Antizionist Jews

There is no question that the presence of antizionist Jews creates profound confusion — for the broader public, and far more painfully, for the vast majority of Jews who experience antizionism as an attack on their safety, their memory, and their right to exist in the world as a people. Antizionist Jews are held up as proof: See? Even they agree. They are tokenized, made into mascots for a movement that otherwise could not plausibly defend itself against charges of antisemitism. 

We must speak about them with clarity.

In every era of Jewish persecution, some Jews have participated — willingly or under pressure — in the very campaigns that sought their people’s destruction. The first blood libel in Norwich was, in part, spread by Theobald of Cambridge, a Jewish convert to Christianity. In the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya — Jewish members of the Communist Party — shut down Hebrew schools, banned Zionist organizations, and erased Jewish communal life in the name of revolution. In Iraq, the Jewish Antizionist League publicly echoed Ba'athist propaganda just years before the Farhud and mass Jewish expulsion. And nearly every one of them, in the end, was consumed by the very movement they endorsed. They were arrested, exiled, or murdered — accused, inevitably, of being Zionists after all.

They laid the blueprint for the antizionist Jews we see today.

It is impossible to know what motivates any single Jewish participant in the antizionist hate movement. Some may genuinely believe they are acting from conscience — having internalized the libels they’ve absorbed from their political and intellectual environments. But many act from fear and pressure. In progressive spaces, conformity to antizionst narratives, and the performance of Jewish shame, is a condition of belonging. The psyche under pressure will sometimes choose not resistance or withdrawal, but performing Jewish shame. Fawning over your oppressor is not virtue; it is self-evacuation. It is the belief that by renouncing your own kin, you might buy immunity. This reflex is ancient, and in a world that treats Jewish particularity as suspect, it should not surprise us when some Jews seek safety in disavowal.

But we must be precise: the presence of Jewish antizionists does not soften the indictment against the movement they serve. Antizionism is not made legitimate by Jewish assent, any more than antisemitism was absolved by Jewish conversion. A libel remains a libel — even if spread by a Jewish voice.

We do not need to scorn these Jews. Nor do we need to center them. We need to build alignment — with Jews and non-Jews — who refuse to be confused by contradiction, who understand that participation does not purify violence, and who remain clear-eyed in naming antizionism for what it is: a campaign of coordinated narrative inversion, and a sustained assault on Jewish peoplehood itself.