How to defend against antizionism – Part 3
An Arsenal Against Antizionism: How to Reclaim the Language
(click here for part 1) (click here for part 2)
If antizionism is sustained through language, then language is where it must be confronted.
This is a question of accuracy, not tone or wordplay. A show of strength is not another decade of failed attempts to clarify “Zionism” to people who aren’t actually talking about Zionism. We must allow antizionism to stigmatise itself by clearly describing its track record and intentions.
What follows are the basic tools required. Used consistently, they allow us to strip antizionism of the moral permission on which it depends.
- Remove The Hyphen
The distinction between anti-Zionism and antizionism is foundational.
Anti-Zionism—with a hyphen—has historically referred to internal, Jewish critique. It engaged with Zionism as an idea: its form, its timing, and its consequences. These debates presupposed a real people and a legitimate question of how that people should exist. It involved Jews caring deeply for other Jews. Anti-Zionism as a serious internal Jewish conversation largely ended in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Antizionism—without the hyphen—is not a critique of Zionism. It is an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty altogether. Soviet propaganda inverted the Holocaust on its victims, dovetailing with Pan-Arab and Islamist interests to portray the Jewish state as a Levantine reimagining of the worst chapter in Jewish history. This movement propagandistically co-opts a Jewish conversation to sanitise eliminationism.
It does not engage with how Jews should exist. It insists, no matter how far from the creation of the state of Israel, that Jewish self-determination should be fought by “any means necessary”. Antizionism has been legitimised by the pseudo-academic, post-colonial fetishisation of Arab and Islamic oppression, latched onto by a Western populace desperate to atone for its own colonial exploits and ensuing privilege.
The removal of the hyphen mirrors the removal of Jewishness and Jewish assent. Antizionism is not a Jewish conversation—it is a conversation about Jews. Anti-Zionism’s critique is replaced with antizionist eliminationism.
If we do not defend this distinction, we lose the ability to demonstrate that antizionism is not a “critique”, but abuse. By leaving in the hyphen, we impart antizionism with the legitimacy of a conversation stolen from us and warped into something unrecognisable.
- Antizionism ≠ Political Criticism
Political criticism engages actions, policies, and decisions. It presumes the legitimacy and continued existence of its subject. Criticism invites disagreement, reform, or change.
Antizionism is mutually exclusive with political criticism. One cannot be fairly seen to “critique” what one seeks to eliminate.
Antizionism does not argue that Israel governs badly. It argues that Israel’s existence is the sole causal factor for injustice in the Levant.
There is no version of Israel that satisfies the antizionist.
Without this distinction, an eliminationist position that stigmatises Jews is rendered reasonable.
- Name the Libels and Their Function
Antizionism relies on a small number of recurring accusations: genocide, apartheid, colonialism.
These terms are the most morally charged categories available in contemporary discourse.
They do not invite analysis. They deliver a verdict as unfalsifiable moral indictments. These libels are permission-generating devices. The permission to vilify Jews hangs on these libels being treated as true.
Once accepted, antizionism becomes not an extreme position, but a necessary one.
The terms they use have real definitions. They apply to multiple contexts. The antizionist’s selective, absolute application of words like genocide, apartheid, and colonialism to a single state reveals their function as rhetoric designed to harm, as opposed to analysis that can be engaged with.
There is not a genocide. There is not an apartheid. Israel is not a colonial state. Drawing the antizionist’s attention to examples of genocides, apartheids, and colonialism, or attempting to clarify how these words pertain to Israel, is worse than a waste of time: is a capitulation to the warping of libels into falsifiable objects of genuine critique. They are not. These words are used to abuse us, not to invite conversation.
You stand in a row of 50 people holding sticks. Someone points to your stick and accuses you of being menacing, while also telling you that you shouldn’t exist. Others join in. They close in on you, repeating the libel ad nauseam. These are the circumstances in which we attempt to address genocide claims with facts.
Instead, we must understand that this is abuse. We must label the “criticism” for what it is: libels, designed to stigmatise, dehumanise, and sanitise violence.
- Stop Calling Antizionists “Pro-Palestinian”
Describing antizionists as “pro-Palestinian” is one of the most persistent and damaging errors in contemporary discourse.
It suggests that antizionism is motivated by concern for people’s wellbeing. It also implies that opposing antizionism is equivalent to opposing their unquestioned humanitarian concern.
Anti-Israel protesters in Darling Harbour
Antizionism is responsible for the forever war that has seen countless Palestinians and others killed. They are not “Pro-Palestinian”.
The IRGC and its proxies continue to use civilians as human shields to damage Israel. Tens of thousands of innocent people have been knowingly sacrificed by an antizionist logic that traded a day of murder, rape, and hostage-taking for a regional war.
Antizionism is not defined by what it supports, but by what it rejects. The use of the phrase “pro-Palestinian” is antizionist propaganda.
Framing antizionists as “pro-Palestinian” implicitly casts Jews as “anti-Palestinian” at a time when the world’s sympathies are with the Palestinian people. Antizionists want Jews framed as being collectively party to all regional suffering. They want Jews to take the blame for the uncountable deaths produced by antizionist aggression. We recycle their propaganda by calling antizionists “pro-Palestinian”.
Opposing antizionism is not opposition to any group of civilians. It is opposition to an eliminationism that kills more Arabs than Jews.
- Describe Jews as a People, Not a Belief
Describing Jews as “people of the Jewish faith” reduces a people to a belief system—something that can be modified or abandoned.
Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity, culture, history, spirituality, and national identity. It predates and does not map neatly onto the categories through which its offshoots are understood. Judaism is the only non-colonial, non-evangelising Abrahamic faith.
Reducing Jews to a faith reframes hostility toward them as religious disagreement. It obscures both antisemitism and antizionism.
It also undermines the legitimacy of Jewish collective existence—precisely the object targeted by antizionism. Jews are often accused of “stealing” Israel because it was promised to them by God. Framing Jews as a faith group legitimises the accusation that Israel is a fundamentalist, messianic project.
- Focus on What Antizionism Does
Finally, and most importantly, we must shift from definitional debates to functional analysis. We don’t actually need to resolve whether “antizionism” is or is not “a form of antisemitism” in order to address it effectively.
We need to examine what it produces.
Across centuries and continents, antizionism:
- constructs Jews as collective moral threats,
- justifies their exclusion, harassment, and targeting,
- reframes hostility and violence as responses to evil.
Permission structures are not defined by what they call themselves. They are defined by what they make possible.
Institutional Assent and Consistency
Language is only effective when applied consistently. Across the political divide, and from both Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, there are countless examples of leaders recycling antizionist language that grants permission for harming Jews. Readers will no doubt begin to notice them.
Language does not merely reflect the world. It shapes the moral landscape in which decisions are made. Antizionism depends on language that obscures its function—presenting bigotry as justice.
This is not to police language, but to expose it.
By naming and describing antizionism accurately and consistently, we can and will confront it.
Business as usual will not suffice.
Joshua Dabelstein is the Movement Against Antizionism’s Australian liaison.
