Anti-Zionism cannot exist without antisemitism - Recent attacks prove it - opinion

Just last week, an assailant rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan. Explosive devices were set off at two Jewish institutions in the Netherlands, after the detonation of one outside a synagogue in Belgium.

When confronted with this violence, many who amplify anti-Zionist rhetoric insist they're merely criticizing the State of Israel. They're anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, they say, leaving Jews to prove when criticism crosses into hate.

But that's a red herring. Anti-Zionism vs. antisemitism is like milkshake vs. ice cream: just as milkshakes depend on ice cream for their appeal, anti-Zionism structurally depends on antisemitic infrastructure to thrive as a social justice movement. The infrastructure does the work automatically: accusations feel intuitively plausible, the stakes are heightened, and violence gets rationalized as resistance.

Modern anti-Zionism is not a mere critique of Israeli policies. It is a hate movement built on a clear ideology. Anti-Zionism organizes itself around three core accusations: that Israel commits genocide, practices apartheid, and represents settler colonialism. Each draws its power not from evidence but from activating antisemitism's mythic legacy.

Blood libel accusations created cognitive pathways that make charges against Jews feel intuitively plausible, even when evidence is absent. When images of suffering Palestinian children circulate, they activate centuries-old frameworks about Jews harming children – not because people consciously believe medieval myths, but because the accusation feels familiar.

Consider the New York Times' July 2025 front-page photo of an emaciated Gazan toddler. The paper later acknowledged the child suffered from congenital disorders, not malnutrition. But the damage was done through image composition alone. Styled to evoke Michelangelo's Pietà, the photo activated antisemitic frameworks without stating them explicitly. The infrastructure operates through resonance, not declaration.

The genocide accusation carries weight only because the Holocaust created both the legal framework (Raphael Lemkin coined the term specifically for what happened to Jews) and the moral resonance that makes genocide the ultimate evil. Anti-Zionism inverts this: it weaponizes the Holocaust's authority to accuse Jews of perpetrating what was done to them.

The apartheid label positions Jews as uniquely privileged oppressors. This functions because antisemitic frameworks about Jewish wealth, power, and exclusivity already exist – popularized by the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery which alleged a Jewish conspiracy to control global finance, media, and governments.

Anti-Zionism updated these myths with modern terminology. Jews' purported overrepresentation in law, medicine, and boardrooms casts them as "hyper-white" oppressors. The accusation doesn't need evidence when the infrastructure makes it feel plausible.

The accusation of settler-colonialism requires erasing an inconvenient majority. More than half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim – refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, not European colonizers. Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Iran didn't "settle" Israel; they fled to it.

Yet the framework casts all Israeli Jews as foreign invaders, activating an older trope: that Jews are eternal foreigners who contaminate lands they inhabit. Nazism deployed this logic, positioning Jews as race polluters. The settler-colonial framework repackages this premise.

The dual-loyalty trope lays the groundwork. Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro revealed that Kamala Harris's vetting team asked whether he had ever acted as an "agent of the Israeli government." The ADL called it a textbook revival of the dual loyalty trope, and the settler-colonial framework operates right on top of it: if Jews are presumed to serve a foreign power, casting them as "settlers" requires no proof. Between 1943 and 1948, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel all emerged as modern nation-states. Jordan is ruled by a Hashemite dynasty from Saudi Arabia, not indigenous to Jordan. Yet only the Jewish state is delegitimized as colonial. This selective application reveals the motive: the framework activates existing tropes about Jewish foreignness.

We recognize hate movements by their outcomes: who gets targeted, who gets hurt, who gets killed. Since October 7, 2023, synagogues have been vandalized, Jewish students barred from campus, Jewish businesses firebombed, and Jews assaulted across the West – not for supporting specific policies, but for being identifiably Jewish.

Anti-Zionism is constructed from antisemitic materials, given contemporary branding, and deployed through social justice language. Blood libel frameworks, conspiracy theories about Jewish power, dual loyalty tropes – the infrastructure makes accusations feel true before evidence is considered.

The question isn't whether we can separate the milkshake from the ice cream. You can't.

The question is whether we're willing to call a hate movement what it is – and stop asking Jews to prove, once again, that the hatred targeting them is real.