Given the remarkable successes we have had fighting antisemitism since the Holocaust, why do we struggle so much to push back the rising tide of Jew-hatred now?
Because we are stuck in a loop fighting today’s battle with yesterday’s tools. The strategies that once helped us are now leaving us overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness and burnout.
The permission structure for antisemitism has been eradicated, but the permission structure for antizionism stands unchallenged. Jew-hatred has evolved. It’s time for our approach to evolve too.
We’ve been treating antizionism as a political or social force driven by misunderstandings about Zionism. Our approach has therefore focused on dispelling those misunderstandings. But we see in real time that this approach is not working — antizionism is spreading, and Jewish safety and belonging are increasingly at risk.
Instead of debunking antizionism, we’re offering a new approach: to expose it as a form of Jew-hatred on its own terms. We’ll pivot our conversations from, “let me tell you why Zionism is not bad,” to “let me tell you why antizionism is bad.”
These are the tools we need to effectively fight today’s battle instead of yesterday’s, and we’ll help you master them.
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It’s time for something new
New to learning about antizionism?
Jew-hatred evolves to fit its environment. New strains of Jew-hatred emerge when old ones, like those based on religious or racial bigotry, lose their social permission.
The new strains then spread undetected because, to most people, they don’t look like bigotry at all. They evade recognition by branding themselves not as specific animus towards Jews, but as a social or political cause.
Jew-hatred is repackaged as social justice. As righteousness. As something that feels moral to do, not something hateful at all. And that’s when the real danger begins.
To defeat antizionism, we have to talk about antizionism
Debate and disagreement are good. They invite us to consider different viewpoints and expand our perspectives in the pursuit of truth. But for debate to be healthy and productive, all sides must be grounded in facts, and antizionist lies are not.
Genocide. Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Ethnostate. Baby-killer.
These are not good-faith accusations, but distortions and inversions unrelated to reality. These are libels, or obsessively repeated lies used to justify violence against Jews. They are so entrenched in our social and political ecosystems that most people don’t perceive them as lies at all.
So when we debate antizionists on their terms, we legitimize these distortions as ideas worthy of rebuttal, lending credibility to lies. This puts us perpetually on the defensive, with Zionism and Israel ever on trial. Instead, we must turn the tables and expose antizionism as the ideology of hate that it is.
Debate legitimizes the lie.
Like all ideologies of Jew-hatred, antizionism functions as a powerful social signal that provides belonging and assurance of the moral high ground. Condemning Zionism as racist or supremacist and repeating the genocide libel have become declarations to the world — I’m a good person.
When your moral fiber and sense of belonging depend on your antizionism, it becomes intertwined with your very sense of self. Asking an antizionist to reject this ideology is the same as asking them to shatter their identity and give up their community. When entrenched in antizionism, changing your mind becomes betrayal.
This is a path few people are willing to walk. Many of them will not, so we must learn how to set firm boundaries that antizionist abuse will not be tolerated. But some people can be reached — with the right approach. Our mission is to help you figure out who those reachable people are, and how to have productive and healthy conversations to teach them to recognize antizionism as an ideology of hate.
Facts can’t compete with identity.
Rather than viewing antizionist lies as something to refute, we'll instead interrupt the lies in the first place.
How do we do this? We take the attention off of Israel and Zionism. We pivot from our defensive stance and refocus our conversations on antizionism itself: its history, nature, tactics and outcomes.
Where did antizionism come from?
When and why did this ideology emerge? How has it evolved over time, and how does that inform what we see today?
Who invented the lies behind it, and who benefits from them?
What outcomes does antizionism claim to produce, and what outcomes does it actually produce?
The days when we answer to antizionist accusations are over. It's time antizionists answer for the hate they spread and the harm they cause
We tackle antizionism head on by exposing its lies, not by debating them.
One conversation isn’t likely to change someone’s mind, especially when they derive virtue and comfort from being in the antizionist in-group. Rather than struggling to do the impossible, and then feeling defeated and hopeless when it doesn’t work right away, we’ll help you play the long game to enact broad social change by…
Setting boundaries. You do not need any antizionist’s permission to say that antizionism and its lies are unacceptable. Call out antizionism when you see it, just like you’d call out any other bigotry. You never need to tolerate or answer for antizionist abuse.
Planting the seeds of change. Have conversations about antizionism that help people stop and think — if only for a moment — wait…am I missing something? Over the course of many interactions, these seeds will grow into a tree.
Every conversation that keeps the focus on antizionism and off litigating the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of Zionism is an important step in the right direction, and every step is a win.