Tying It All Together: Antizionism, A Holistic Ideology

This lecture is part of Antizionism: The History of an Ideology, a six-part series hosted by Chai Mitzvah. The series examines the historical origins, evolution, and contemporary manifestations of antizionism. Sponsored by the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism.

This talk analyzes the cultural logic of antizionism as a distinct, recognizable ideological formation—one that emerges as a successor ideology to Christian and Islamic anti-Judaism and to classical antisemitism. Antizionism constitutes an anti-Jewish politics specifically targeting Jewish collectivity, indigeneity, and sovereignty, structured through three core libels—colonizer, apartheid, genocide—which together form its defining semantic content. Building on the work of Mansour, Herf, Tabarovsky, and others, antizionist libels can be genealogically traced to Nazi–Islamist convergences, Soviet antizionist propaganda, and their later rationalization through Western academic settler-colonial theory. Antizionism thus posits that a “Jewish majority state” is inherently oppressive, encoding this claim in a metaphysical theology of inherent evil that draws on anti-Judaic canards, antisemitic theories of Jewish conquest, and Holocaust inversion. It is not a criticism of real Israeli policy. It is entirely a priori, conceiving of every Israeli action as a deterministic expression of the posited evil essence. As such, antizionism operates as a dogma. Its premises are neither tested nor debated, but reaffirmed, repeated—using fragments of selective evidence—in order to mark Jews (as “Zionists”) for stigma, exclusion, and violence. Antizionism, then, is  the primary contemporary structure of anti-Jewish hate.

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Adam Louis-Klein is a scholar of antizionism whose work focuses on antizionism as a single, holistic ideology of anti-Jewish exclusion. Trained in anthropology and philosophy, he combines intellectual history, discourse analysis, and comparative ethnography to examine how antizionist libels—colonizer, apartheid, and genocide—operate across Soviet, Middle Eastern, and Western contexts. His research explores how contemporary moral and human-rights language has been repurposed to legitimize the stigmatization and targeting of Jews, Israelis, and “Zionists.”