Mick Hartley

Shalom Lappin at Quillette looks at the history of anti-Zionism, and the strands that have come together – especially since October 7th – to produce the modern anti-Zionist movement that’s become such a dominant driving force in our current political climate.

Opposition to Zionism from outside the Jewish Community came from three primary sources in the 20th century: Nazism, Soviet communism and its supporters, and Islamism working in concert with Arab nationalism. In his 2024 book Three Faces of Antisemitism, historian Jeffrey Herf documents the Nazi campaign against the creation of a Jewish state, which became a central theme of the Third Reich’s ideology from 1937 onwards. It drove the regime’s attempt to recruit Arab and Muslim support against the Allies in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Nazi propaganda machine portrayed the Zionist project and the Yishuv (the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine) as the focus of an international Jewish conspiracy intent on colonising Europe and the Muslim world. According to this account, a Zionist lobby was directing the British, the French, and the Americans to dispossess the Arabs. The Nazis said that they would liberate the Arabs from the Zionist invaders, who were using Western colonialism as their vehicle for domination.

Soviet Anti-Zionism.

Anti-Zionism became a prominent component of Soviet policy in the 1920s. Zionism was stigmatised as a reactionary bourgeois movement that ran counter to the interests of the revolution. Between 1918 and 1929, the Yevsektsiya—the Jewish department of the Soviet Communist Party—was tasked with dismantling the independent institutions and organisations of Jewish life in the Soviet Union so that Jews could become faithful Soviet loyalists. Zionist organisations, the Bund, Hebrew-language instruction, synagogues, Yeshivot, schools, and the other agencies of Jewish religious and civic life were abolished. And when this process was complete, the Jewish communists who worked in the Yevsektsiya were exiled to the gulag or executed.

During the postwar period, anti-Zionism became a central theme of the Stalinist show trials and purges of communist Jews in the Soviet Union and its satellite, including the notorious 1952 Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia. Jews were frequently accused of spying for Israel, and of being cosmopolitans who lacked loyalty to the countries in which they lived. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, anti-Zionist campaigns became a staple of Soviet domestic and foreign policy, as well as that of its allies. The communist Polish government effectively expelled a large part of its remnant Jewish community during one such campaign in 1968–9. The trigger for this assault was the Polish regime’s attempt to blame “Zionist agents” for the widespread student and worker protests that had erupted in 1968.

The Soviets were also instrumental in popularising the genocide libel. Their ambassador to the UN, Yakov Malik, charged Israel with “racial genocide” on 10 May 1976 during a Security Council debate about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And this was not the first time that the charge was made in the UN. In a 2025 paper, Norman Goda observes that, in October 1948, Salah Eddine Tarazi, the Syrian delegate to the UN Legal Committee, attempted (unsuccessfully) to get the Committee to revise the draft of the Genocide Convention to cover the displacement of Palestinian refugees in the 1948 war. Czechoslovakia expelled approximately three million ethnic Germans in 1946–7, and Poland expelled at least nine million during the same period. The USSR also forced out several hundred thousand ethnic Germans after the war. These “population transfers” were, in most cases, implemented as government policies but they were never described as genocide. Instead, they were accommodated as unfortunate but understandable retaliatory actions against a hostile population, in the aftermath of a devastating war.

The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign reached a climax with the USSR’s sponsorship of the UN General Assembly resolution identifying Zionism with racism and apartheid. The resolution passed the Assembly on 10 November 1975, and it was only annulled on 16 December 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. For a brief period, obsessive anti-Zionism waned on the Left during the post-communist years in Eastern Europe and the period of the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000.

Islamist and Arab Nationalist Anti-Zionism

The breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War catalysed Arab nationalism and political Islamism, both of which sought to end Western influence and colonial rule in the Middle East and North Africa. This period also coincided with an increase in Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and the rise of the Yishuv as a major centre of Jewish political life there. Arab nationalists in Palestine perceived the Zionist project as a direct threat to their own aspirations, while the Islamists objected to a Jewish polity in historically Islamic territory. Both movements regarded the Zionists as a spearhead for Western imperialism, rather than as the national movement of Jewish refugees escaping violent oppression in different parts of the diaspora.

In 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It supported the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, and it used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a key recruiting text to attack local Jewish communities and the Zionist project. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and chair of the Palestine Higher Committee, coordinated the Arab revolt in Palestine from 1936–9. He was forced into exile, initially in Iraq, and then in Berlin, where he broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic across the Muslim world. Husseini was close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which fielded its own volunteer troops alongside Egyptian forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

While the Arab nationalists opposed Zionism in secular and territorial terms, the Islamists saw the conflict as a religious struggle to preserve and extend the purity of the Islamic domain against a corrupt adversary. The two perspectives were frequently combined into a Messianic anti-Zionism. When the Soviet Union became the main source of military and political support for Arab nationalism in general (and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in particular), the formulation of Arab anti-Zionism was adjusted to accord more closely with Soviet ideological categories, at least when it was marketed to Western audiences.

Contemporary Anti-Zionism

The three major strands of non-Jewish anti-Zionism described above are all expressions of the antisemitic ideologies from which they are derived. Nazism saw Zionism as an instrument of a nefarious conspiracy perpetrated by a degenerate people who sought to corrupt and dominate European civilisation. Soviet anti-Zionism was rooted in the idea that the Jews are particularists and capitalists resistant to a revolutionary universalist and socialist order. Islamist and Arab nationalist anti-Zionism imported Christian religious hatred of Jews and the racialised antisemitism of the Nazis, and melded these themes with an anti-colonial narrative grounded in resistance to the Crusades.

Contemporary anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is postmodern. It moves beyond the traditional political categories of the 19th and early 20th centuries to encode a totalising worldview that blends the three main tributaries of traditional anti-Zionism into a single stream. It features the Nazis’ racialised perception of Israel as the focus of an intrinsically evil conspiracy that threatens civilisation. It takes Israelis, as well as their Jewish supporters, to be irredeemably degenerate. It includes the Soviet attitude towards Israel and Zionists as agents of genocidal colonialism, racism, and rapacious capitalism. Finally, it adopts the Islamist perspective that the eradication of Israel is the centrepiece of an eschatological struggle against the forces of darkness.

Misconstruing this postmodern variant of anti-Zionism as an entirely new phenomenon misses the basic properties that have characterised anti-Jewish bigotry for millennia. Central to all incarnations of this bigotry—religious, racial, and political—is the foundational conviction that the Jews constitute an illegitimate collectivity that obstructs the redemption of the world. Where Jews were once held to be a uniquely malevolent people, today Israel is held to be a uniquely malevolent state. Postmodern anti-Zionism insists that Israel is not a real country (unlike other post-colonial states such as Jordan and Iraq); it is an unnatural construct, the disappearance of which will produce a utopian era of decolonised justice and peace in the Middle East and beyond. How exactly this is to be achieved is usually left unspecified. However, Westerners who declare their support for “resistance” movements like Hamas and Hezbollah implicitly endorse those groups’ declared goals of expulsion and genocide.

Organised Jewish communities in the diaspora are considered a legitimate target of the increasingly aggressive and occasionally violent anti-Zionist campaign. They are seen as the hinterland of Israel’s support system, and the centre of the lobby that manipulates Western foreign policy. Individual Jews are condemned as agents of Zionism, unless they are prepared to disavow and denounce Israel, in which case they are paraded as examples of “good Jews,” just as their predecessors in the Yevsektsiya were before them. And like the compliant Yevsektsiya Jews, the revolution will most likely turn on them once they are no longer useful.

Early Zionist theorists predicted that the creation of a territorial Jewish polity would eliminate antisemitism by normalising the conditions of Jewish life. Jews would become a nation like any other. In fact, the success of the Zionist project generated the reverse effect. The culturally entrenched view of Jews as an illegitimate entity was sharpened and projected on to Israel, as the clearest expression of Jewish collectivity. Independence now offers Jews unconditional refuge and the means of self-defence, but it has not altered historical cultural patterns of anti-Jewish racism. Antisemitism is polymorphic, assuming different formulations in distinct historical contexts. Today, it is expressed as anti-Zionism, but it continues to be powered by the same obsessions….

The virulence of contemporary anti-Zionism was apparent in the glee with which many Israel haters greeted the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was then amplified in the widespread anti-Jewish violence that accompanied Israel’s devastating military response. Many people were shocked by these developments, but the redemptive racism unleashed over the past three years has been lurking beneath the surface for decades.

Anti-Zionism is a symptom of a crisis in the Western social order, conditioned by profound economic disruption and rapid technological change. This has precipitated a breakdown of the broad consensus that defined public discourse throughout the postwar era. Extremist movements from the far-right and the far-left have come to define mainstream policy options over the past two decades, as moderate centrist governments have struggled to deal with cascading challenges. The disinformation and bigotry promoted through social media is undoubtedly a catalyst in this process, but democracies have come apart in the past without the benefit of digital mass communication….