The Cause That Ate the Brain: Anti-Zionism’s Roots

How an old Western habit of making Jews symbolic got a keffiyeh, a placard, and a sociology degree.

There is a strange little miracle happening in the West. People who could not find the Jordan River without Google Maps suddenly start explaining Zionism like they were there with Moses. Three thousand years of Jewish history? Gone. Two thousand years of exile, persecution, survival, prayer, return, language, law, memory? Deleted. Apparently history began in 1948, or 1967, depending on how recently the activist watched a TikTok.

This is the first trick of modern anti-Zionism. It does not argue with Jewish history. It chops it up, burns the inconvenient parts, and presents the ashes as a university module.

Historically, strands of Christian thought rewrote Jewish history to cast Jews as the people of blindness, stubbornness and unbelief. Not every Christian, obviously — before anyone faints into their oat milk. This is not an attack on ordinary believers; it is a point about an inherited Western habit of using Jews as symbols. In that tradition, Jews were made to play a role: the people who missed the truth, rejected the prophets, and wandered as evidence of their own failure.

Modern anti-Zionism does something similar, only with worse haircuts and better grant funding. It severs Jewish history from the present and shrinks the whole Jewish story into the last 60 or 70 years of conflict. The Jew becomes visible only as a soldier, settler, oppressor, coloniser. The Jew praying towards Jerusalem for centuries? Too complicated. The Jew returning to an ancestral homeland after exile and slaughter? Awkward. The Jew as a people with memory, land, law and continuity? Sorry, not available in the activist starter pack.

Not Criticism. A Movement.

There is nothing wrong with criticising Israel. Israelis do it daily, loudly, and usually before breakfast. If shouting at your own government were an Olympic sport, Israel would sweep the medals and then argue about the referee.

But anti-Zionism as a movement is not the same thing as criticism of policy. It is not “I dislike Netanyahu”. It is not “I oppose this settlement” or “I object to this military decision”. That is politics. Anti-Zionism, as a movement, is something else. It says the Jewish state itself is illegitimate.

That distinction matters. Because once you decide that the Jewish state is the problem, not a government, not a policy, not a war, but the very existence of Jewish sovereignty, then the solution becomes obvious. Remove the state. Disempower the Jews. Render them harmless. Return them to the condition in which the world apparently prefers them: scattered, vulnerable, dependent, grateful, and preferably available for memorial ceremonies.

This is why anti-Zionism is action-oriented. It does not merely dislike Israel. It seeks to dismantle the vehicle of Jewish power. That is the whole point. Israel is not hated because it fails to be perfect. It is hated because it prevents Jews from being powerless.

And that, for many people, is unforgivable.

Palestine: The Omni-Cause

Palestine is no longer treated as a cause. It is treated as the cause. The mother cause. The holy cause. The cause that swallowed every grievance on earth and now waddles through the public square wearing every badge at once.

But every religion needs a devil. In this one, it is Israel.

Climate change? Israel.
Racism? Israel.
Capitalism? Israel.
Colonialism? Israel.
The price of sourdough in Hackney? Give it five minutes. Someone will find a settler to blame.

This is what I call the omni-cause. Palestine becomes the sacred excuse, while Israel becomes the magic key that explains everything. Every grievance, every rage, every failed revolution, every half-read theory from a university seminar gets stapled to the Jewish state. The result is not politics. It is theology with worse posters.

And like all bad theology, it needs a devil.

Israel becomes the cosmic evil. The one thing that must be defeated before the world can be redeemed. Palestine will save us all, they say. Not peace. Not reform. Not freedom from Hamas. Not democracy in the Arab world. Not women’s rights in the Middle East. Not gay rights under Islamist rule. No, Palestine. Always Palestine.

Apparently once Israel is destroyed, racism will end, capitalism will collapse, dolphins will return to the Thames, and Jeremy Corbyn will finally discover deodorant. A beautiful vision, really. Completely mad, but beautiful in the way a man shouting at traffic cones is beautiful.

Israel as the West in Convenient Packaging

Part of the obsession is simple: Israel allows people to attack the West without sounding like they are attacking themselves.

Israel is allied with America. It is democratic, Western-facing, technologically advanced, militarily capable, and unapologetically national. So for the anti-Zionist imagination, Israel becomes the West in miniature. America with Hebrew signs. Europe with tanks. Colonial guilt in a smaller, more emotionally satisfying package.

This is why criticism of Israel often stands in for criticism of the West, America, capitalism, borders, nationhood, modernity, military power, and whatever else the activist class has decided to hate this week. Israel becomes the little box into which they place every Western sin.

There is also an old reversal here. In Christian Europe, Jews were often portrayed as backward, stubborn, anachronistic. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Zionists were accused of being too modern, too clever, too urban, too powerful, too successful. Now Jews are apparently backward again because they have a nation state and use military power to defend it.

So which is it? Are Jews too weak or too powerful? Too ancient or too modern? Too tribal or too universal? Too diasporic or too sovereign?

The answer is yes. Whatever is needed at the time. Antisemitism is nothing if not flexible. Like yoga, but for bigots.

The Two Jews the West Allows

There are two images of the Jew that Western thought has often found acceptable.

The first is the evil Jew: powerful, scheming, rootless, manipulative, hidden behind events, pulling strings like a villain in a badly written spy film.

The second is the good Jew: suffering, passive, universal, diasporic, progressive, and preferably dead. The Jew as victim. The Jew as moral symbol. The Jew who teaches the world tolerance by not fighting back.

This is the Jew people love. The museum Jew. The memorial Jew. The candlelit Jew. The Jew who appears in black-and-white photographs and does not ask difficult questions about why the world abandoned him.

But the Jew with a border? The Jew with an army? The Jew who says “never again” and means “we will shoot back”? That Jew ruins the performance.

Jean-Paul Sartre captured the trap perfectly: the antisemite wants to destroy the Jew as a man and leave only the Jew; the liberal universalist wants to destroy him as a Jew and leave only the man.

Different costume. Same erasure.

One says: you are only a Jew.
The other says: stop being a Jew.

And now anti-Zionism adds a third option: you may be Jewish, but only if you renounce Jewish power, Jewish sovereignty, and Jewish self-defence. You may keep the food, the jokes, the trauma, and perhaps a tasteful klezmer soundtrack. But Jerusalem? No. An army? Absolutely not. That makes people uncomfortable at dinner parties.

The Old Code in New Clothes

Shulamit Volkov famously described antisemitism as a “cultural code” in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany. It was not just one prejudice among others. It became part of a whole worldview. To be antisemitic was often to belong to a wider political and cultural package: anti-democratic, militarist, nationalist, reactionary.

Today, anti-Zionism works in a similar way inside parts of the progressive world. It acts as a badge. A password. A signal that you belong.

You don’t need to know anything about the Mandate, the Ottoman Empire, the Mufti, the Farhud, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, the Peel Commission, the UN partition plan, or the fact that Jews have prayed towards Jerusalem since before Britain worked out plumbing.

You just need to say “Free Palestine” with the correct facial expression.

Then you are in.

Anti-Zionism has become part of a progressive doctrine: anti-Western, anti-American, anti-national, anti-border, anti-police, anti-military, anti-everything except Hamas, somehow. Funny how that works. The one group that actually embodies fascism, theocracy, misogyny, homophobia and death-cult politics gets a free pass because it has the right enemies.

In the mid-twentieth century, anti-Bolshevism served as a organising myth for parts of the far right. Today, anti-Zionism plays a similar role for parts of the far left. It gathers anxieties, resentments and fantasies into one object. Israel becomes the symbol through which everything can be hated at once.

Very efficient. Like Amazon Prime for moral stupidity.

From the Margins to the Mainstream

The danger is not that every critic of Israel is an antisemite. That is lazy. And worse, it lets the serious ones hide behind the stupid ones.

The danger is that antisemitic patterns of thought have moved from the margins into respectable institutions under the language of anti-Zionism. Universities. Media. NGOs. Political parties. Churches. Unions. Cultural spaces. Places that used to know better, or at least pretended to after Auschwitz.

Now we hear the same old themes dressed up in new vocabulary.

Jews are too powerful.
Israel controls the narrative.
Jewish suffering is exaggerated.
Jewish self-defence is aggression.
Jewish history is invented.
Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate.
Jewish fear is manipulation.
Jewish memory is propaganda.

And all of this is said in the language of justice. That is the clever part. Old hatred rarely comes wearing the old uniform. It comes dressed as compassion, liberation, decolonisation, human rights. It carries a tote bag. It has a podcast. It says “as an educator” before saying something historically illiterate enough to make a brick wince.

The Genocide Conspiracy

At the centre of modern anti-Zionism sits a conspiracy theory. It says Jews invented or exploited their history in order to justify stealing land and committing genocide.

That is why Holocaust memory is now attacked so often by the same people screaming about Gaza. They understand that Jewish history is the foundation under Israel’s moral legitimacy. So they have to break it. They have to turn memory into manipulation. They have to make Jewish suffering look like a weapon.

This is why the accusation of genocide is so useful. It reverses the Holocaust. It turns Jews from the victims of extermination into its authors. It says: you became what you suffered. It is not only an accusation. It is a ritual humiliation.

And it works because it gives Western audiences moral relief. They can stop feeling guilty about dead Jews and start feeling righteous about condemning living ones.

Much more convenient. Dead Jews ask for remembrance. Living Jews ask for ammunition.

The Jew Who Refuses to Disappear

The real offence of Zionism is not colonialism. It is Jewish refusal.

Refusal to vanish.
Refusal to remain dependent.
Refusal to be ornamental victims in someone else’s moral theatre.
Refusal to let Europe write the final chapter and then congratulate itself for the memorial plaque.

Zionism said the Jewish people are not just a religion, not just a trauma, not just a minority, not just a museum exhibit, not just the ghost in Europe’s conscience. They are a people. With a land. With a language. With rights. With enemies. With the right to defend themselves.

That is what anti-Zionism cannot forgive.

Because Jewish power breaks the script.

The old script says Jews suffer, others interpret. Jews die, others learn lessons. Jews are persecuted, others build museums. Zionism interrupts that with something terribly rude: survival with agency.

The Idiots Are Rising Again

We are told anti-Zionism is about justice. Fine. Then let us ask the obvious questions.

Where is the justice in denying Jewish self-determination alone among the nations?

Where is the justice in demanding that Jews return to statelessness after centuries of pogroms, expulsions, ghettos, inquisitions, massacres and genocide?

Where is the justice in treating Palestinian nationalism as sacred and Jewish nationalism as uniquely evil?

Where is the justice in marching for Gaza while ignoring Hamas, the regime that turned Gaza into a tunnel network with civilians parked on top like sandbags?

Where is the justice in telling Jews that they may be safe only when they are weak?

That is not justice. That is old Western thinking with a new slogan.

And the slogans are everywhere now. On campuses. In parliament. In newspapers. In art galleries. In streets where people who cannot find Israel on a map explain “settler colonialism” to police officers while standing in a country that once owned half the planet. Britain lecturing Jews on colonialism is always a special treat. Like Dracula running a blood donation ethics seminar.

Final Beat: The Oldest Hatred, Updated for Wi-Fi

Anti-Zionism’s roots are deep because the West has spent centuries turning Jews into symbols. Sometimes of stubbornness. Sometimes of capitalism. Sometimes of communism. Sometimes of modernity. Sometimes of backwardness. Sometimes of victimhood. Sometimes of power.

The Jew is never allowed simply to be a people among peoples.

That is the pattern.

Today, anti-Zionism tells us Israel is the source of global evil, Palestine is the key to redemption, and Jews must choose between being universal victims or particular villains. It is not new. It is ancient machinery running on modern electricity.

The language has changed. The appetite has not.

So no, this is not about a border dispute. It is not about Netanyahu. It is not about settlements. Those may be real debates, but they are not the engine of this obsession.

The engine is older.

It is the belief that Jewish power is illegitimate, Jewish memory is suspicious, Jewish survival is negotiable, and Jewish sovereignty is a problem to be solved.

And once you understand that, the whole circus becomes much clearer.

The placards. The chants. The university statements. The BBC throat-clearing. The politicians discovering moral courage only when Jews are on the receiving end. The activists who cannot name a single Palestinian leader without accidentally endorsing a terrorist. The people who think “Free Palestine” is a personality.

It is all part of the same script.

The Jews are allowed to be mourned. They are not allowed to win.

That is why Zionism still matters.

Because it says: no.

No to disappearance.
No to dependency.
No to being reduced to someone else’s lesson.
No to the museum Jew.
No to the helpless Jew.
No to the polite Jew who waits for permission to survive.

The Jewish state exists because history taught Jews what the world does when they have no power.

And the world’s rage at that fact tells us exactly why it is still necessary.

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The idiots are rising. Let’s not leave them the microphone.