According to Adam Louis-Klein, Jew-hatred cloaked as political expression in the form of antizionism is a hate movement and should not be accepted. The founder of Movement Against Antizionism told The Journal that Jews have been on the defensive and have to stop getting into endless debates with people who are either bad faith actors or haters.
“No one would believe the blood libels of years past that Jews are murdering Christian children to use their blood to bake matzah,” Louis-Klein said. “But the key libels of colonization, apartheid and genocide, these are what people are quick to accept with no scrutiny.”
Call It Out As Racism
“We should view antizionism as racism,” Louis-Klein said. “Antizionists say Israel is a white colonizing and apartheid and genocidal state. The current discourse claims this is a political opinion. This is the evolution of Jew-hatred. Instead of saying the Jews control all the banks or Hollywood, it’s this. We need to recognize antizionism as its own bigotry and stop trying to make it fit into past forms of antisemitism. It’s a new form of antisemitism.” He defines antizionism as “a hatred of Jewish peoplehood embodied in Israel.”
Louis-Klein, 32, said the effort to brand Zionists as evil includes propaganda plans from the Soviet Union in 1967. He is calling on all world Jewish organizations to go on a messaging offensive describing antizionism as a hate movement.
“We’d love to put ourselves out of business,” he said. “Not to explain how great Zionism is but to explain antizionism and its harm and specific libels. Antizionism is different and its crucial that it be taught correctly. Antizionism’s Achilles’ heel is to be objectified and talked about as a hate movement. It’s goal is to put Jews under the spotlight and force them to always defend themselves.”
Louis-Klein said antizionists thrive by being given permission slips to hate and the word “Zionist” has wrongly come to be understood as someone who supports colonization, apartheid and genocide. In addition, the Holocaust inversion of calling Zionists Nazis puts Jews in the role of oppressors.
Don’t Give Power To The Libels
Louis-Klein said it is way overdue that legacy organizations stop holding debates about whether or not antizionism is antisemitism. While it is important to attack both, the scheme to legitimize antizionism works if it is not called out.
“There is an inability to draw boundaries,” he said. “We’re debating with people who are not coming in good faith and they’re not honest. They spread libels. They don’t care about demonstrating strength of claims. They care about the power of the mob and the ability to spread the libel so it is accepted in the news. You keep repeating these slanders. When we debate these claims we legitimize a show-trial.”
He said antizionism is what we are seeing on college campuses, much of it following the Soviet Union’s propaganda from the 1960s that was passed to the Middle East and can be seen today in Tucker Carslon and Candace Owens.
A great irony, he said, is that Israeli media is highly critical of its own country, yet American figures who are obsessed with Israel and repeatedly criticize the Jewish state claim they are not allowed to criticize Israel. B
ecause Jew-haters are in the majority, they can use libel to galvanize others to jump on the bandwagon. It has also taken the form of calling Israelis white, ignoring the many that have dark skin.
Why Younger Jews Accept The Libels
Why have so many Jewish Gen Z-ers been swept up by this? Recent polls showed a majority of Jews believe Israel has the right to exist but fewer identify as Zionists.
“This ideology is fit to the moral codes of our time,” Louis-Klein said. “Everyone has internalized the colonialism, racism and genocide are the great evils of our time. When you construct Israel as a colonizer, an apartheid state committing genocide, it fits too smoothly into the moral grooves of how people view the world. It’s almost too cognitively satisfying, especially for younger people to see Israel as evil.”
“When you construct Israel as a colonizer, an apartheid state committing genocide, it fits too smoothly into the moral grooves of how people view the world. It’s almost too cognitively satisfying, especially for younger people to see Israel as evil.”
He also said that things don’t happen by accident, and media figures can see which way the wind is blowing.
“Tucker Carlson’s rise as an antisemite has resulted from the Gaza genocide libel,” he said. “He’s rode the wave to try to legitimize himself. He’s an antisemite and an antizionist.”
Why Carlson Might Be Scapegoating Israel Due To His Guilt
On the podcast of the Comedy Cellar, Louis Klein said Carlson may have guilt over supporting the Iraq war, which he has apologized for, and may make himself feel better by attacking Israel.
Jews, he said, have an attachment to the phrase “antisemitism” but it is a failure to recognize that it must explain how antizionism is not a legitimate political notion, but a set of slanders.
“When we say it’s antisemitism, it’s ambiguous, and it’s not working when we speak to non-Jews,” he said, “because antizionists believe they’re doing something different. In some way they are.”
Part of the reason antizionism is effective, he says, is that those who use the word can’t define it.
The Goal is Word-Salad
“They don’t really know what a colonizer is, because if you look at history, America took over land, Muslims spread Islam by colonizing and Europeans took over land,” he said. “Almost every country did, so how is Israel the distinct colonizer, while ignoring a war in which it improbably defeating numerous armies that sought its complete destruction? There’s only one country, South Africa, that was charged with apartheid and Israel doesn’t legally discriminate based on race. Genocide is a legal term that requires intent to destroy a people, which Israel has not had, but so called “experts” throw away that definition so they can smear Israel.
Online, many don’t care they don’t know the meaning of terms, he said.
“They need to be flexible enough that you can stain Zionists with them but never have to actually define them,” he said. “We have to show we won’t accept it.”
He said some antizionists have been flummoxed when they tried to engage him in debate and he lambasted them for being part of a hate movement and don’t know how to respond, as they are used to instilling fear and getting Jews to grasp at straws to defend themselves.
A legal concept of antizionist discrimination is needed, he said. He defines antizionism as “a hatred of Jewish peoplehood embodied in Israel.
Is that likely to happen?
“We’re going to make it happen,” he said.
The Movement Is Helped By Token Jews
He said there are some “token antizionist Jews” like Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Peter Beinart who “just participate in this hate mob to gaslight Jews, and that violence against Jews must be a zero sum game equivalent to Palestinian suffering.
Antizionists have seen they can get under the skin of Jews with posts like “When are you getting your $7,000 from Israel?” or “this message was promised 3,000 years ago.’ He advised people to respond to these posts with a simple “libel card declined.”
They Came After Him
On his way to a Ph.D. in anthropology at McGill University, he said antizionists sought to destroy his career.
He was proud of editing a journal but said he was “purged as a Zionist.”
Most hurtful, he said, was what was done by his intellectual hero, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
“He publicly disowned me and tried to humiliate me to his 10,000 Twitter followers,” Louis-Klein said. “I was deeply betrayed by him. I went into Amazonian Anthropology in large part because I was inspired by his work and was trying to bring it to the next level. It’s a prestige economy and showing yourself as an antizionist bigot means others will come and support you as a mob. A lot of people who were my friends and colleagues began to abuse me as well.”
He spent time in the Amazon with the Desana people in Brazil and Colombia who are undergoing forced assimilation, he told The Times of Israel’s Haviv Rettig Gur on Gur’s podcast, adding that after Oct. 7, 2023, he saw that there is an effort to force Jews to distance themselves from their identity.
“They’re trying to force us to disappear because they see us as a threat,” he told Gur.
He is aware this is happening in other industries as well.
Louis-Klein who has written for The Free Press, Tablet and numerous podcasts, said a major part of the propaganda of antizionism relies on Jews not to call out and get bogged down by endless arguments.
“It’s a clever dynamic where antizionism is posed as a valid critique that has to be answered,” he said. Their hope is Jews will say ‘well, we’re not so bad.’ Unfortunately, many Jews have fallen for false framing and it’s time for a giant correction.”
