Ezra Klein is dangerously wrong about anti-Zionism

‘Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing’, wrote Ezra Klein in the New York Times this week. He was instantly showered with plaudits from both hotheaded leftists and ‘sensible’ centrists. For they all cleave, for dear life, to this belief – that the reason our digital highways, and literal highways, have pulsated with venomous loathing for the Jewish State these past two-and-a-half years is not because of any crazy rebirth of anti-Jewish hostility. No, it was Israel’s own actions that pricked this animus. Israel signed its own death warrant among the righteous of the West with its ‘genocidal’ behaviour in Gaza and beyond.

To call this ‘wrong’ would be too kind. It’s dangerously wrong. To treat anti-Zionism as a mere street reaction to the excesses of the Zionist nation is to be wilfully blind to the singular zeal of this movement, to its apocalyptic intensity. Until Mr Klein and the other establishment worriers about Israel can point me to any other movement of modern times that didn’t only criticise a state at war but also branded it demonic, bloodthirsty and deserving of holy annihilation, then I will hold to my belief that anti-Zionism is not a political idea at all but an ideology of hate.

It was in a column titled ‘This is why there’s no liberal Joe Rogan’ that Klein diagnosed anti-Zionism as a natural response to Israeli war-making. He discusses the controversy swirling around the Israel-hating Twitcher, Hasan Piker. That kicked off when Abdul El-Sayed, the leftish candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, enrolled Piker to campaign for him. Piker’s past comments, which include likening even liberal Zionists to Nazis, make him morally unfit for the Dems, cried commentators. If the party wants to be taken seriously, they said, it must draw a thick line between itself and this iffy streamer.

Klein criticises Piker, especially his ‘Zionist Nazi’ schtick, which he calls ‘repugnant’. But, he says, Piker ‘isn’t a Jew-hater. He’s an anti-Zionist.’ There are now legions of anti-Zionists, he says, and their fury was forged less in the fires of bigotry than from horror at how Israel is ‘behaving today’. Anti-Zionism is no longer a ‘marginal viewpoint’, he says. Nor is it the bastard offspring of some ‘international psy-op’. People are anti-Zionist because of the ceaseless misdeeds of the Zionists themselves, which are ‘incompatible with any normal understanding of liberal values’.

To me, it is a lethal abandonment of critical thinking to say anti-Zionism is a monster of Israel’s own making. Even the most basic, school-level sociology would suggest something more sinister is at play. After all, if it was Israel’s wars that pushed the young into the arms of anti-Zionism, then why do they not cry ‘Stop the war’? Why do they devote themselves to the ending not only of conflict but of the Jewish nation itself? Why do they seek not merely a laying down of arms but the scrubbing away of the Jewish homeland? The clue is in the name: they’re not anti-war, they’re anti-Zionist, and Zionism means little more than the right of the Jews to enjoy sovereign equality with the other peoples of Earth.

Two factors in particular shatter the idea that the boiling animus for Zionism is mere political revulsion for the actions of the State of Israel. The first is the question of when this virulent new strain of anti-Zionism took hold. That will have been in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. The anti-Zionism that now moves like a pox through the virtual highway first found expression before the bodies of Hamas’s victims were cold. Israel had barely fired a shot, far less sent ground troops into Gaza, before swarms of people were gathering in London, Sydney, Berlin and New York to holler ‘Fuck the Jews’ and revel in their murder. That wasn’t a response to Israel’s actions – it was a response to Hamas’s. It was a public acceptance of Hamas’s invitation to ‘globalise the intifada’ and to torment ‘Zionists’ over here as well as in the Middle East.

Mere days after Hamas’s pogrom, posters featuring kidnapped Israelis were being ferociously clawed down and graffitied. On the day of the pogrom itself, as Jews were being put to death, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign contacted the Metropolitan Police about holding an anti-Israel march in London. People danced with glee outside the Israeli Embassy in London before Israel had taken serious military action. That’s because it isn’t Israel’s actions that infuriate them – it’s its existence. It’s the temerity of the Jews of the Holy Land to insist on the right of statehood. Anti-Zionism exploded in the aftermath of 7 October because it is fundamentally the Western wing of Hamas’s conviction that the Jews must be deprived of nationhood, by violence if necessary.

Or consider the use of the term ‘genocide’ to describe Israel’s pursuit of the racist terrorists that raped and murdered its people. That emerged within days of Hamas’s massacre. Kibbutzim were still smouldering when on 10 October 2023 the Palestinian ambassador to the UN described Israeli airstrikes in Gaza as ‘genocidal’. The genocide lie was amplified by Israelophobic commentators throughout October 2023. A mere three weeks after Hamas launched its infernal war with the murder of more than a thouand Jews, a group of UN special rapporteurs were saying Gaza was at ‘grave risk of genocide’. What a shameful inversion of truth that was – the Jews are attacked by genocidal terrorists and yet it’s the Jews who are called genocidal.

The ‘genocide’ lie, which is the first commandment of anti-Zionism, emerged not in response to Israel’s actions but from a pre-existing cesspit of Israelophobic animus. It wasn’t anything Israel did that earned it that slur. It was the anti-Zionists’ long-held bigoted belief that the Jewish state is an inherently genocidal one, ‘uniquely murderous’, a nation given to the joyous letting of blood. This brings us to the second factor that upends Klein’s claim that anti-Zionism is a ‘response to what Israel is doing: the sheer mania of anti-Zionism, its fizzing, overwrought nature. Spend five minutes with a self-defined anti-Zionist and you will know you are in the presence of a bigot in the garb of a peacenik.

Anti-Zionism belongs far more to the realm of irrational dread than judicious analysis. It simmers with hate. It sees Israel not only as a nation that has committed wrongs – as have all nations – but also as a demonic thing that’s dragging us to hell, or at least to forever war. It rehabilitates ancient calumnies in pseudo-political language. Where Jews were accused of killing Christian children, the Jewish State is said to take pleasure in the death of Palestinian children. The old view of the Jews as the puppet-masters of global affairs finds its echo in the new idea that Israel has the West eating from the palm of its hand. Across the internet, anti-Zionists from both left and right accuse the Jewish nation of controlling our media and polluting our nations with porn and ‘Third Worlders’. Honestly, saying anti-Zionism is a response to Israel’s behaviour is like saying the KKK was a response to black people’s behaviour.

Klein is right about one thing – anti-Zionism is no longer a ‘marginal viewpoint’. And that should worry us all. My concern is that the media establishment’s drawing of a line between anti-Zionism and ‘real anti-Semitism’ is giving free rein to this emboldened ideology of loathing that comes dressed as pacifism. We now have the bizarre situation where someone like Klein can cheer Hasan Piker for saying anti-Semitism is ‘gross’ and ‘immoral’, and then just days later, Piker says he would ‘vote for Hamas over Israel every single time’. Hamas – an army of violent bigots that is devoted to vapourising the world’s only Jewish nation. But it’s just anti-Zionism. It’s fine. Relax.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.