and Jewish culture from demented anti-Israel individuals flaming on X and the internet, the leading organizations and spokespersons for Palestinian rights are clear-cut: No Jews should be blamed for actions of the Israeli government simply because they are Jews.(11)

It may be that some anti-Zionists have felt it would be a waste of valuable time to monitor and repudiate all violations of this policy; but when it comes to bigotry of any kind, we should never let ourselves off too easy.

Antisemitic statements from the homicidal (“gas the Jews”) to the insulting (“Jews always play the victim”), whether spoken out of malice, thoughtless rage or ignorance, must be roundly condemned regardless of their source. Desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are unambiguously off limits.

A poster depicting Netanyahu with bloody hands is no more a “blood libel” than a similar one of Trump, Putin or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; but a caricature of scheming, hook-nosed Jews should be torn to shreds.

III. The Antisemitism Industrial Complex

The origin of the polemical stratagem of “reductio ad antisemitism” found in so many current pro-Israel polemics goes back decades to the earliest backers of a Jewish ethno-state. At that time, the myth of Israel as a progressive social democratic nation, established as a home for refugees and ceaselessly threatened by Jew-hating neighbors, was hegemonic.

The use of this facile rhetorical device grew noticeably after Israel’s wars of 1967 and 1973. Initially it was exercised mainly by the pro-Israeli Right to crush liberal movements such as Breira (Alternative) and New Jewish Agenda, both speaking out against the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and working in support of the then-heretical two-state solution.

With the Hamas-led massacre on 7 October 2023, surpassed by the Israeli state’s genocidal bloodbath in Gaza, reductio ad antisemitism came to the fore with a revitalized epic fury in the hands of backers of the Netanyahu government. At the same time, though, it is forcefully embraced by a very visible and outspoken faction of “two-state” supporters, including those claiming to be progressive and even some with a Marxist history.

This is the bloc of writers of central concern in this article. Whether or not all the associates use the term “liberal Zionism” for self-description, their political positions correlate to these politics — believing that a Jewish-privileged state in this region can somehow be democratic, and that partition into a separate Palestinian state remains viable.(12)

The aim of this tactic, gleefully promoted jointly by this identifiable regiment of liberal Zionists in tandem with those further to the Right, is to craft and promote a one-dimensional conspiracy theory about purported widespread (“rampant”) antisemitism as a central feature of the anti-Zionist Left. The result has been a special kind of self-delusionism characterized by the usual forehead-smacking clichés.

There is now a literary “antisemitism industrial complex” that disseminates the accusations of this grouping through academic journals, collections of essays, and relatively short and somewhat sensationalized, polemical books and pamphlets presenting themselves as scholarly and that feature the work of professors. In effect, a cohort of pro-Israel faculty is engaged in full-time labor in this fiction factory to which they offer a veneer of respectability.

Some examples of the intellectual journals are Fathom (online since 2012) and Telos (founded as Left-wing in 1968, moving to the Right in the 1980s, adamantly pro-Israel after 9/11). Three anthologies from Routledge publishers are Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh, editors, Responses to 7 October: Antisemitic Discourse (2024); Alan Johnson, editor, Mapping the New Left Antisemitism (2024); and David Hirsh, editor, The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century (2024).

A book and a pamphlet are Shalom Lappin’s The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World (2024) and Cary Nelson’s Mindless: What Happened to Universities? (2025).

It’s not that nothing can be learned from all writing by these liberal anti-anti-Zionists, beyond offering a template for the mentality of this genre. Some authors provide noteworthy background information and sometimes introduce complications to historical dilemmas that are useful to consider.

Yet the rhetorical mode of their writing is customarily marked by heated exaggerations, grains of truth blown out of proportion, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy against which historian Richard Hoftstadter warned in a famous essay and book 60 years ago.(13) It is a “paranoid style” of argument that seems a maddingly tunnel-visioned alternate reality when seen in the context of all that is omitted.

IV. “Rampant Antisemitism” and Jewish Safety

With this groundwork providing a kind of academic cover, the allegation of “rampant antisemitism”(14) on the Left has percolated up into the wider public sphere through dumbed down, hyperbolic and increasingly shrill forms. These are then demagogically instrumentalized by pro-Israel government officials, podcasters, and university administrators.

In the context of the worldwide tectonic shift toward reactionary nationalisms, and the Right-wing U.S. culture war underway, a new version of “The Jewish Question” becomes ready for instrumentalization by powerful (largely non-Jewish) elites.

This cry for “Jewish safety” plays a central role as a rhetorical club at U.S. colleges and universities, and not simply to vilify and beat down pro-Palestinian activism. It has become pivotal in energizing related campaigns to crush programs aimed at leveling the racial playing field, mainly by attacking “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) initiatives, and those promoting a fuller and franker understanding of gender difference.

Along the way the democratic rights of faculty, staff and students are trampled, and immigrant rights put under threat. The teaching and administration of Middle East Studies and Jewish Studies programs have been compromised by administrative interventions, as well as fear by faculty of using ideas that may result in student snitches filing complaints about a hostile environment under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.(15)

Tinpot influencers are sometimes put on federal, state and university-level task forces and committees on campuses that are specifically formed to monitor, investigate and combat “antisemitism” or safeguard “Jewish life.” They and university administrators then go on to make charges against faculty, staff and students that fire up the crazies and unleash the rage of an array of bad actors advocating punishment and blacklisting.(16)

Such hounding often occurs via petitions, harassing phone calls, social media slanders, and explicit threats — but there have also been acts of violence against pro-Palestinian students.(17)

Attempts to link the majority of student protestors with foreign terrorist groups are also part of the picture. We are not talking here about random trolls on X and Facebook. University of Michigan (U-M) Regent Jordan Acker told the Guardian in October 2024 that the student encampment to divest from Israel was “a coordinated, foreign-funded student protest that is engaging in violent activity,”(18) and Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud stated in October 2025 of the local protest that “I really believe [they] were encouraged from Iran; it did not have the involvement of very many — if any — of our own students.”(19)

Most recently in June 2026, eight pro-Palestinian individuals associated with U-M were indicted by a federal grand jury. The charges are conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate commerce, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure.

The kind of allegations on which this is based — mainly spray-painting graffiti, breaking windows, and leaving simulated corpses on lawns of U-M regents — normally would be prosecuted as vandalism on a state level, not as conspiratorial federal crimes with possible decades-long sentences.

In court, these acts were characterized by prosecutors as a “terror campaign” meant to intimidate people at the university into divesting from Israel.(20)

The academic promoters of liberal Zionists may try to depict themselves as engaged in an honorable project of exposing antisemitism as they cosplay morality and language police in academic and intellectual life. In reality, they are not merely impugning the pro-Palestinian movement as a whole; they are ginning up a new version of a “Red Scare” with anti-racist youth (many of them Jews) as the “Reds.”

What is mostly happening is that students, faculty, and staff are not being disciplined because they are antisemites — they are being designated antisemites so they can be disciplined.

V. Liberal Zionists Explain Things to Me

Among the many disturbing ironies of this misdirected campaign by the liberal pro-Israel propagandists is that antisemitism is absolutely on the rise in the West, including violent attacks on Jews.(21) U.S. polls show that a large percentage of young Republicans are openly and unabashedly antisemitic.(22) On July 4, hundreds of masked members of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Front marched near the Capitol.

Podcasts, social media channels, church sermons and neo-Nazi political reports are filled with lies that the Jewish Talmud secretly instructs Jews to cheat, rob and harm non-Jews; that Israeli men in New York celebrated as the Twin Towers burned on 9/11; that Israel was behind the murder of Charlie Kirk; that Israel secretly controls foreign policy; and more.(23)

This is the real and dangerous antisemitism, to be distinguished from endless politicized accusations against the anti-Zionist Left that are diluting the term to the point of meaninglessness.

Yet the intellectual firepower of this righteous band of liberal Zionists, aimed primarily at the Left, thwarts an understanding of the causes of Jew hatred, and obscures a focus on the possible solutions. Its opportunist amalgamations of anti-racist/anti-colonialist students with reactionary antisemites are an obstacle to urgently needed effective action.

To my knowledge there are no journals, collections of essays, books, or even pamphlets by this circle that are devoted to the main danger on the Right. Most of the material from these liberal Zionists that does address the Far Right also includes an equivalent component of doubtful assertions about antisemitism on the Left.

The authors use a “horseshoe” argument; that is, modern antisemitism is depicted as a cross-political spectrum issue with far Right and far Left extremists resembling each other. This ignores opposite goals, motivations and social visions, collapsing distinct political and historical categories to draw false equivalences.

Such a warped and obscurantist strategy infects even Pamela S. Nadel’s new book, Antisemitism, An American Tradition (2025), which is devoted primarily to antisemitism historically in the United States, long before the appearance of the Israeli state.

She somehow manages to end up with an entire concluding chapter devoted to cherry-picking aspects of protest incidents to reach an absurd conclusion: “the majority demonstrating for Palestine no longer blur the line between Israel and Jews, between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They have erased it.”(24)

In this, Nadel and others follow the reprehensible methodology of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pseudo-civil rights organization that was recently exposed by the meticulous research of Emmaia Gelman in The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State (2026). With each new ADL report seeming to be a master class in misattributions, the organization is now widely recognized as incapable of separating anti-Israel sentiment from antisemitic sentiment.(25)

The obsessive argument of this liberal academic literature is that antisemitism is found not just in the traditionally documented and theorized record of Jew-hatred; that is, in Christian charges of deicide and punishment by exile; Enlightenment-era beliefs in an inherent Jewish economic parasitism; and Dreyfus-period theories of Jews as an unassimilable and disloyal “race.”

Their claim is that the prevailing expression is a “New Antisemitism,” to be found in certain political views about the character and functioning of the Israeli state.(26) Yet there is little new here, as these accusations are derived from a 2003 formulation of Natan Sharansky, a onetime Soviet dissident and today a staunch Zionist.

Sharansky pronounced the allegedly antisemitic “Three D’s” as: Delegitimization, Demonization, and Double Standards.(27) The word has remained the same but the meaning has changed.

VI. The Captive Mind

No one is suggesting anywhere near complete homogeneity on all questions, or in degrees of competence, among the cohort associated with these publications and books of this Three D perspective.(28) Some are indubitably learned, although there are certainly passages and essays that are shoddy and even howlingly bad, and fact-checking wasn’t done for at least one of the most serious accusations.(29)

On a few occasions, some authors may have escaped the gatekeepers with over-the top claims.(30) Others dare to go full bananas in making it clear that the Left as a whole is the target, although it is arguable that they are simply pulling back the curtain to give us a glimpse of the reality that others will not yet admit.(31)

Yet the point is that the volumes listed earlier in this essay, with about 70 different contributors, are politically circumscribed and exclusive in a general sense. One can see this as part of “The Closing of the Zionist Mind” that has evolved over the decades.

Among the litmus tests for inclusion: The authors all adamantly oppose the movement to transform Israel/Palestine into a one-state secular democracy with equal rights and security for all.

They also repudiate the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement to create pressure for ending financial and political support of the Israeli state, and reject the characterization of the Palestine situation as apartheid. And they oppose the right of Palestinians driven out of their homes in 1948 and after to return, primarily because this would be a threat to the Jewish majority that must be retained at all costs.

As evidence of their liberal and progressive credentials, the pro-Israel apologists are captive minds of one alternative — the “two-state solution.” Of course, this now largely discredited “solution” has no support among the Israeli state leadership and is rejected in any form by almost two-thirds of the Israeli-Jewish population.

For those familiar with the realities of the on-the-ground situation in Israel/Palestine, the manner in which this cohort relies on the two-state alternative for their progressive credentials amounts to nothing more than super-sized ass-covering.(32) In their hands, it operates as an ideology that camouflages contradictions, assists domination, and thwarts emancipation.

Numerous Middle East specialists judge the idea of a separate Palestinian state to be obviously unfeasible for multiple reasons. These include the extraordinarily asymmetrical economic chasm that exists between the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian population; the Israeli insistence that any Palestinian state must be demilitarized while the nuclear-armed Israeli state remains the most powerful in the region; and the near-impossible removal of the 700,000, many violent, Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Paradigm Lost: From the Two-State Solution to the One-State Reality (2019), by University of Pennsylvania Professor and past president of the Association for Israel Studies Ian Lustick, is among the most influential books making the case that a single non-democratic state in Palestine already exists and the two-state alternative is long dead.

What is required now are democratic steps toward a state transformation away from a “Jewish state” to a state for all its citizens. All inhabitants of this state would be allowed to retain their diverse culture, communities and language. This should be the norm in every country in the world, including the various Islamic, Christian, and Buddhist states, and any and all settler-colonial states.(33)

Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine.

It’s a view of the goal for Israel/Palestine consistent not only with many Palestinian experts (Saree Makdisi, Rashid Khalidi, Tareq Baconi) but also with pro-Palestinian Rabbi Shaul Magid, Harvard Professor of Modern Jewish Studies. Magid, the author The Necessity of Exile (2023), made his opinion clear in his review of Lustick’s book:

“The two-state-solution mantra of liberal Zionism is becoming more and more dangerous, and liberal Zionists are wasting precious time by their attachment to it… the belief in two states is arguably more a crutch of one’s Jewish identity than a real assessment of the one state that exists between the river and sea, called Israel.”(34)

Neither Lustick nor Magid nor any of the others are under any illusion that the reconstruction of a new, democratic state will be a seamless march to the future.

This degree of extreme difficulty in achieving peace is the excruciatingly challenging situation in many countries of the world. Sudan, where the death toll is twice that of Gaza, is but one example — but we can’t give up on our objectives and settle for compromises that ultimately lead nowhere because the root problem is not addressed.

The point here is that the two-state solution is not a solution. Even if it should end up somehow on the table as a shuffling of the status quo of colonization and occupation, it is simply not a long-term viable option.

VII. Lost in Translation

In assessing the argumentation of the liberal Zionist literature under scrutiny in this essay, the most vexing problem lies in ascertaining the definition of most of their key terms. Their writings manage to take the post-modernist notion of a “floating signifier” to new levels. What views should actually count as “delegitimization,” “demonization,” and “double standards”? And who is to decide the boundaries so that an act of criticizing the structures or behavior of a state can be judged an act of demonizing?

We can agree that the peculiar term “antisemitism” (the word “semitic” refers to an Afro-Asiatic language family) now means “Jew hatred.” Prior to the 1948 formation of the Israeli state there could be a consensus around obvious examples. One instance would be the scapegoating of Jews as a group responsible for catastrophes, from well-poisoning and plagues to the “stab-in-the back” belief that Jews caused Germany’s defeat in World War I.

Another would be attributing secret control of the media, economy and government to Jews as a group. Beyond these there are Holocaust denial or minimization, the attribution of group physical traits, the belief that Jews manipulate the global financial situation, and so on.

In contrast, today’s pro-Israel liberals make their case that anti-Zionist positions and certain criticisms of the Israeli state are antisemitic because they qualify as antisemitic under Sharansky’s Three D’s. And they prove this by “translating” the words of critics, as well as often attributing psychological motives and speculating about emotions.

If one reads through the litany of accusations against the Left in this literature, one finds that instead of using the actual language and demands of the leading critics, the authors often paraphrase them into an alternative wording that suits their political needs.

In Mapping the New Left Antisemitism, the emergence of the pro-Palestinian movement is called “The Rise of a ‘We Are All Hezbollah now!’ Left” (xxi), apparently based on a chant and perhaps some signs of an unknown number of protestors among a crowd of perhaps 25,000 in central London back in 2006. Of course, anyone who has followed the movement knows that versions of “Immediate Ceasefire” have been the overwhelmingly predominant chants and slogans.

In the same book we are told that Left anti-Zionism is antisemitism because its supporters “deny Israel’s right to exist” (54) and that “self-determination for the Jewish people came to be seen as the epitome of evil” (90). Moreover, it is asserted that the anti-Zionist Left sees the formation of Israel as “a conspiracy of Zionism, conceived of as a demonic force outside of general history and outside Jewish history.” (53)

Michael Walzer, possibly the most humane, decent, and academically qualified contributor to this volume, makes a softer assertion: “I take ‘Zionism’ to mean a belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state, nothing more. Anti-Zionism denies that rightfulness.” (8)

The problem is that, even here, except for some ultra-Orthodox sects such as Neturei Karta that oppose any Jewish self-determination in the form of a state prior to the arrival of the Messiah, categorical opposition to any and all forms of Jewish self-determination under any circumstances is hard to find. Most significantly, this is not the main point — which is the behavior of the actually existing Israeli state, and of the Zionist movement then and now.(35)

The objection of the pro-Palestinian movement is not to some imaginary Jewish state that could exist somewhere else in the world, but to the form and practice of one particular type of Jewish nationalism in a certain geographic location, which is what Zionism is.(36)

Zionism has been proven in historical context to be a version of self-proclaimed self-determination with a goal: claiming the Arab-majority territory of Palestine for a Jewish ethno-state, although originally the expression “homeland” was sometimes used. Some critics, like the General Jewish Labor Bund, understood that creating an exclusive Jewish homeland in a territory occupied by another people could lead to disaster in the long run.(37)

What happened in Palestine, starting in the late 19th century, can be more accurately described as a type of settler colonialism than as national self-determination.(38) The idea that self-determination can be accurately used to describe mass immigration (even as refugees) to a territory already inhabited by a vast majority of a different religion and culture is certainly open to debate.

To many of us the situation looks like more of a violation of self-determination — of the Palestinian Arabs. This is especially the case when justified by Ben-Gurion’s ironic phrase that “God promised it to us.”

The matter is further complicated when the aim of a minority becomes to drive out the Indigenous population and continuously expand the territory in a manner maintaining a new majority of previously persecuted refugees — many of whom probably would have preferred to emigrate to the United States or England if racist policies had not prevented this.

To object to this form of settler-colonialism certainly does not mean to deny that there are deep cultural ties in Judaism to the region. as well as a history of continuous Jewish presence in Palestine. To see all Jews in Palestine as occupying white settlers would be as inaccurate as Joan Peters’ fraudulent claim in From Time Immemorial (1984) that Palestinians were recent economic migrants.

However, the numbers of Indigenous Jews were numerically small (eight or nine percent) until colonization began in the late 19th century. Then some 240,000 desperate refugees from European antisemitism arrived in the Fifth Aliyah during the 1930s, with 250,000 Jews coming from Arab countries between 1948 and 1951.

It is also worth noting that scholarship about Zionism as one distinct form of settler-colonialism is a crucial way for disavowing anything specifically “Jewish” about the behavior of the Israeli state in its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism claims that Left anti-Zionists see the Nakba as a “unique evil.” (55) Yet the antisemitic notion that elements of “Jewish character” or tradition is responsible for such atrocities is more likely to fester among those who believe the Zionist myth that the return from Galut (exile) is a Jewish spiritual and cultural “national” ingathering.

The explanation of settler-colonialism argues an alternative: That it was an event shaped by British imperialism and Nazi genocide. Scholars have demonstrated that for its ethnic cleansing the Israeli state incorporated methods and ideology derived mainly from British behavior during the Mandate period and throughout its empire.(39)

Another “translation” involves the issue of state transformation. Here we find the demand to democratize the state, end Jim Crow segregation within the Green Line, and grant civil rights to the West Bank and Gaza, continually translated into “destruction of Israel.” This is language that to many suggests the killing of the Jewish population in the current Israeli state, especially since Jews are regularly referred to in historical and religious texts as “the children of Israel.”

But this is not language to be found in the major critics and spokespersons today.(40) Constant translation of normal if harsh political criticisms into inflammatory language, as seen in phrases like “Israel-haters” employed by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens,(41) is regularly used to prove the “demonization” charge.(42)

It’s also a way to avoid rational discourse about the validity of the criticisms themselves. Naturally, there are cultural consequences to a repeated referencing of these same translations — many of which qualify for the overused trope award (for example, “Israel is being singled out,” “This is a blood libel,” “Jewish critics are self-hating”).

This inculcates narrow perspectives on readers (a kind of “argument collapse”) and amplifies standard talking points in place of contextualized reasoning.

VIII. Indexicality Be Damned

There are many obvious “tells” within such argumentation that expose its specious basis, a cavalier attitude that can be summed up as “indexicality be damned.”(43) Let me count the ways.

Most of all, there are nonstop cases in point when it comes to their strategic ambiguity about representing Left anti-Zionist opinion. Everyone knows that, like all social movements, the Left is heterogeneous and contradictory, full of self-styled revolutionaries of many stripes and reformists; pacifists and electoralists; those devoted to mass action in the streets and ultraleft provocateurs; self-critical individuals as well as a few who seem to lack doubts and think that a ruthless attack must be met with a ruthless response; and so on.

There are also, sadly, purists who police other anti-Zionists for deviations, splitting the movement and devouring their own for not toeing what they imagine to be a sufficiently revolutionary or anti-colonialist line. No one is claiming that the anti-Zionist Left is reducible to only high-minded and faultless people.

The most obvious way to create a plausible definition and develop a critique of Left anti-Zionism would be to identify the most prominent intellectual and political spokespersons. These might be those with the most influential books who are cited most frequently, and leaders of major organizations.

Yet the evidence employed in many of the liberal Zionist polemics focus on a lone banner at a demonstration, a quote from an angry speech, a fragment of a sentence from a YouTube video, decontextualized statements, or the fact of an appearance by an anti-Zionist leader at an event with a controversial person. What we find is not a thoughtful consideration of what people actually think but a goulash of gotcha moments.

In the case of the United States, it is not difficult to identify reliable sources to represent the protest movement. For many decades the late Edward Said and Noam Chomsky have been the outstanding critics of Israeli state policy.
In the 21st century the best known include Rashid Kahlidi, Judith Butler, and Peter Beinart, and the Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé is certainly an exceptional influence. Jewish Voice for Peace is certainly among the leading political movements, with 750,000 supporters and over 100 grassroots chapters on campuses and in cities.

One would expect studies claiming “rampant” antisemitism to explore the large amount of material from these sources to make its case. But most of the volumes don’t even mention them!(44)

Responses to 7 October has one reference to an enigmatic (alleged) quote from Pappé for which there is no source (12); The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century also has one quote from Pappé taken from YouTube that is used to suggest that BDS was not started by Palestinians (12); and Mapping the New Left Antisemitism has two brief quotes from Pappé (42, 43) that it calls lies but for which it provides no footnotes (only one book title).

Chomsky is mentioned twice in this last book, once as author of the work in which the Pappé quote is said to appear (43), and once simply as a source that someone else is said to have used. (81) The same book also says that Jewish Voice for Peace “joined the anti-colonialist left, adopting its rabidly anti-Zionist views” (201) but gives no source.

Judith Butler, outspoken supporter of Palestinian self-determination and favorite rightwing target.

Judith Butler gets the most attention and is described in Responses to October 7 as “perhaps the most globally influential left academic theorist.” Yet all we get here is an unsourced quotation to the effect that she allegedly spoke to her students describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “progressive,” “part of the left,” and “extremely important.” (60)

The same quote appears in Mapping the New Left Antisemitism (45, with the source given as a Fathom essay by someone else, without a page number).(45) These are slender reeds on which to hang their definition of an imaginary antisemitic Left; but they give an idea of the quality of research and documentation in much of this material.(46)

To its credit, this last volume does include a 14-page essay by Stanford University Professor and Telos editor emeritus Russell Berman called “Mis-reading Hannah Arendt: Judith Butler’s Anti- Zionism and the Eichmann Trial.” (259-73)

It’s a dense and specialized critique, but the issue of Zionism is not a simple one, and both Butler and Arendt are difficult figures. As one might expect, it is also one-sidedly antagonistic to Butler, so damaging reputations is still the name of the game. Yet it’s not on the level of the editor of the special issue of Telos on “Politics and the University” who can write of “Hamas’s depraved killing spree…filtered through the minds of Fanon, Said, and their rival in blood-lust, Judith Butler.” (65) No subtlety there.

IX. Axis of Idiocy

To be sure, liberal Zionists object to the rhetoric and methods of the present Israeli government and of the Far Right. In this sense they believe they are better defenders of the Jewish ethno-state than Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, even as they do what amounts to “opposition research” for them and also for “Project Esther” of the Heritage Foundation — which uses concerns about “Jewish safety” to advance its Christian Nationalist agenda.(47)

In this double game one finds a disturbing resemblance to the liberal anticommunists of the Cold War Era who denounced the reckless rhetoric and methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy and other reactionary zealots, even as they refused to oppose the political witch-hunt itself.

Their view was that the McCarthyites were impeding the authentic and necessary fight against the Communist subversion within, and the international Communist conspiracy’s aggression without.(48)

Simply put, the appearance and methodology of this type of pro-Israel liberal Zionism is not some advance to a higher level of thinking and understanding provoked by new objective conditions. Their circumscribed and circular arguments suggest minds caged in a reversion to familiar tropes and styles of deradicalization that lead to modus vivendi with imperialism.

Much of this pro-Israel strategy is borrowed from the past, including even the presence of ex-Marxists as fuglemen leading the charge. It reminds us of how much the Cold War liberal rhetorical style remains with us, and that we are likely to see an evolution parallel to those liberals who subsequently morphed to neo-conservatism — if that hasn’t happened in some cases already.

Moreover, their approach of coddling the rulers runs counter to everything we have learned about how one should respond to the way antisemitism has worked throughout history. This is particularly disturbing because a substantial portion of those with liberal Zionists politics identify as Jews. Politically speaking, they have cemented a pact that amounts to an axis of idiocy.

What should have been absorbed from history is that European sovereigns, nobles and church officials started out in the 11th century by putting Jews in privileged positions as tax collectors, rent collectors, and money lenders. Two centuries later, when the general population became discontented over poverty and natural catastrophes, Jews were turned into political and economic fall guys to divert anger away from the elites.

When the time comes that calls for “Jewish safety” are no longer needed as a mechanism for repression by MAGA and other nationalists, the current partnership is certain to backfire and transform into familiar antisemitic scapegoating. With the ideals of Marek Edelman ignored and bridges to traditional allies among the oppressed broken, the real safety of ordinary Jews everywhere will be jeopardized.

We know the drill: First Jews are used as instruments and then they become victims. Even members of the pro-Israel Jewish establishment, now riding the Trump Tiger to enhance their influence (and for the ADL, boosting revenues due to fearmongering), can meet the same grim fate as did most of the “court Jews” of the early modern period. Those currently demanding privileges for Jews and punishment of pro-Palestinians are temporarily profiting by engagement in a kind of cross-pollination with MAGA.

/p>In their promotion of frequently spurious claims about “Jewish safety” in the paranoid style of their pro-Israel polemics, they are not the ones primarily responsible for antisemitism. However, as with the court Jews, certain behavior gives credence to the worst antisemitic stereotypes. Of course, having made terrible choices, few will be able to outrun the consequences.

Notes

1. Edelman was also a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Polish Solidarność, and a life-long Anti-Zionist. Among many sources for this quotation, see: https://oko.press/paralizujaca-aura-holokaustu-gaza-wywiad
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2. Ben-Gurion was the leader of the socialist-Zionist Mapai party. Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paradoxe Juif (Paris: Stock, 1976), 121. The remark, although from Goldmann’s memory, is consistent with several other statements made by Ben-Gurion.
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3. Throughout this essay there are quotations and book titles by individuals who spell “antisemitism” as “anti-semitism.” We have followed the originals.
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4. For one of many articles discussing a shift among Democrats away from uncritical support of Israel see: Michael Arria, “Voters are Forcing Democrats,” Mondoweiss, 22 July 2026.
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5. The phrase is used ubiquitously as in this headline from a statement by the American Jewish Committee: “AJC Leadership Meets with European Officials, Demands Jewish Safety Be Prioritized” in https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-leadership-meets-with-european-officials-demands-jewish-safety-be-prioritized. Note that the statement alleges a “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam in November 2024 and makes no references to other targeted groups, such as Muslims. In fact, research shows that while the disgusting phrase “Jew hunt” did appear in a chat group, the violence was instigated by Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans who had committed vandalism and shouted anti-Arab slogans.
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6. See the fine book by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2024), which I reviewed, “Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism,” ATC 232, September/October 2024.
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7. See Hal Draper, “Marx and the Economic Jew Stereotype” (1977): https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1977/kmtr1/app1.htm. Although Draper is not as disturbed by Marx’s language as I am, his argument that Marx wrote in defense of the civil and political rights of Jews is compelling.
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8. Israeli is far from the only state demanding condemnation for war crimes but is unique in the amount of support received from the West and the amount of white-washing propaganda it receives as a “democracy.”
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9. The conflation of Jews and Zionism by individuals such as David Duke and Nick Fuentes is well-known. For the American Jewish Committee position, see: https://www.ajc.org/news/it-must-be-restated-israel-is-central-to-judaism-and-jewish-identity. Of course, Zionism is complex and has undergone an evolution so that past heterogeneity has been qualitatively diminished by its present form. Even so, there are still admirable individuals who call themselves Zionist but who carry out activities obviously in contradiction to the dominant form, such as those who participate in “protective presence” activities in the West Bank, which includes Rabbis for Human Rights. Individuals should be evaluated by their actions more than by political labels that they may be using in a mistaken or eccentric manner.
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10. Andrew Pesson, “The End of the Academy as We Knew It,” Telos 207 (2024):86.
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11. See the Jewish Voice for Peace statement differentiating Jews from Zionism: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/zionism/
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12. Of course, not everyone who holds a two-state position combines it with the kind of anti-Left campaign of the particular cohort I am addressing. For example, Norman Finkelstein, who identifies as an anti-Zionist, regards the two-state position as the only pragmatic possibility at present and is their frequent target. In my experience it is possible to have comradely dialogue with individuals holding the two-state position or who even think of themselves as Zionist; but once they begin characterizing those holding one-state anti-Zionist position as antisemitic, it becomes clear that thoughtful and open exchange is no longer possible.
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13. “The Paranoid Style in America Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, and The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965).
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14. The phrase “rampant antisemitism” is now regularly used to describe the reason for federal lawsuits against universities where pro-Palestine protests have occurred: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5798173-trump-harvard-ucla-antisemitism/
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15. For the removal of the Chair of Middle East Studies at Harvard see: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/29/harvard-cmes-director-departure. For the removal of the chair of Jewish Studies at Indiana University see: https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/10/iu-jewish-studies-director-unprecedented-replacement
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16. See Wald, “Trump’s War on Free Speech and Higher Education”: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc237/trumps-war-on-free-speech-higher-ed/
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17. See: https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2024/05/uc-campus-protests/
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18. See: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/24/michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel-campus-gaza-protests. In June 2026, Acker was shown by an investigation to have circulated lewd and misogynistic messages on a work messaging platform about a female undergraduate student at the University of Michigan and a Democratic strategist. He offered a non-apology apology to the Board of Regents and was applauded by them but condemned by the U-M Faculty Senate. See: https://facultysenate.umich.edu/statement-concerning-regent-acker/
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19. See: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-872108.
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20. See “UM Group Orchestrated Terror,” Detroit News, 10 June 2023.
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21. See Gilbert Achcar, “Why is there a Surge in Antisemitism?”: https://anticapitalistresistance.org/why-is-there-a-surge-in-antisemitism/. Among the violent incidents of concern are ones leading to at least 20 deaths in 2025. These include 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, two people during an attack outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, England on Yom Kippur, another two people outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. in May, and one person in a firebombing during a walk for Oct. 7 hostages in Boulder, Colorado in June. Such incidents understandably provoke fear among Jews, and protest movements should be sensitive to the possibility of their anger and militancy being misunderstood. That said, the primary issue remains the abuse of the U.S. and Israeli governments against Palestinians, and the most effective way to respond to policies in the movement with which one disagrees is to work harder to advance the most effective ones for building a movement in support of Palestinian human rights.
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22. See: https://thejewishindependent.com.au/young-republicans-antisemitism-alarming/
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23. See: “How Antisemitism Recruits” on the Nexus Project: https://nexusproject.us/nexus-resources/how-antisemitism-recruits-five-conspiracy-theories-and-how-they-fall-apart/. Some of the recent disillusionment in MAGA with Israeli foreign policy (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens) is based on conspiracy theories about Jewish power — not genuine sympathy for Palestinian human rights. Needless to say, the anti-Zionist Left should have no association with such elements. See the many articles documenting that their main concern is “America First” and a belief that Israel is manipulating the U.S. government for its own interests. See “Conservative Influencers Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens” in Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 29 December 2025.
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24. Pamela S. Nadel, Antisemitism, An American Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), 254.
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25. See: https://forward.com/opinion/625117/wikipedia-adl-unreliable-jonathan-greenblatt/ See also: https://jewishcurrents.org/the-shame-of-the-american-jewish-establishment
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26. The expression “The New Antisemitism” first became popularized after the Six-Day War in 1967, and was used in an Anti-Defamation League publication, The New Anti-Semitism (1974). The claim that criticism of the Israel state was a mask for Jew-hatred has been pursued in many books, such as Shalom Lapin, The New Antisemitism: The Emergence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World (2024). This approach is also expressed in the notorious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
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27. See Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” in Fall 2004 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review (Vol. 16, Nos. 3-4).
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28. In Mapping the New Antisemitism, one sees both more and less sympathetic assessments of the concept of “intersectionality” (22, 282).
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29. One of the pieces in Telos claims that a Yale student was stabbed in the eye by a Palestinian flagpole (121); the Forward, among other sources, documented that this never happened: https://forward.com/opinion/608230/jews-have-to-stop-believing-conspiracy-theories-yale-columbia-antisemitism/
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30. I was dumbfounded to read this preposterous summary of an alleged “opinion” of a “significant sector of the Left” by the late Norman Geras: “It doesn’t matter if criticism of and attitudes to Israel are anti-semitic so long as they are also anti-Zionist.” Geras, “Second Preface,” David Hirsh, ed., The Re-birth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2024), XV.
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31. The “Preface” to Mapping the New Left Antisemitism states that the Left in the 21st century is “no longer satisfied with addressing the oppressive structures of social relations, as we had been; they wanted to smash everything: truth, reason, civil society, state, freedom, law, community, nation, democracy and friendship” (xxiv). The same volume contains the bizarre claim that anti-Zionists hold that only “the little Jewish state” (45) merits a boycott. Of course, it is indisputable that BDS is modeled on the boycott campaign against South Africa.
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32. See the recent critique of the one-state position by Norman Solomon in Informed Comment, 18 July 2026. Just to be clear, groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS do not have a formal position on the matter of the number of states one supports; the issue is one of political demands made on the U.S. and Israel.
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33. The frequent demand to respond “Yes” or “No” as to whether Israel has “the right to exist” is a trick question that can’t be answered without clarifications of definitions and context. Most social theorists regard all states as “political entities” which do not have a right to permanently exist as they come into existence and disappear, alter their territories over time, and undergo profound changes in political/economic structure and even name. Moreover, an existing state can be “destroyed” in different ways; for example, by profoundly revising its governmental forms and dismantling its demographic identity without attacking its population. The prevailing aspiration of the socialist anti-Zionist Left is to peacefully transform Israel as the exclusively Jewish nation-state now ruling historic Palestine, turning it into a single, secular, democratic state where Israelis and Palestinians share equal voting and civil rights.
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34. See: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/two-state-solution
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35. To be sure, socialists look forward to a time in the future when states themselves will be abolished and humanity will live in self-administered societies; but we live in an age where self-determination, and, in some cases autonomous states, are still required for oppressed national minorities.
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36. While Zionism is the most successful form of Jewish nationalism, the General Jewish Labor Bund advocated Diaspora nationalism; Birobidzhan was a Soviet state-sponsored secular Jewish homeland (now the administrative capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Federation); and Territorialism and Canaanism are some other examples. Moshe Machover, a leading Marxist anti-Zionist, argues that a Hebrew-speaking nation, distinct from Jews in the Diaspora, exists in Palestine with the right to self-determination — although not one to be exercised through an oppressor settler state like Israel. This was originally the position of the Marxist group in Israel called Matzpen, which was founded in 1962 and existed into the 1980s. The view still has some support among socialist activists today.
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37. About the Bund and similar groups see Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016).
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38. Moreover, “self-determination” doesn’t even necessarily mean the establishment of a full-blown autonomous state; there are other forms of self-rule (such as federalism and varieties of autonomy) that allow a group to freely pursue economic, cultural and social development.
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39. See the documentation provided in Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. (2022).
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40. Of course, its common attribution to the anti-Zionist Left means that some radicals may thoughtlessly repeat it.
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41. See Bret Stephens, “The Genocide Charge,” New York Times, 16 January 2025.
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42. The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century uses “professional Israel-haters” (xi).
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43. “Indexicality” is the question of who is speaking and in what context the remark is made.
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44. Here I am mostly relying on the indexes to the books, although they are not always reliable.
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45. In another essay I have addressed the issue of support for the right of armed resistance, and the fact that this does not mean support for the ideology and actions of every group or individual who claims to be acting in that manner. See “Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence”: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc230/frantz-fanon-and-the-paradox-of-anticolonial-violence/. For a compelling critique of Hamas, see Gilbert Achcar, Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World Historical Perspective (2025). Also see the review by David Finkel, “Genocide in Perspective,” ATC 237, July/August 2025.
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46. There are some instances where a footnote number appears a few sentences after a controversial citation but that source refers to another subject. Absent and confusing documentation is an issue throughout all the volumes, and the 121-page pamphlet Mindless contains no footnotes or source references at all.
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47. See: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/whats-project-esther/
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48. They also supported or remained silent about liberal imperialist interventions of the era, except for some opposition to that in the Dominican Republic in 1965-66.
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September-October 2026, ATC 244