Why We Keep Failing to Recognize Antisemitism When It Changes Its Clothes

Why We Keep Failing to Recognize Antisemitism When It Changes Its Clothes Matthew Feinberg @the webbie

Antizionism has its own origin story, its own lexicon, and its own delivery mechanisms. It has developed a historical narrative through which the conflict is interpreted, a vocabulary through which that narrative is expressed, and an institutional ecosystem capable of transmitting those ideas from universities and activist organizations to newsrooms and social media.

That matters because antizionism is related to classical antisemitism the way a mutated virus is related to its parent. A mutation does not have to reproduce every feature of what came before. It preserves enough of the underlying machinery to remain related while changing enough of the exterior to evade recognition.

The postwar West became reasonably good at recognizing certain forms of antisemitism. We learned the vocabulary. Jews controlled the banks. Jews manipulated governments. Jews corrupted the nation. Jews were disloyal citizens with hidden allegiances. Jewish solidarity was conspiracy. Jewish influence was sinister. Jewish power was dangerous.

Those claims became socially disreputable.

But discrediting the vocabulary is not the same thing as eliminating the ideas. The noun can change while the grammatical structure survives.

A person no longer needs to claim that "the Jews control Washington." He can talk instead about "Zionist money" controlling American politicians. He does not need to complain about Jewish domination of the press if he can describe unfavorable coverage as evidence of "Zionist media control." He does not need to accuse Jews of divided loyalty if he repeatedly demands to know whether American Jews are loyal to America or to Israel.

Antizionism has developed a political vocabulary in which old structures of suspicion about Jews can survive without sounding old.

Criticism Is Not the Issue

Israel is a country. Countries can be criticized. Governments make terrible decisions. Prime ministers can be corrupt, foolish, reckless or incompetent. Settlements can be opposed. Military operations can be condemned. Wars can be protested. Israeli voters themselves have spent the country's entire history arguing ferociously about Israeli governments.

None of this requires antizionism.

Antizionism makes a different claim. It moves from arguing about what Israel does to questioning whether Israel, specifically as an expression of Jewish national self-determination, should exist at all.

Even here, categories matter.

There are universal anti-nationalists who oppose the nation-state as a political form and include Israel within that critique. There are people who sincerely imagine a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians would share sovereignty. There are religious Jewish antizionists whose objections arise from theology. That is not the campus coalition. Neturei Karta and Jewish Voice for Peace may both reject Zionism, but they do not arrive there by the same road.

There are also people who say they accept Israel within roughly the 1967 lines but repeatedly support slogans, organizations and coalitions whose political program does not end there. Their stated destination is two states; the movements they empower often demand one state created through the dismantling of the Jewish one.

Then there are people whose objection appears to begin and end with Jewish nationalism while accepting national self-determination almost everywhere else. There are activists who use "Zionist" so promiscuously that it becomes little more than a socially acceptable substitute for "Jew." And there are people who openly want Israel destroyed and regard what happens to its Jewish population afterward as someone else's problem.

Those are not identical positions. Pretending they are makes serious analysis impossible.

The existence of Jewish antizionists does not settle the issue either. Jews can hold any political belief available to anyone else. Their existence demonstrates the diversity of Jewish politics. It does not tell us whether an idea, movement or vocabulary can carry antisemitic assumptions.

So the useful question is not whether every antizionist belongs in the same moral category.

The useful question is what the ideology allows people to say, believe and demand.

How Prejudice Learns New Languages

Antisemitism has never spoken one permanent dialect.

Christian Europe produced Christian forms of Jew-hatred. Jews became enemies of Christ, desecrators of the sacred and murderers of Christian children.

When European politics became increasingly racial and nationalist, antisemitism adapted. The Jew became an alien race corrupting the national body. Conversion could no longer solve the supposed problem because Jewishness had been transformed from religion into biology.

The Soviet world supplied another vocabulary. Zionism could be described through the language of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and conspiracy. Hostility toward Jews did not always need to announce itself as hostility toward Jews when "Zionist" could perform much of the same work.

Our age has its own moral language: racism, colonialism, privilege, oppression, liberation and indigenous rights.

Prejudice is not stupid. It migrates toward the language that carries moral authority.

One transformation in particular deserves attention.

For centuries Jews were persecuted partly because they were accused of being foreigners wherever they lived. They were foreigners in Germany, foreigners in Poland, foreigners in Russia, foreigners across much of Europe and the Middle East. Jewish rootlessness itself became an accusation.

Then Jews rebuilt sovereignty in the geographical center of Jewish history.

Suddenly they were foreigners there too.

The wandering Jew who supposedly belonged nowhere became the settler-colonial Jew who supposedly belonged somewhere else.

An accusation that can survive its own contradiction is no longer merely about geography.

The Origin Story

Antizionism needed more than vocabulary. It needed a history that explained why opposition to Jewish sovereignty was not merely permissible but morally necessary.

The familiar version is simple. A native population lived on its land. European colonial settlers arrived. Imperial powers imposed a foreign Jewish state. Palestinians were expelled, and virtually everything that followed became resistance to that original crime.

There are facts inside that story. That is precisely why it works.

Jews maintained a continuous presence in the land, although for long periods they were a minority. Zionist immigration dramatically increased the Jewish population. The war of 1948 produced Palestinian flight and expulsions, while the new Jewish state fought local Arab forces and neighboring states after Arab leaders rejected partition. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were subsequently displaced or driven from Arab and Muslim countries, with most eventually absorbed by Israel. After 1967, Israel came to control territories containing a large Palestinian population, creating another political and moral reality that has endured for generations.

Palestinian leadership also had agency. Arab Palestinian leaders rejected the United Nations partition proposal in 1947 rather than accept a Jewish state alongside an Arab one. Decades later, negotiations repeatedly confronted the same fundamental problem: compromise required both peoples to accept that the other was not disappearing.

The conflict is real. Palestinian dispossession is real. Jewish dispossession is real. Occupation is real. Terrorism is real. Rejected compromises are real. So are decisions made by leaders on every side.

The problem begins when history becomes an interpretive machine that permits only one population to possess agency.

Under the antizionist origin story, Jewish actions demonstrate intention while Palestinian actions demonstrate desperation. Jewish victories produce moral responsibility while Arab defeats erase political responsibility. Jewish refugees become settlers; Palestinian refugees remain refugees across generations. Israeli power requires explanation; the reasons Jews sought power in the first place become increasingly irrelevant.

The conclusion decides which facts deserve weight.

That is the difference between history and an origin myth. History complicates the story. An origin myth arranges history so that the ending is already known.

Why This Conflict Really Is Different

There are legitimate reasons Israel and Palestine receive unusual international attention. Jerusalem carries enormous religious significance. The Holocaust shadows the creation and perception of Israel. Palestinian refugeehood has lasted for generations. The consequences of 1967 remain unresolved. The United States is deeply involved. The Middle East spent decades at the center of Cold War competition and global energy politics.

Pretending none of that matters would weaken the argument.

But unusual attention does not explain unusual delegitimation.

Many states emerged from collapsing empires, wars, partitions, migrations, population exchanges and territorial disputes. Pakistan was born through partition accompanied by enormous violence and displacement. Jordan emerged from the post-Ottoman territorial settlement. Algeria's national independence came through a brutal anti-colonial war and the flight of much of its European population.

Whatever one thinks of those histories, their present right to exist is not generally treated as conditional upon achieving moral perfection.

Israel's often is.

Israel is expected not merely to defend particular policies but to justify its birth over and over again. Its failures are repeatedly converted into evidence that its existence was illegitimate from the beginning.

Israel is different because criticism of its actions so frequently expands into a referendum on its birth.

The question is not why Israel attracts attention.

The question is why Jewish sovereignty so often becomes conditional.

Verdict Before History

Contemporary antizionism has an extraordinarily efficient distribution system, but the mechanics are less interesting than the sequence it creates.

The verdict often arrives before the history.

A student can encounter "settler colonialism" before learning what the Ottoman Empire was. He can learn that Israel is an "apartheid state" before learning how Israel, the West Bank and Gaza came to possess their different political and legal arrangements. He can encounter "Zionism is racism" before knowing why a Jewish national movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe at all.

The vocabulary arrives carrying its conclusion.

October 7 made the mechanism unusually visible.

Before the bodies had been counted, the massacre was already being translated in some activist spaces into "resistance," "decolonization" and an inevitable response to oppression. In the days and months that followed, Jews far outside Israel were sometimes asked to denounce Israel before remaining welcome in political or social spaces. Synagogues, Jewish institutions and Jewish students became targets of demonstrations supposedly directed at the government of a country thousands of miles away.

Whatever one believes about the war that followed, something important had become visible.

The boundaries between Israel, Zionism and Jews could become remarkably porous when anger moved in one direction.

And "Zionist" itself could expand.

It could begin by describing a political belief and end up encompassing a synagogue because it displayed an Israeli flag, a Jewish school because it taught Hebrew, a student organization because it supported Israel's existence, a restaurant because its owner was Israeli, or an American Jew because he refused to denounce a government he did not elect.

At that point, antizionism is no longer functioning merely as a position on a state.

It has become a way of sorting Jews.

The Pattern Test

This is why I am increasingly uninterested in arguments that begin and end with the question, "Is antizionism antisemitism?"

That formulation encourages a definitional game. Someone produces a Jewish antizionist. Someone else produces a legitimate criticism of an Israeli policy. Soon everyone is debating labels instead of examining what is happening.

A better test is structural.

When "Zionism" enters an argument, what happens next?

Does the argument revive claims about hidden Jewish or "Zionist" control of governments, finance or media?

Does it revive the accusation of divided loyalty by treating Jewish attachment to Israel as evidence of political unreliability?

Does it impose political tests on Jews that are not imposed on members of other ethnic or religious communities?

Does it hold Jews collectively responsible for a government's actions simply because that government is Israeli?

Does it treat Jewish political organization as inherently suspicious?

Does it describe Jewish fears of antisemitism as cynical manipulation designed to silence critics?

Does it regard Jewish national power as uniquely illegitimate while treating nationalism elsewhere as an ordinary political fact?

And when someone chants "from the river to the sea," what political reality is imagined between the river and the sea, and what happens to the millions of Jews already living there?

Those questions do not require mind-reading.

They require pattern recognition.

Why the Old Vaccine Fails

The postwar West became very good at recognizing archived antisemitism. The symbols are familiar. The accusations are familiar. We know what belongs in the museum.

The harder task is recognizing the live dialect.

Open Jew-hatred became increasingly disreputable after the Holocaust. At the same time, the language of anticolonialism, racial justice and liberation acquired enormous moral authority. An ideology capable of translating older suspicions about Jews into that language gained an obvious advantage.

That is the selection pressure.

The old conspiracy can become "Zionist influence." The old accusation of Jewish disloyalty can become suspicion of attachment to Israel. The old fear of Jewish organization can become anxiety about "Zionist networks." The old conviction that Jewish power is uniquely dangerous can become a political doctrine in which Jewish sovereignty itself is treated as the problem.

Not every person using that vocabulary believes all of those things. They do not have to.

What matters is whether institutions can recognize familiar structures when the vocabulary changes.

A university capable of recognizing the ugliness of demanding that Muslim students condemn a foreign government before joining a campus organization should recognize the same demand when it is imposed on Jews.

A newsroom that would treat a conspiracy about ethnic control of government with suspicion should not become credulous because the speaker has substituted "Zionist."

A political movement that would recoil from vandalizing an ethnic community center over the actions of a distant state should not discover a moral exception when the building happens to be Jewish.

The standard should survive the substitution.

We know what antisemitism looked like when it spoke the language of Christianity. We learned what it looked like when it spoke the language of race, nationalism and conspiracy.

History did not need us to forget the old dialects. It only needed us to believe we would always recognize the new ones.