Jew-hatred has never stopped evolving. Antizionism is its latest iteration

Rachel ‘Archie’ Matlow is a journalist and author.

Before Oct. 7, 2023, my home was Toronto’s queer, leftist arts and media world. As a secular trans Jew who never quite felt at home in organized Jewish life, that’s where I found my fellow alternative Jews and like-minded people. We didn’t agree on everything, but I assumed we shared basic values: anti-racism, feminism, queer and trans rights, pluralism and social justice.

Turns out, there were some terms and conditions.

For nearly three years, I’ve been trying to understand how so many intelligent, caring people around me seemed to turn against those values overnight. Feminists dismissing reports of sexual violence against Israeli women. Anti-racists committed to “lived experience” telling Jews what does and doesn’t count as antisemitism. Artists and academics boycotting their Israeli counterparts. Queers excluding Jewish LGBTQ groups. Even some Jews making excuses for the Islamist terrorist group that slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians.

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These are people who could spot a microaggression from across the street. But when it comes to Jews, victim-blaming and collective punishment have somehow become progressive.

Here’s where the familiar disclaimer usually comes in: “Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic.”

Of course it isn’t.

But what exactly are we calling “criticism”?

Opposing settlements and settler terrorism? Condemning Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and far-right officials’ dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians? Holding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for reportedly ignoring warnings before Oct. 7? Please, criticize away. Israelis certainly do.

But denying ancient Jewish ties to the land, treating claims of “apartheid” and “genocide” as settled facts, insisting Israel doesn’t have “a right to exist,” or wielding “Zionist” as an accusation? That’s something else.

For a long time, I struggled to name what I was seeing. It didn’t look like the antisemitism I’d learned to recognize. For starters, it was coming from the left. The “good” guys. Nobody was waving swastikas or chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Quite the opposite: this wasn’t about Jews, they insisted. It was about Zionists.

I felt pressure to fall in line – to join the protests and sign the open letters. People wanted to know: Was I one of the Good Jews?

I’d been criticizing Israel for 20 years. My Polish communist grandfather was anti-Zionist. So I was genuinely confused: how had “Zionist” become a slur akin to Nazi?

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When I questioned treating “genocide” as a verdict, pushed back on rape denial, or asked what a “Free Palestine” was supposed to look like, friends looked at me with suspicion. I was called “tribal” and “right-wing.” One of my closest friends ended our friendship. I got the message: either get onboard the flotilla or at least shut up.

The same queers who embrace nonbinary thinking about gender had suddenly gone full binary about Israel-Palestine. Why couldn’t I call for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages? Since when did a two-state solution become betrayal? And why was a movement supposedly fighting for justice so allergic to questions?

So, with a lot of spare social time suddenly opening up, I went down the rabbit hole.

I soon realized I knew plenty about “the world’s oldest hatred” without really understanding what it is – or how it works. It’s a delusional story about who Jews are, what’s supposedly wrong with us and why we’re standing between society and its ideal world, exploited by those who want power.

And it hasn’t survived for thousands of years by wearing an “I Hate Jews” T-shirt. It shapeshifts to fit each new audience, changing costumes and language, recasting Jews into the villains it needs. What we’re seeing today is the latest adaptation.

Medieval Christian antijudaism said Jews were Christ-killers, well-poisoners and child murderers. The problem was our religion. Convert already! By the late 1800s, religion was out and racial “science” was in. Now Jews were a dangerous race. Converting couldn’t save you any more. The problem was in our blood. The Nazis took that mythology to its deadliest conclusion: “the Jew” became an all-purpose explanation for everything wrong with Europe – simultaneously behind capitalism and communism. When the world gets frightening or difficult to explain, Jews have a strange habit of turning up as the explanation.

But Jew-hatred didn’t stop evolving in 1945.

Enter antizionism, where “No Jews Allowed” doesn’t sell, but “No Zionists Allowed” does. The basic story goes like this: European Jews colonized Palestine, displaced its Indigenous population and built a racist state maintained through apartheid and genocide. Israel isn’t just a country that does bad things. Israel is the bad thing – the original sin.

Antizionism may be Jew-hatred’s cleverest disguise yet, precisely because it presents itself as anti-racism. “Antizionism” sounds like opposition to a political movement. But the “Zionist” of antizionism bears about as much resemblance to actual Zionism as the hook-nosed, money-grubbing caricature of “the Jew” bore to actual Jews.

That’s why I spell antizionism without a hyphen: like antisemitism, it’s an ideology built around an imagined villain. But antizionism pulled an even neater trick: it refashioned a real word Jews used for themselves into a synonym for Pure Evil.

At its core, Zionism is the belief Jews should have the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That’s it.

Modern political Zionism took off in late-19th-century Europe as Jews felt the walls closing in. There was never one Zionist master plan. Religious Jews, socialists, liberals, nationalists and hardliners fought bitterly over what a Jewish state should look like and how Jews and Arabs might live together. Some Zionists explicitly imagined co-existence, and Israel’s founding declaration in 1948 promised equal rights regardless of religion, race or sex.

For many Jews today, Zionism simply means believing Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state. It doesn’t mean supporting Benjamin Netanyahu or any particular war. You can believe a country should exist and still think its government is doing terrible things. Canadians manage this feat every day.

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What’s confusing is that there are now two “Zionisms”: the one Jews created, and the villain Israel’s enemies spent decades constructing. Sometimes the difference is obvious: “Zionist entity” or “Zio-Nazi.” But often it isn’t.

Even some Jews slide between the two. I’ve had maddening arguments with antizionist Jewish friends who insist my definition of Zionism is wrong. Zionism, they tell me, is an inherently racist, “Jewish supremacist” ideology. Push back and out comes the trump card: “Antizionism is a century-old Jewish tradition.”

And they’re right. Sort of.

Jews opposed Zionism long before Israel existed. But that was a Jewish family argument about how best to survive. Some bet on statehood; others on assimilation, socialism, religious life or autonomy in the diaspora. The Jewish Labour Bund, which many antizionist Jews invoke, bet on building a Jewish future in Europe rather than a Jewish state.

History wasn’t especially kind to that bet. The Holocaust destroyed much of the European Jewish world where the Bund had imagined its future. And Israel became a country.

In 1947, Jewish leaders accepted the United Nations plan to divide the land into Jewish and Arab states; Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, five Arab armies invaded. The war displaced roughly 700,000 Palestinians – part of what became known as the Nakba – while Israel later absorbed many of the roughly 850,000 Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab countries and Iran.

Opposing the creation of a Jewish state in 1926 is therefore not the same thing as arguing in 2026 that an existing country – home to nearly half the world’s Jews – should cease to exist.

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And here’s the sleight-of-hand: When critics make the case against Zionism, the word expands to encompass settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide. Challenge those premises and it shrinks back to the old Jewish debate: I’m just opposed to Jewish nationalism. The Bundists opposed Zionism too.

Contemporary antizionism makes the accusation. Pre-1948 Jewish anti-Zionism provides the alibi.

And for what it’s worth, like many Jewish anti-Zionists, my grandfather supported Israel once it existed and visited several times.

Antizionist Jews today may sincerely believe they’re carrying on a tradition of Jewish debate. But their Jewishness also lends credibility to a very different tradition – one considerably less interested in Jewish survival. After all, if the cool Jews are calling it social justice, why check the footnotes?

Many people assume slogans like “Zionism is racism,” or the conviction that Israel is a colonial, apartheid and genocidal state, grew organically out of Palestinian solidarity activism. But as historian Izabella Tabarovsky and others have documented, much of that language comes from Soviet Cold War propaganda.

After Israel defeated the Soviet-backed Arab states in 1967’s Six-Day War, the KGB ramped up a campaign to discredit the increasingly Western-aligned Jewish state, undermine the United States and expand Soviet influence in the Arab and Muslim world. But after the Holocaust, openly demonizing Jews wasn’t a great look, so the Soviets found a workaround: instead of “Jews,” say “Zionists.” Old conspiracies about Jewish money, media and political power – inspired by the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – became conspiracies about “Zionist” influence.

But this wasn’t just Find and Replace. The Soviets flipped the whole moral script. “Zionists” became racist, fascist agents of American imperialism. Jews were no longer the victims of Nazis; “Zionists” were the new Nazis. Political cartoons fused swastikas with Stars of David and depicted Israeli leaders in SS uniforms.

The cleverest part was the built-in alibi. Soviet authorities officially condemned antisemitism as reactionary Jew-hatred while presenting antizionism as righteous opposition to racism and imperialism. Antisemitism was the bad guy. Antizionism got to be the anti-racist hero. They’d insist – and stop me if you’ve heard this one – “We’re not against Jews. We’re against Zionists.”

Ask a Jew who lived in the USSR how meaningful that distinction was and you’ll probably get a laugh: antizionism came with discrimination, repression and restrictions on Jewish life.

The campaign spread across the global left and Arab world through thousands of books, newspapers and broadcasts, using antizionism to stoke anti-Western sentiment.

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In the Middle East, Soviet antizionism converged with past Nazi influence, rising Palestinian nationalism and Muslim Brotherhood–style Islamism. In 1965, Palestinian intellectual Fayez Sayegh’s influential Zionist Colonialism in Palestine framed Zionism as a racist, colonial project – even though Israel had no mother country extracting its resources.

A conflict between two national movements – Arab and Jewish – was recast as one between “native Palestinians” and “colonial Zionists,” fitting neatly into the Western left’s anticolonial lens: colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed.

In 1975, the Soviet and Arab blocs pushed through UN Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.” (It was revoked in 1991, but somehow that part never makes the placards.)

Over time, the story proliferated in academia, where scholars increasingly cast Israel as a foreign settler colony, analogous to Canada, Australia or the United States. The fact that Jews came from a place once called Judea? Apparently, that part got cut too.

The tipping point came in 2001, at the UN’s anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, where a parallel NGO forum branded Israel a “racist, apartheid state” and accused it of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Copies of The Protocols circulated alongside a flyer asking, “What If Hitler Had Won?” By the end of the “anti-racism” conference, Israel had become the world’s human-rights villain.

Marxists, Islamists and parts of the progressive left were now reading from the same script. Whatever else divided them, they could at least agree on who the enemy was.

Antizionism had become one hell of a coalition-builder.

By the time I encountered this worldview, nobody handed me a Soviet pamphlet. It was on the syllabus.

I studied cultural and postcolonial theory in the early 2000s, as the optimism of Oslo gave way to failed peace talks and the Second Intifada. We were learning to interrogate power: who had it, who didn’t. For liberal arts Jews like me, there wasn’t much question we were white. We’d grown up safer and more privileged than almost any Jewish generation before us. We were also discovering how much Palestinian history we’d never been taught.

That should have made the story more complicated. Instead, one incomplete story got replaced by another – one with its own myths and its own version of history. As I got older and learned more about Middle East history, Palestinian factions and regional geopolitics, I realized the conflict was far messier than I’d been led to believe. Israel-Palestine – like my gender – was no match for such a simple binary.

Palestinians could be displaced and dispossessed while also having leaders who rejected compromises and compounded their suffering. Jews weren’t all Ashkenazi; Jewish communities stretched across Ethiopia, Iraq, Morocco and Yemen. Arabs could be ruled by empires and have their own long history of conquest. Jews could build successful lives and still be persecuted: German Jews had looked privileged – educated, prosperous, assimilated – but it didn’t save them. Power, it turned out, wasn’t a permanent identity.

Over the years, I’d noticed certain ideas and language around Israel hardening. But I had no idea how deeply – or how widely – they’d taken hold until Oct. 7. The horror of Hamas’s attack was shocking enough, but the reaction blindsided me. Within hours, some people in my social circles had switched their profile pictures to Palestinian flags. No pause – never mind radical empathy. The deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was being hailed as “resistance,” the terrorists who tortured and murdered families in their homes became “freedom fighters,” and their victims – grandparents, children and festival-goers – were beside the point. Claims that Israel was committing “genocide” were circulating immediately.

The implication was clear: Israel had brought this on itself. What happened was terrible, sure. But they had it coming.

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Looking back, I can see how much of the reaction was already scripted. The slogans were written, the heroes and villains cast, the conclusions drawn. Social media supplied the accelerant.

Calm, friendly people I’d known for years were suddenly sharing vicious antisemitic messages. Feminists were marching in the streets, glorifying an Islamist militia that raped and mutilated women. At a queer bar, I listened to a comedian do a bit about wanting to “fuck Hamas.” The room erupted in laughter – including two Jewish friends.

Strangest of all, nobody seemed to think any of this was strange. I felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass into a world where everything was upside down. I couldn’t understand the sheer hypocrisy. Or where basic human empathy had gone.

Then a good friend I’d known since my teens – an educated white woman in her 40s – posted something that made it click. She celebrated “the long legacies of everyday solidarity and joint struggle between Palestinian, Black and brown, Indigenous, working-class, and queer people.”

I kept staring at the list. Then it hit me. Oh. They think we’re white-white. I’d always thought my Jewishness belonged alongside my queerness – part of what made me stand with other minorities, not apart from them. But I hadn’t realized how far across the progressive moral ledger Jews had moved. We were no longer “white, depending on the century.” We were now complicit in white supremacy. Pantone Colonizer White.

Suddenly the moral arithmetic made a terrible sort of sense. If Israelis were white European colonizers and Palestinians their Indigenous victims, then my friends genuinely believed they were “punching up.” They hadn’t abandoned their anti-racist values – they’d overcommitted to the formula. If, in their eyes, Zionists were “genocidal baby-killers,” targeting them wouldn’t feel like bigotry. It would feel like justice.

I’d been naive enough to think butchered civilians – even infants and peace activists – might complicate the story. Instead, people disappeared into their assigned roles.

I was struck by how easily people believed it. Then again, Jews have been repeatedly cast as child-killers, bloodthirsty and secretly powerful for millennia. Repeat those ideas long enough and they start to sound like common sense. Add a barrage of emotionally charged imagery – strategically tailored and disseminated – and simple explanations become even more seductive.

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Which is why I believe most antizionists are sincere when they say they don’t hate Jews. They hate the “Zionist” boogeyman: some unholy mash-up of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Jared Kushner and a Nazi. Hatred doesn’t need to be conscious. It just needs a convincing story and not too many questions. And before you know it, you’ve lost the plot.

Adam Louis-Klein, founder of the Movement Against Antizionism, helped me make sense of a pattern I’d been noticing. He describes settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide as antizionism’s three “core libels.” One leads to the next. If Jews are foreign colonizers, Zionism becomes a racist project to displace an Indigenous population. A Jewish state becomes apartheid. Palestinian violence becomes resistance. And Israel’s war against Hamas becomes genocide, understood through a settler-colonial framework.

Except Jews aren’t foreign to the land. History and archaeology document thousands of years of Jewish connection to it. Remove the premise that Jews are foreign colonizers and the house of cards crumbles. Flip the frame and Zionism can be understood as a decolonization project: amid the collapse of empires and creation of new states, a conquered and scattered people returned home and revived their ancient language. Last time I checked, Indigenous rights don’t expire.

As for apartheid, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank raises serious human-rights questions, but Arab citizens of Israel have equal voting rights, sit in parliament and serve as judges. By contrast, Hamas’s original charter called for killing Jews, while its leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again” until Israel is destroyed.

That’s why calling antizionism “criticism of Israel” misses the point. Criticism leaves open the possibility of change. But if no new government, partition plan or peace proposal could ever make Israel legitimate, the only solution is for Israel to disappear.

At some point, I realized my arguments with friends weren’t really about Israel or Gaza. They weren’t interested in how Israelis and Palestinians might actually build a better future. Something else was at stake.

For many activists, antizionism has become a moral identity – a way of demonstrating you’re a good person, on “the right side of history.” For Jews on the left, the pressure to prove you’re not evil, and the stakes of failing, are higher. Once a political position becomes part of who you are, contradictory facts don’t just challenge your politics. They threaten you. Especially when that identity is tied to your chosen family, community or career, changing your mind can cost more than an argument.

Which helps explain why antizionists have an answer for everything.

Israeli Pride parades? Pink-washing. Millions of Israeli Jews from the Middle East and North Africa? Still white colonizers. Jews point to thousands of years of history in the land? Colonial mythology. Israeli women describe being raped in captivity? Zionist propaganda.

It’s amazing what pretzels the mind can twist itself into to keep a story straight.

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Every challenge becomes evidence for the prosecution. Question whether “settler-colonial” fully describes Jews returning to an ancestral homeland and you’re defending colonialism. Question whether “genocide” accurately describes the Gaza war and you’re an atrocity-denier. Ask what dismantling Israel would mean for millions of Israeli Jews and you’re centring the colonizers.

I believe the underlying feelings are real: anger at capitalist greed, Donald Trump, transphobia and Islamophobia; guilt about colonialism and white privilege. But Israel has become a screen for everyone’s projections – forced to carry all of humanity’s baggage along with its own.

And when that hostility lands on Jews, antizionists blame Israel, Jews themselves or far-right antisemites for the rise in hate crimes. Yet somehow, they don’t recognize their own reflection.

Nazi-era antisemitism saw Jews as non-white infiltrators who didn’t belong in Europe; contemporary antizionism sees “Zionists” as hyper-white European colonizers who don’t belong in the Middle East. Jews were once told to go back to Palestine; now they’re told to go back to Poland. Contemporary antisemitism proudly displays swastikas; antizionism puts them inside the Star of David.

Of course, no one thinks they’re the bad guys. That’s why the real test of a movement isn’t what it claims to stand for. It’s how it behaves. Criticism shouldn’t require everyone to recite the same script. It shouldn’t punish dissent or demand that Jews either denounce Israel or commit social suicide. It shouldn’t come with intimidation, harassment or violence. That’s not political critique. That’s enforcing a party line.

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And this is where antizionist Jews add another layer of permission. By elevating themselves as the morally superior Good Jews willing to denounce Israel – echoing Hannah Arendt’s “exception Jews” – they cast other Jews as morally deficient and fair game.

Thirty-five years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the old alibi survives: This isn’t about Jews. It’s about Zionists.

But let’s be real. People who target Jews aren’t exactly administering a political questionnaire first. They go after those who are visibly Jewish, go to synagogue or shop at a kosher market.

Western activists may deny they’re antisemitic, but Hamas is a lot less coy. In one devastating recording from Oct. 7, a terrorist calls his parents from the phone of an Israeli woman he’d just murdered to brag that he’d “killed 10 Jews.” Not 10 Zionists. Not 10 Israelis.

Nearly three years later, what has the “pro-Palestine” movement even done for Palestinians? Has it changed Israeli policy? Brought them any closer to statehood, freedom or peace?

Boycotting Standing Together, Israel’s largest Jewish-Palestinian peace organization, seems like an odd way to get there. So does pouring enormous energy into demonizing Israel while refusing to criticize Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007 – jailing, torturing and killing its opponents.

Israel deserves plenty of criticism. But if Palestinian liberation is the goal, you’d think ending Hamas’s iron grip would be pretty high on the list.

Gazans have risked their lives to protest Hamas, before Oct. 7 and since, chanting “We want to live” – only to face violent repression and crickets from Western activists. Who’s standing with them?

Palestinians don’t all think alike any more than Jews do. Reducing them to helpless extras in someone else’s morality play isn’t solidarity; it strips them of agency. That’s another kind of dehumanization.

I recently spoke with Palestinian-American advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza and lost dozens of relatives in this war. He was fiercely critical of Israel – and Hamas, which he argues launched an “intentionally genocidal assault,” banking on Israel to devastate Gaza and generate global sympathy. Hamas built tunnels for fighters but no shelters for civilians and, in his words, “sacrificed 2.3 million Palestinians for a propaganda strategy.”

For him, Islamist extremism is an existential threat to Palestinian survival and freedom.

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It’s easy to chant “Free Palestine” or imagine a single democratic state where everyone has equal rights and lives happily ever after. But seven million Israeli Jews aren’t disappearing. Neither are Palestinians. That’s the trouble with reality: it’s messy, painful and terrible at slogans. The only paths are compromise and co-existence – or forever war.

Meanwhile, Jews are once again feeling the walls closing in. In Canada, reported antisemitic incidents are at record levels, but stats don’t capture the Star of David tucked under a shirt, the kippah left at home, the Jewish artist dropped from an event after failing a Zionism purity test, or the many Jews pushed out at school or at work. For me, queer spaces used to feel safest. Now they’re where I feel most anxious.

And what recourse do Jews even have when our institutions see us as too powerful – or too deceptive – to deserve the same anti-racist protections as other minorities? Why speak up when you’ll just be accused of “weaponizing antisemitism”? Eventually, a lot of Jews shut up. But silence doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say. It tells you the price of saying it.

Jews need allies. Nobody wants to be called a “genocide apologist” for standing up for Jews. But that’s how antizionism persists in plain sight: fear of looking racist has become a pretty ingenious way to get people to tolerate Jew-hatred.

Politicians keep denouncing antisemitism without confronting where the “scourge” is coming from. The answer is uncomfortable because, as the old horror-movie line goes, the call is coming from inside the house.

Jew-hatred has always been a good stress test for society’s values. So yes, this is about protecting Jews. But it’s as much about protecting a culture where facts still matter, words still mean something, people are allowed to disagree, and minorities deserve solidarity even when they’re politically inconvenient.

The real divide isn’t pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine, Jews versus Muslims, or left versus right. It’s between reality and ideology, curiosity and certainty, and actually being anti-racist rather than just looking the part.

Because the real test of our values isn’t how we treat the people we’ve decided are the good guys. It’s whether we apply them to the people we’ve decided are villains.