After its ideological kidnapping, we must urgently reclaim the term Zionism

The 7 October attacks represented the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. 8 October witnessed the ‘continuation of the pogrom’, to quote journalist Brendan O’Neill. In the three years since, Jews have become accustomed to a daily roll call of incidents that testify to a tsunami of hatred, one which has reached into every corner and crevice of social life. In some cases, such as Heaton Park, Washington and Bondi Beach, the hatred has taken its most murderous and demonic form.

But when you study the CST figures or the data from other countries, you find that the majority of antisemitic incidents are ‘Israel or Zionism’ related. People are targeting Jewish people because of their real or purported Zionist attachment. The superficial explanation is that this is the fault of an Israeli government that reacted to a massacre with a brutal campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The real explanation is that there has been a racist campaign, decades in the making, to render Zionism a term of abuse. This campaign has depicted Zionists as an inhuman barrier to a world of peace and harmony, as a metaphor for evil and as the most potent contemporary symbol of global corruption and moral turpitude. It has demanded purity tests of Jews, separating the good ones (who renounce Zionism and eviscerate their cultural identity) from the bad ones who refuse. It has seen calls to ‘crush Zionism’, to murder Zionists and to purify the world of Zionism. Naturally, this is all contrary to the claims of the ‘progressive’ left, which wants us to believe that any discourse and narrative on Israel or Zionism is ‘just politics’ and that it cannot cross over into antisemitic hate and prejudice.

Of course, there are cases where criticism of an Israeli government is entirely justified, and where we should have difficult but necessary conversations about where it may be going wrong. This is, however, irrelevant to much of the antizionist movement, which is built around the rejection of Israel’s existence, the exclusion of practically all Jews who disagree with them and the dissemination of harmful conspiracy theories about Israel, Zionism and Jewish people.

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That is why B’nai B’rith UK has just launched a major report on ‘Antizionism as the new face of anti-Jewish extremism’ in Parliament. It exposes how Zionism has been ‘ideologically kidnapped’ by its enemies and why a more truthful narrative must be reclaimed without delay. For Zionism is a liberation movement for a persecuted people who experienced the frightening consequences of powerlessness for two millennia. It is a movement for a people who faced a relentless tide of genocidal violence and expulsion and yet fulfilled their quest for national redemption. It takes spectacular myopia to look at this tragic history and still regard the fulfilment of Zionism as some kind of moral error. Moreover, the Jews of Israel have never been illegitimate colonial interlopers like the Belgians in Congo or the French in Algeria. They have returned to a land with which their ancestors had a deep, longstanding and continuous historical presence: an unbroken link going back millennia.

Antizionism must therefore be exposed as a hateful movement built upon an edifice of lies. It isn’t about human rights or fairness or justice. It isn’t a force for anti-colonialism. It does nothing to advance Palestinian rights and, indeed, is corrosive to the peace-making and co-existence that are vital to resolving the Middle East’s many discords. It is an extremist movement which seeks to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and to eradicate Israel. But it is more than this. Antizionism also seeks to ‘de-Zionise’ the rest of the planet. It targets oppressively all those Jews who have, in their view, used Zionism to control our governments, our banking systems, our media, our universities and any other social institution with which they have come into contact. Why else chant to ‘globalise the intifada?’

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To truly expose the moral rot at the heart of antizionism, we must understand both its history and the ideology underlying it. It emerged from the bowels of the most intolerant regimes of the twentieth century – Nazi Germany and especially the USSR. The Soviet connection is really interesting, because the lies, libels and calumnies that are spewed out on a daily basis against the Jewish state and Zionism are a faithful replica of the lies, libels and calumnies disseminated by the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet regime proposed three core ideas to demonise Israel and Zionism – they were the charges of settler colonialism, genocide and apartheid.

According to the first trope, Zionists have carried out a colonial war against a pitiless indigenous population, stealing their land and expropriating the title deeds to their nation. For some, this is at the behest of external powers (Britain and the US); for others, it is the Zionists who drive this project forward. The bottom line: The Jews of Israel are depicted as lacking indigeneity and acting as usurpers.

The second charge is genocide. The comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany or with other fascist powers was another mainstay of Soviet demonology, repeated ad nauseum in books, pamphlets, speeches and videos. Soviet cartoons depicted Israeli soldiers wearing swastikas and dreaming of Hitler, while the German jackboot was inextricably linked to Israeli military ‘Blitzkrieg’ and ‘Herrenvolk’. The ‘Blitzkrieg’ and ‘Herrenvolk’ were mobilised on a massive scale and used to ‘prove’ that the Jewish state was identical to Hitler’s Germany. ‘ Needless to say, the genocide charge surfaced very early during the Gaza war; in fact, pretty much on the very day that Hamas terrorists were engaging in their killing spree throughout southern Israel. That is not because Israel started a genocide campaign, which remains a grotesque lie, but because that charge had been in the zeitgeist for decades, ready to surface at a moment’s calling.

The third charge is that of apartheid. Antizionists argue that the Jewish state is a constitutionally racist ethnostate with formal systems of discrimination, exclusion and prejudice. They liken Israel’s security barrier in the West, designed to protect against suicide bombings, to an ‘apartheid wall’ that racially segregates different communities in the territory. They condemn Israel’s use of military checkpoints and permit systems as a form of racial control and choose to see Palestinian villages and cities as ‘bantustans’ in a greater Israel.

The point is that when these calumnies and tropes are routinely screamed at university campuses, as they have been for years, there is a history behind them. They are not the spontaneous outpouring of rage at Israel’s actions. They are instead the simple regurgitation of a decades-old campaign of hatred that has captured so many Western institutions, including, to their shame, the UN. Naturally, each of these tropes is easily open to refutation; that is, through facts, evidence and logic. But refutation makes no difference to antizionist ideologues. Antizionism is much more a cult than a political position. It brooks no disagreement; it tolerates no dissent; it regards nuance as heresy, and it views critics as ‘haters’.

To fully discredit antizionism, we must go even further than this. We must show how this insidious ideology affects all of society by embracing anti-Western regimes and acting as a magnet for jihadist movements. The UK in particular has become an epicentre of anti-Zionism. Iran and Qatar both launder the Hamas narrative in this country through their media stations and charities. One can find support for the ayatollah regime on many marches and demonstrations, hardly a surprise given that the most radical anti-Israel forces (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) are Iran-funded and inspired. Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, is ideologically obsessed with demonising the Jewish state and has a considerable presence here.

Radical leftists too now see demonising the Jewish state as the key part of their political outlook. This too has had baleful consequences in the UK. Not only are we seeing attacks on cherished symbols, whether it is the Churchill statue, the Battle of Britain memorial or the poppy, we are also seeing a nasty form of sectarianism entering British politics. Few can forget the by-election in Gorton and Denton in which the Green Party released campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla, ones which featured images of Sir Keir Starmer with Narendra Modi and David Lammy with Benjamin Netanyahu. Such tactics simply polarise communities by dividing them into religious interest groups, thus stoking up needless division. Then there are the independent ‘Gaza MPs’ who won seats in 2024, some of whom called for the UK to join military intervention against Israel. The anti-Zionist ‘Free Palestine’ movement has thus acted as a recruiting sergeant for some destabilising forces in modern Britain.

By contrast, there are important movements which seek to bring together Israeli and Palestinian voices in an attempt to celebrate co-existence. They seek a better future for both peoples and welcome the Abraham Accords as a means of normalising relations between the Arab world and Israel. By acknowledging that Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are a given, these people make the case for a better and more prosperous Middle East for all its people, including the Palestinians. Let us celebrate these voices while exposing the pseudo-intellectualism and moral corruption at the heart of anti-Zionism.