I’ve watched what antizionism does to Jews. I’ve seen it pressure and push and violently demand. Some fold, others get crushed, and almost every Jewish person I talk with has described its sinking weight. I’ve been messaged by many who are ashamed of lying low, being quiet, losing a piece of themselves just to get past a day.
I wish I could act superior and say I’d never compromise, but life is too complex, and I won’t pretend to know what I haven’t faced. Sometimes you have to pick your battles. Sometimes to protect yourself and others you have to shrink, defer, and postpone.
At the same time, I see more and more people clapping back, being bold, and refusing to be crushed. They won’t suffer ignorance, shy away, or cower under duress. It’s these who are the first to say what I’m about to.
I’ve kept my voice level a long time and I’m unsure being careful helps anymore.
I don’t have a neutral word for what I see, nor do I desire one. It’s bullying I see, and bullies don’t stop at silence. So, if you feel what I feel, let’s begin where they do and name it.
Hold this definition, because it’s the one that matches the world. Presumptuous, perhaps. Correct, certainly. It’s worth sounding overly confident for.
This is an instrument for detection. Point it at the last three years and compare what’s happened. Marches of mobs have chanted homicidal slogans at synagogues, not embassies. A father and son went to a Hanukkah crowd, not a consulate. “F@ck Israel” was spray-painted on a federation building, not a foreign ministry. The inverted red triangle, “from the river to the sea,” Globalize the Intifada, Zionism is Racism, apartheid, genocide, colonizer, child-killer, ethnostate. That’s what’s being said, and it’s the language of modern antizionism.
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Elias Rodriguez shot two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington last May and shouted “Free, Free Palestine” as they took him. If you want to hear those exact words as chants, there’s a crowd of people who do so. The doubled “Free” was his way of signaling the cause.
Ayman Ghazali drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield with thirty-five gallons of gasoline, after searching for “the largest gathering of Israelis in Michigan.” He had just posted that Israel was “pure evil.”
Neither man reached for the words we are used to Jews hearing. They spoke the language I’ve been studying since October 8, the language of the NYT opinion section and the postcolonial seminar. The march and the truck. Ghazali and Rodriguez. Kristof and Khalidi.
It doesn’t need to be antisemitism to hate Jews. It doesn’t need to resemble anything we’ve been used to. Antizionism is different, having its own source, libels, and presentation. It draws from its own well. And if you haven’t noticed, the water runs deep.
There’s no more waiting for this hatred to be acknowledged.
Now the caveat. Every communal statement opens with the same genuflection noting that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. Then it spends the rest of its breath detailing why. That describes a world that no longer exists. It’s written for a time when criticism of Israel arrived as criticism, an argument about settlements from someone who may have wanted the argument won.
Look at what arrives now. A chant outside a deli. A triangle on a dorm door. A jar of chemicals through a family window. A man reloading outside a museum. The genuine realpolitik of Israeli policy is a needle in the haystack of what actually reaches Jews. The caveat has revealed its function. Built as a shield for the honest critic, it now works as a front for everyone else, the first line an antizionist reaches for. Retire it. When the fever breaks it can be reissued.
Time to cast a wider net. Every screening instrument in medicine errs toward the false positive, because the cost of a missed cancer is a life and a second look is worth the time. Organizations have a screening instrument calibrated the other way, terrified of catching a single honest critic, relaxed about missing a movement.
Reverse it. Count too much. Let the innocent critic suffer the indignity of a second look. Hell, let him have a couple more. The other calibration has a body count, and it grew by twenty last year. At least they’ll survive.
Let’s say it with the urgency the numbers carry because this isn’t a classroom kind of question. The distance between what the organizations tally and what’s hunting Jews actually amounts to is measured in death. Sydney, Manchester, Washington, Boulder.
Read the ADL’s 2025 Audit, with this definition and the document argues against itself. 45% of 6,274 incidents related to Israel or Zionism, down from 58% the year before. Nearly half the hatred reaching American Jews arrives through Israel, and the audit answers its own finding with a subcategory tag. A hatred that generates half your data isn’t a modifier of the subject. It is the subject.
Then the exclusion clause gets summoned. The counts do not include “legitimate political protest of Israeli policies” or “general pro-Palestinian activism.” There’s the caveat again, printed as a methodology. The auditors sat through five thousand rallies sorting chants into antisemitic and legitimate, noting the moment a crowd crossed that line. Those you hear yelling don’t care about that line, even if they pretend to around you or cameras.
They assumed the line’s irrelevance before they assembled. A demonstration against one country, held weekly for two years, by people who’ve never marched for Sudan or Yemen or against China isn’t a protest with lapses. The exclusive fixation amounts to evidence. The fetish of Israel is the data.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against eight people tied to the University of Michigan, charged with a campaign of threats and vandalism to force the school to cut its ties with Israel. On the first anniversary of October 7, they spray-painted “Free Palestine” and “intifada” on the Jewish Federation of Detroit, demanding the school divest “by any means necessary.”
The Federation, the target, called it antisemitic violence. If by “antisemitic” they mean the word we use in place of Jew-hatred, I understand. It’s what most the world has learned to say, and I won’t tell any Jewish person not to say it.
It’s important, however, to avoid missing the obvious. The attackers had spoken antizionist from the first demand letter to the last jar of chemicals. No swastika, no race-pollution, no Turner Diaries on their dorm bookshelves.
The J7 report, just published, lists 23,000 incidents, 20 funerals, and the deadliest diaspora year since Hezbollah bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and 85 people were no more. J7 used one word for all of these. Their lines trace killings through Sydney, Manchester, Washington, and Boulder. Four attacks, four explicitly antizionist banners, not a greedy-trope or Sig runes among them.
The task force speaking for 90% of the diaspora drew the most complete map ever made. It even found the source, naming antizionism as the motive behind nearly half the incidents in Britain and America. Then it filed that finding inside antisemitism and moved on. Its remedies, funding, legislation, platform enforcement, are all aimed at the words and images of Duke and Farrakhan. We simply have no need to counteract using “Globalist” anymore.
Which leaves the correction, and it’s far from complicated. Antizionism is its own source of Jew-hatred, and it needs neither to be antisemitism nor to resemble it, to hate Jews. It uses Israel, Zionism, and Jews as a collective, to launder what would otherwise be unsayable. The othering, ostracizing, harming, and delegitimizing of Jewish people, all washed clean through the words “critique” and “politics.”
Let’s drop the reflex that keeps combing the crowd for the honest critic. He exists. He’s one man in a movement of millions. And even he fixates on a single state, holding it to a standard demanded of no other, incessantly talking about it.
Antizionism is a modern form of Jew-hatred aimed at the Jewish people and their ancestral home. It’s a movement of libels, demonization, and social exclusion, expressed through the othering of Jews and the Jewish state. It has a genealogy rooted in Soviet, Nazi, Arab nationalist, Islamist, and leftist influences, and was carried into the West through universities and institutions. It comes from the political left, is couched in the language of human rights, and understood as a cause for liberation in concert with anti-fascism and anti-racism. It views Jewish memory as manipulation, Jewish self-defense as aggression, and Jewish statehood as racism.
It is the most dangerous form of Jew-hatred in the world today. It left its symbols at the synagogue, came as a truck through a temple wall, and showed up as a pistol outside a museum. It explains what Ghazali and Rodriguez say. Their exact words. A definition that matches data isn’t an opinion. It’s the name for it.
Antisemitism, as I see it, is the right arm. Hoods, swastikas, blood and soil. Two generations were trained to read that arm, to flinch at its cocking and slip its swing, and this training took.
Then the left arm started throwing, and the flinch never came, because it arrived from the other side, in a different glove. We watch it land and run to check it against the right. Now and then it matches and gets counted.
Mostly it doesn’t.
A punch is a punch and Jew-hatred doesn’t have to come from the corner most were warned about. The question “Is this antisemitism?” is built to detect the right arm.
Or think of it this way: smoke was the danger every home was wired against, so the ceiling wears the same device, working as it has for decades. For smoke. It wasn’t built for anything else. Antizionism doesn’t smoke. It carries none of the imagery society has learned to shame, and so it fills the rooms at City Hall and public arenas, having a chant here, a book display there, and the alarm reads clean air.
We need a device calibrated to detect the smokeless poison. An awareness that blocks both punches. That begins by calling it antizionism, losing the caveat, and worrying less of mislabeling the genuine political critic.
The Inverted World is reader-supported and self-funded. Free subscriptions help the work spread; paid subscriptions help keep it going.
Originally posted on The Times of Israel blogs.
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