By Jones and Gisle: "The Antizionist Script: How Two Strangers Reached the Same Conclusion"

We, Kile Jones and Tobias Gisle have never lived in the same country, studied at the same college, or moved in the same circles. One found his way to anti-zionism through graduate seminars and leftist academics. The other found it through punk clubs and airless anarchist meetings in basements in Stockholm. They left this world by different roads too, through life, love and friendship. 7th of October led, for both of us, to fierce arguments with people who suddenly ceased to be friends.

Both of us ended up sifting through the literature, the propaganda, and feeling the pressure of things no longer adding up. What follows is not a coincidence of two men reaching similar conclusions. It is the same story of deprogramming. Read side by side, the accounts use the same words, in the same order, to describe events on opposite sides of the world. That endless repetition of keywords led to the grooming of a generation, a problem we finally recognized and identified. The long road away from antizionism is the subject of this piece.

Kile

For a while I believed a particular conviction was a result of the love affair I had with theory. I had reasoned my way to it, or thought I had: that Israel was a colonial project, a European graft onto Palestinian ground, the last unfinished errand of Empires being taken to task for an ethics they would later cry ignorance of. I was a leftist in graduate school and my forebears had declared as much. Lenin and Stalin had connected Zionism with imperialism long before the settler-colonial theory of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. Leftism got me to the “colonizer” label before I ever read Orientalism or The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It was only later when postcolonialism had confirmed this, but instead of armies, resources, and the bourgeois, it was oppression, othering, and identity erasure.

I had never marched, never held a placard or belted a chant. My antizionism was academic, built in University libraries and late-night arguments. Those long inner monologues you keep in your twenties. I had learned about Israel, as most people do, from people who hate it. I mistook their provocative new histories for a genuine, albeit less entertaining, depiction of Levantine events. When I held that view, the world repeated it back to me. Every plank. Word for word. What unsettles me now is not that strangers shared my conclusions, but that they shared my vocabulary, down to the words.

There’s a catechism that has three articles, recited in a single breath by most of the world: colonizer, apartheid, genocide. A graduate seminar in Cambridge, a die-in in Melbourne, a Swedish morning show, an email chain at two in the morning—the identical triad, in the identical order, each delivering it with the pride of holding hermetic knowledge of the-lesser-taught horrors of Israel. Beneath the three articles sits more to the creed, which is just as fixed. That a “powerful lobby” has bought the conscience of Western governments, so that any official who declines to condemn Israel has been paid. That the Jews of Israel are white Europeans—somehow forgetting the half who were driven out of Baghdad, Cairo, and Tripoli, who’d be astonished to learn they were erased.

Nobody is recruited by hatred. You’re recruited by a key, one that opens every lock in the building. The promise is that a single distinction, oppressor and oppressed, will sort the whole world for you in advance, so you never again have to learn a conflict on its own terms. You just assign it. That’s the seduction, and it catches the conscience-driven, not the cruel. The people inside are certain they’re the decent ones, and on most days they have the receipts to prove it. The consequences for their actions, however, leave damages Jews and Israel should not be burdened with—ones that threaten their very existence.

The key was forged in real books, by real hands, and the pedigree matters because it explains the sameness. Edward Said taught a generation to read every Western account of the East as a will to dominate. Frantz Fanon had already set the temperature: “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” the opening promise of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. Then the academy assembled the engine that would run on those parts. Patrick Wolfe, in 2006, supplied its slogan—”invasion is a structure, not an event”—and named the settler’s aim the elimination of the native. Lorenzo Veracini systematized the whole apparatus in 2010.

By the time you walked in, settler-colonial studies wasn’t one reading among many. It was the academic way to view Israel. That’s how it gets installed: words before knowledge. You’re handed the vocabulary, settler, colonizer, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, oppressor, and the cues for when to fire it, long before anyone offers the history that might let you test it.

Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) supplies the script and Rashid Khalidi’s works gives it a syllabus. You can recite the indictment with total fluency and not survive a single serious question about it, because fluency was the point. Then you test it against the world, and it snaps at its joints. The teaching swears by one rule, stand with the weak against the strong, everywhere, no favorites, and a rule that holds everywhere cannot keep an exception. This one keeps exactly one, and it returns with a regularity no honest principle can survive.

The same scholarship that treats every native people as native makes its lone exemption for the one people indigenous to the land in question: Jews in the Levant become the settlers, condemned by tools built to protect them. Zionism, at the root, was a doctrine of supremacy for the “chosen people” reread as an inverted master race. This allows the persecuted minority to have built a state amidst a host of Arab countries—clearly the tactic of white colonial oppressors. It’s a remarkable trick of the language to accomplish this: an argument that begins in the vocabulary of leftist politics and anti-racism ends up pinning the yellow star back on.

The same promise to believe women, for instance, went silent on October 7th, until the UN’s Pramila Patten, reported on March 4, 2024 that there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang-rape occurred at the Nova festival, along Route 232, and at Kibbutz Re’im. The believe-all-women institutions had spent the months before treating it as a talking point; UN Women needed eight weeks to say anything at all. The same hunger to condemn Israel’s bullets lost its voice over Iran, where the state that killed Mahsa Amini in 2022 and shot hundreds, possibly thousands of its own, earns a pass for supporting a group who will not accept any offer without unilateral control from the river to the sea. When a teaching about liberation can swallow its own opposite on one condition, you’ve found that condition. And what I found, revealed the left was not only covertly antisemitic while explicitly anti-racist, they are blinded to casualties that lay at the path of their commitment to the righteous cause.

You see the target clearest on the way out, because leaving carries a price that doubles as evidence. Whoever walks isn’t argued with: he’s explained. His reasons are waved off and a hidden one supplied for him—he’s bought, he’s compromised, he was theirs all along. That’s the identical move the system runs on Jews: refuse the plain account, insist on the secret hand behind it. The reflex that pins one defector on Jewish money is the reflex that pins the whole century on it. Turn it on someone who used to believe what you did, and he feels, for the first time, the thing he was aiming at others. It’s a stretch of logic that antizionism provides as an explanation for when the unfathomable happens and a Zionist is made through study, reason, and ethical concern. It cannot admit them. And here the words stop being abstract.

Recited aloud, the antizionist is always concerned about foreign affairs, borders, occupation, and a government overseas. But watch where its processions end. Not at embassies or consulates. At synagogues. That’s the whole of it. A key that sorts the world, forged from real books and installed as a rote memorization, guarded by one permanent exception, and paid for on the way out, in the same coin it spent on Jews. You don’t leave it the way you leave an opinion or an abstraction. You leave it the way you leave your country. The fact that antizionism surfaces in the same words, the same sequence, on continents that share nothing else, is a tell.

It’s also why, the first time I read Tobias Gisle, I had the sense of being quoted by a man I’d never met. Where I hear antizionism recited, Tobias has gone looking for the seminary that trains the clergy. He follows “colonizer” to Edward Said, and then he does the thing I hadn’t seen anyone do, placing settler-colonial theory beside the Great Replacement, and showing them to be the same conspiracy from opposite politics, one cut to flatter the left, one the right. He mapped the apartheid-and-genocide labels and notices, as I do, that those who recite it believe themselves to be the opposite of bigots.

Different continent, with a different language, in a different decade of waking up, and yet the lexicon he documents, is, syllable for syllable, the one I hear.

Tobias

I heard the catechism first, but not in English, in Swedish. My path to and away from antizionism was almost like Kile’s in reverse. Although I always fancied myself an intellectual, the path to activism came from the beat and the street, not from some dusty library, squirreled away behind the imposing greens of some well-cropped university lawn. I wanted to rebel from my background in the boarding schools of England and in Sweden, so I became a hardcore punk rocker, soaking up the beats of the important bands of the era. In Sweden they were vegan and radical leftist, like the most famous band of the era, Refused. Every stage dive a portent of the revolution.

Through the punks I met the anarchists, through the anarchists I met the pro-Palestinians, the dangerous, unfunny side of all the wokery that was a world that foreshadowed the explosion of intersectional politics in the US by decades. Förtryckssamverkan, we called it, the convergence of oppressions. Yes, that is correct, Swedish gets all the longest words. During the Second Intifada many of my friends went to the West Bank under the auspices of ISM, International Solidarity Movement. There they picked up the essence of the conflict, which was of course the same narrative that much of the Swedish press was pushing, but we were young and radical, so the punchline was that much worse.

We learned the ISM, great returning heroes of course, that the conflict was about colonialism, the Palestinians were subject to colonialism and apartheid, Israel was a pretend country, and Hebrew was a pretend language. Indeed, the standard activist in Sweden knows very little of the actual history of the Jews, you learn about the Holocaust and Nazi antisemitism, but little else. We hated both nazis and Israel equally. How satisfying. Oppression is bad. This means that we could imagine that while Jews who were murdered in Europe were to be pitied, if they managed to survive by getting to Israel, they were suddenly evil colonialists. This makes no sense but is a reminder of how successful the antizionism of the Soviets was in building a narrative.

Among our number we were proud to count the great Gazologist Andreas Malm, who later would say that watching Hamas snuff movies from October 7th was exhilarating, like heroin, something he shot up into his arm. We were in awe of him, this wise and well-travelled intellectual giant. Activism had simply hollowed out our moral core.

Then something happened that I never intended, never wanted or asked for. I fell in love. To my eternal misery, or not, she turned out to be something that would leave me shunned and cast out of the activist world. She was kryptonite for all my activist friends. A leper. She was from the hated country. When I first took her to Sweden, where we had been studying together in England, most people would not speak to her. When she said her nationality, they would literally turn their backs. She didn’t hold views they disagreed with, they simply were not interested in hearing what views she might have. I tried to appease, to have a foot in both worlds, to hate her country but love her person. After all, it could not be that she might know something about the Middle East after living there all her life, that we activists, converts to Palestinianism living in the safety of the west, might not know.

I, the activist, must know best, with my anger and the chip on my shoulder. Life and the Credit Crunch of 2008 made us try to live together in Israel. My antizionist activist fever had lessened, it was hard to live in Israel and hope it would disappear, but I was by no means convinced by the people who said Israel was not the cause of the conflict. My fury had been brought down from a furious boil to a simmer, but the word “occupation” had a grip on me. I started a university course in Middle Eastern studies by distance from Stockholm already in 2013, but it wasn’t until Covid that I was allowed to finish it, both Bachelor’s and Master’s. Although I quite fiercely opposed antizionism by then, I still thought I could incorporate some of the Palestinian narrative into my work, I wanted to be evenhanded. I thought the left-wing Zionists and the most moderate of the Palestinians could work together towards peace.

I handed in my Master’s in September 2023, to my professor, a radical antizionist supervisor. It was very lucky that it was finished, a few weeks later there would be no working with this hateful propagandist. As it was, I received top grades the same month. Then came October 7th. It did something to me that all previous rounds of terror had not. This included the moment I found out afterwards that a terrorist had been hiding after killing 7 people in Tel Aviv and had hung an ISIS flag on a nearby building on the same street where my son was celebrating a five-year-old’s birthday party at McDonald’s. This was different. My daughter’s amazing teacher, who can see each child for who they are, hid for 8 hours in a safe room when Hamas went from house to house outside her house killing her friends and neighbors.

I had to confront the fact that the foundation was wrong. The Palestinians were not reacting to injustice. They were not upset over having checkpoints in the West Bank. This was what calling Israelis “colonists” meant. It means the same thing that calling Jews “a cancer” meant to the Nazis. That right-wing Israelis had been right. At least in this. When many Palestinians call it an “occupation” they don’t mean only Ariel and Efrat, they mean that Tel Aviv and Haifa are cities of occupation and their existence is a crime.

What do you do with the criminals? You drive them out, you kill them. You do not explain to them that they are bad. However much we want peace these people cannot be reasoned with, they are enemies and their most radical expression is the mass murderers of Hamas. When I read Kile B. Jones for the first time, it was uncanny. He came from precisely the opposite direction, in the deserts and canyons of the mythical Wild West thousands of miles from the lakes, forests and snows of the Kingdom of Sweden. Yet the language to describe Israel was the same.

The passions that ignited the punks of Sweden to shun my girlfriend were the same passions that led Kile’s friend to be hounded by his own friends and colleagues. The Jew, the Israeli, might possibly be accepted in these groups if they shout the Genocide lie from the rooftops and proclaim the evil of Israel to the world. But they did not. So, naturally, they are demons. Like Kile, I found that even among my friends, the option to have another view on Israel than the anti-Israel mainstream chanting about mainstream was unacceptable. If I had lost my activist friends a few decades ago by marrying an Israeli, I lost most of my other vaguely leftist friends after 7th of October for the simple act of refusing to jump on the bandwagon and to tell lies. October 7th broke something inside. It forced me to look hard in several directions. It forced me to see both Israel’s vulnerability and to confront how foundational antisemitism was to the whole anti-Israel industry. I had to go back to the source.What was this furious anger I had been so attached to? Where was it coming from?

When Ben-Dror Yemini called his book Industry of Lies talking about the anti-Israel books and articles I thought this was a bit rich. Now I really needed to know. How deep did the lie go? I started working backwards, sifting through the various theories. It was like unwinding a tight coil around my body. Each layer I peeled back revealed new truths about the poisonous antizionist concoction. Lila Abu-Lughod’s rapture when she found settler-colonial theory, this pseudoscientific theory that divides the people into good, honest native people and evil external colonialists. It is called “the Great Replacement theory” if it comes from the right and is shunned by liberals, who think of foreigners coming to the West as individuals. But for Israel, this is the theory and it is taught by serious-looking professors. Baddies who come from outside and goodies who were there first (itself a debatable claim). Joseph Massad collapsing the concept of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points to enable the self-determination of peoples to reveal a cartoonish anti-Palestinian colonialist villain.

Then there is Edward Said, the grandfather of the theory of Orientalism, shot through with the spurious claim that there is a kind of antisemitism playing out against the Arabs and that this oppression needs to be “exposed” and “countered”. All of them are closed intellectual theories that cast Israel as the foreigner, the occupier, the settler, the thief, the European or the murderer. And the liar. Jews do not tell the truth. Ever. No alternative explanation can be envisioned, Evil Israel is part of the premise. A religious conviction. What was true of the holy trinity of apartheid, colonialism and this newish word “genocide”? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even the word “occupation” turns out to be a little misleading.

Not that Israel has done everything right in its history; no country has. But nothing merits the idea that Israel has less right to exist than any other country. Nothing merits the endless bile directed at the world’s only Jewish state. Nothing merits the Big Lie of Genocide in Gaza. Indeed, Israel is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. Even though both Kile’s country and mine are older still, this is very unusual for a country to never lose its democracy to occupation or tyranny.

So here we stand. Two gentiles, worlds apart, connected by one mission. Neither of us set out to write the same essay. We didn’t compare notes before we wrote our sections; the echoes were not planned, they were noticed after the fact, and that is what should trouble the reader. A punk in Stockholm and a clinician in America, a generation and an ocean apart, learned to recite “colonizer” and “apartheid” in the same breath, aimed at the same people, and arrived at the same discovery when they stopped: that the protest never stops at City Hall. It stops at the door of Jewish people. Enough.

The antizionist lie must be exposed in all its shades and make visible the antisemitic glue that holds the ramshackle theories together. People talk about the October 8th Jews, the Jews who woke up to feel hunted, trapped and forced to denounce Israel. Well, we are the October 8th goy shabbat, because you are not alone.