Scaffolding Anti-Zionism: The Hate We Missed

In pedagogy, scaffolding is the process of breaking a larger, more complex idea or task into smaller, manageable steps. For example, if I wanted to teach symbolism, I would scaffold the lesson by first asking students to identify concrete objects in a room. From there, I would guide them to consider the emotional or thematic associations those objects evoke, and only then introduce the concept of symbolism as the use of tangible objects to represent abstract ideas. Through apophasis, we learn what something is by defining what it is not, and this principle helps clarify whether students have truly grasped the concept. I would know that students have met the learning objective when, upon being shown a painting by René Magritte, they are able to correctly determine that it does not belong to either the realist or impressionist art movements.

When we apply this scaffolding model to anti-Zionism, a troubling picture emerges: most people do not know how to understand it. At best, they say, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” and at worst, “anti-Zionism should not be confused with hating Jews.” This confusion persists because Jew-hatred was never properly scaffolded. Instead, we rely on an all-purpose definition of antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” This flattening of a complex and adaptive hatred has obscured the latest form of Jew-hatred: anti-Zionism.

But more to the point: how have we been teaching about antisemitism? From my own experience in Jewish day schools, I was taught that antisemitism is primarily about intolerance and scapegoating. With respect to the Holocaust, the culmination of the antisemitism era, we were taught an equally flattened narrative: Jews were othered by Nazis, i.e. white supremacists. In the 1990s, Holocaust survivors came to speak to us, and we listened with tears. Their stories gripped us, and we vowed “never again.” Yet, having studied Holocaust survivor testimony as an adult, a troubling pattern emerges. This is not the fault of the survivors themselves: their stories were about survival, not about the mechanisms that led to their dehumanization.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He could not help but tell us how his little brother was burned alive in a synagogue in Baranovichi, or how his older brother was shot during morning roll call in the ghetto. He described his escape by bicycle into Soviet territory. These were the stories survivors told: stories of how they endured. What is often missing from these narratives, and what our teachers did not supplement, was the role of antisemitic libels in marking Jews for extermination. Nor were we taught that prior to the Holocaust, and even before Wilhelm Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism,” there existed an earlier form of Jew-hatred: anti-Judaism. Most critically, we were not taught that Jew-hatred is uniquely complex because it mutates.

In sum, the way we have taught antisemitism has obscured three essential components of Jew-hatred:

1. Jew-hatred mutates

2. Anti-Jewish libels are the delivery mechanisms that spreads each new strain

3. Jew-hatred is a virtuous hatred: it constructs Jews as villains to justify itself

Significantly, when anti-Zionism arrived in the West, more specifically, on American campuses in the early 2000s, Jews and Jewish professionals were unsure how to understand it. Many were misled into believing that anti-Zionism was simply political criticism of Israeli state policy. At the same time, among those Jews who did recognize that anti-Zionism was a rearticulation of antisemitism, a similarly troubling pattern emerged. Believing that anti-Zionism was merely an ideological opposition to Zionism, pro-Israel advocacy organizations poured millions into initiatives aimed at defining and promoting Zionism, assuming that Zionism was the direct opposite of anti-Zionism.

But does anti-Zionism need Zionism in order to operate? The answer is no. Anti-Zionism is not actually concerned with whether Jews can or should self-determine politically, nor is it interested in the relationship Jews have with Israel. Anti-Zionism is a project centered on producing villains. In this, it follows its predecessors: antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Antisemites were never concerned with the authenticity of Jewish identity, practice, or behavior; they sought to construct “the Jew” as a villain. Similarly, anti-Judaists such as Martin Luther or St. John Chrystosom were not interested in Jewish liturgy; they were invested in casting Jews as anti-Christian enemies. Anti-Zionism repeats this mechanism, simply substituting “Zionist” for “Jew,” while inheriting the same foundational hatred.

Critically, antizionist apologists such as Mira Sucharev argue that anti-Zionism is not a form of Jew-hatred because they define it as opposition to Zionism, just as one might (incorrectly) assume antisemitism stands in opposition to “semitism,” which, of course, is absurd. By framing anti-Zionism as a political stance against Jewish self-determination, today’s antizionists fail to recognize that anti-Zionism was deliberately constructed to appear as legitimate political criticism while functioning as a hate movement.

Failing to recognize that anti-Zionism, whose Soviet and Nazi genealogy reveals that it has nothing to do with Jews and their right to self-determine, is fundamentally a project of constructing villains, they also overlook a crucial point: Israel does not need to exist for the anti-Zionist to exist. The large-scale violent antizionist pogroms, such as the 1920 Nebi Musa riots in British Mandate Palestine, the 1921 Jaffa riots, the 1929 Hebron massacre, the 1934 pogrom in Algeria, the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, and the 1945 Tripoli pogrom in Lybia all occurred without a sovereign Jewish state and, therefore, without any self-determined Jewish national entity. Further still, even if their qualm is with Zionism, Zionism itself does not stipulate state action, but only that a Jewish state should exist.  

Israel does not need to exist for the anti-Zionist to exist.

Because anti-Zionism is not actually an opposition to Jewish national self-determination, and because it does not require the existence of Israel to oppose, we must ask: what is it? 

Anti-Zionism is a structural form of Jew-hatred, one that reproduces the Jew as villain through the delivery mechanism of antizionist libels. Consider the slogan, “Zionism is racism” formulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a leading Soviet Middle East strategist and KGB analyst. He was one of the primary architects of the ideological frame that recast Zionism as a form of racial imperialism. Just a few years later, “Zionism is racism” was institutionalized at the United Nation via UN resolution 3379. Critically, the Soviets defined Zionism as racism in order to construct a villain much like St. John Chrysostom, in the fourth century, wrote a series of homilies in which “Jews themselves are demons.” Primakov and St. John Chrysostom are separated by 1,500 years but because Jew-hatred is structural, those who understand that Jew-hatred is forged around the construction of villains, know that “Zionism is racism” is the latest version of thousand-old ritual of casting Jews in the role of villain. 

Those who recognize that Jew-hatred operates through this mechanism understand that “Zionism is racism” is simply the latest iteration of an ancient ritual of casting Jews as the enemy. Many struggle to perceive this structural continuity because the language now appears modern. But it is not. It is demonology: Today’s demons are named not as “Christ-killers,” or “race-polluters,” but “racists,” “colonizers,” “genocide-wagers,” and “nationalists.” Here it is useful to consider how antisemitism is commonly defined: “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” This indefinite definition obscures the essential feature shared by all anti-Jewish movements: the construction of Jews as villains.

In the era of anti-Judaism, “Judaism” served as the symbolic representation of everything a society believed to be wrong, threatening, corrupting, or dangerous to Christianity. In the era of antisemitism, the construction of “the Jew” followed the same logic: a conceptual figure used to explain what a society perceived as threatening, corrupting, or dangerous to the purity of race.

Anti-Zionism continues this pattern. It is a worldview that uses the “Jewish state” or “Zionism” as the symbolic figure of what is believed to be wrong, threatening, corrupting, or dangerous to post-colonial doctrine. Once we understand that anti-Zionism is the third variant of Jew-hatred, and that it has very little to do with Zionism itself, we will stop pouring millions into programs aimed at defining or defending Zionism. That is not the answer to anti-Zionism. Just as the answer to antisemitism was never to prove how good Jews are, the solution was to expose antisemitism as a hate movement: to show that the race-polluter libel and the swastika are hate symbols directed at Jews.

Once we understand that anti-Zionism is the third variant of Jew-hatred, and that it has very little to do with Zionism itself, we will stop pouring millions into programs aimed at defining or defending Zionism. 

So too, the answer to anti-Zionism is to expose the libels and symbols unique to this latest variant. Yes, this means letting go of the frameworks of the antisemitism era: letting go of Holocaust education as the sole paradigm, letting go of caricatures of Jews with big noses as the central visual symbol, letting go of the assumption that we still live in the time of antisemitism. We have already done effective work exposing antisemitism: even with the current surge of swastikas and “Hitler was right” graffiti, society recognizes antisemitism because it has been inoculated against that second variant of Jew-hatred.

What we now urgently need is education on the latest strain: anti-Zionism. And that begins with teaching, clearly and systematically, that Jew-hatred mutates; that each mutation is delivered through its own libels; and that the purpose of these libels is always to construct the Jew as the villain of the moral imagination. Only once this scaffolding is restored can we expose anti-Zionism not as political critique, but as the third variant of an ancient and adaptive hatred.

Crucially, this means not responding to anti-Zionism by teaching more about Zionism. For years, well-intentioned Jewish institutions responded to antizionist accusations by trying to define Zionism more clearly: “Zionism means Jewish self-determination,” “Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people,” “Zionism is love of the land and the Jewish story.” These claims are not wrong; they are simply irrelevant to anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism does not oppose Zionism’s meaning. It does not care what Zionism actually is. Anti-Zionism requires only that “Zionist” signify the villain. To counter anti-Zionism by explaining Zionism is therefore to fight a symbolic war on the wrong battlefield. It is to refute an accusation that was never based in misunderstanding to begin with.

Thus, the task is not to defend Zionism. The task is to expose the libels that make the “Zionist” into a villain. We must show that slogans like “Zionism is racism,” “Israel is genocide,” or “Zionists control the media” are not political critiques, but delivery systems of a familiar and ancient hatred, updated in vocabulary and moral justification, but unchanged in structure. To try to counter anti-Zionism by proving Zionism is moral is to repeat the historical mistake of trying to counter antisemitism by proving Jews are moral. That was never the point. The Jew-hater does not hate because of what Jews are or do. The hatred defines the Jew, not the other way around. The work before us is therefore not to rehabilitate Zionism, but to teach how the villain is constructed, and to show that this construction is the organizing logic of Jew-hatred in every era.

Naya Lekht is currently the Education Editor for White Rose Magazine and a Research Fellow for the Institute for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.