Antizionism and Antisemitism: The Two Faces of Jew-Hatred

Commentary

As “pro-Palestinian” protests continue to flood the streets, the Jewish community around the world is once again confronted with a disturbing resurgence of antisemitism. But this time, it wears two different faces: an ancient, familiar form of Jew-hatred known as antisemitism and the other in its progressive disguise, antizionism. Both lead to the same outcome—the vilification of Jews, a modern movement of radicalized activists.

Two faces of the same hate, antisemitism and antizionism, consistently bear a frightening resemblance to pervasive antisocial behaviour: pathological lying, deception in the media and on the streets, moral disengagement, lack of empathy, a superiority complex with little to no knowledge to support it, and being hostile or threatening to others.

Modern antisemitism has stemmed from the far right, though some argue that Nazis (which refers to Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party) were in fact far left. It has festered from conspiracy theories that Jews control the media, banks, and government, and are cunningly planning to take over the world. Scapegoating the Jewish people and sowing distrust form the very foundation of this hatred, portraying Jews as omnipotent and dangerous.

Western antizionism, by contrast, emerges from the far left: Marxists, communists, and Islamists. It is dressed up as political activism, labelling Jews as white colonizers, complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. It sells the notion that Jews are all white and they oppress people of colour, specifically Palestinians. Unlike far-right antisemitism, antizionism wraps these blood libels within their social justice coat of arms. The rhetoric is different from the far right, but it is another sociopathic rebranding of Jew-hatred, with identical goals and results: legitimizing emotional detachment from the plight of the Jewish fabric, perpetuating manipulative deception, historical revisionism, and moral inversion.

One popular falsehood is the claim that Israeli Jews are all white European colonizers and recipients of white privilege. In reality, two-thirds of Israel’s Jewish population are people of colour, many of whom are descendants of the 850,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab lands. Jewish roots in Middle Eastern and North African lands with darker skin are removed from the narrative, because they complicate the false dichotomy of “white Jew” versus “brown Palestinian.” This historical erasure is not just misleading, it’s a cold, calculated denial of Jewish suffering.

Both antisemites and antizionists use conspiracy theories and historical revisionism to justify their hate for the Jewish people. Moral justification propels their resentment and makes it excusable. False narratives weave society-wide sociopathic paranoia, repeated with a superior sense of authority but lacking evidence to support the hostility.

Today, we’re witnessing a merging of these two extremes in what might be called a “far-right woke” ideology, where antisemitism is repackaged and made socially acceptable under the banner of antizionism. It allows for plausible deniability against insinuations of racism with the claim that it is political dissent. The truth, as seen in the rhetoric and hate crimes against Jews around the world, is that Jews and Zionist friends thereof are uniquely held personally accountable for the actions of Israel’s government. This double standard is the defining feature of modern-day Jew haters.

Antizionists often demonize Zionism without the understanding or while deliberately ignoring that it is simply the Jewish aspiration for self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland. It predates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by thousands of years. It has nothing to do with colonialism and everything to do with the longing to return home, to “Zion” (modern-day Israel) for thousands of years. Zionism is not a “colonial project”; it is the first successful “liberation project” of an indigenous people from its colonizers, the British, the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Romans, and the list goes on.

Archaeology, history, religion, and science have all proven that the Jews come from Israel and have been indigenous to the land long before any current claims made by existing Arab colonizers. Since then, the Jews have fought time and time again against those who sought to extinguish their ongoing connection to the land and exterminate them.

Antizionism itself is clear in its hostility and attempted erasure of Jewish history, culture, ethnicity, and existence. The claim that the modern-day Palestinian people—a designation tied to a name given to the region by the Romans long before the Arabs arrived and centuries before the advent of Islam, intended to erase Jewish ties to Judea (now Israel)—have a legitimate indigenous status demonstrates the millennia-old denial of Jewish rights and existence, now known as antizionism. Excusing or ignoring Arab colonization across the Middle East and North Africa while advocating for the erasure of Jewish connection to Israel is not activism—it’s selective moral disengagement to serve a racist agenda.

Antizionism is not a legitimate political position. It is the modern expression of Jew-hatred. Disguised as a form of solidarity with Palestinian people, it not only rejects Jewish history, identity, and connection to the Jewish ancestral homeland but it systemically disengages from any moral clarity or empathy for the Jews as fellow human beings.

Antizionism is hate. Antizionism is racism. Societal normalization of extreme sociopathic behaviour, when ignored or justified, cannot be expected to stop at words or wanton disregard for the law or rights of others. It always ends the same way. Genocide, apology, repeat.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.