By: Izabella Tabarovsky
Two years after October 7, there is a palpable change taking place in the field of antisemitism studies. Increasingly, scholars recognize that antizionism must be studied as a stand-alone ideology that is related to antisemitism but also possesses its own unique characteristics. Its essence is captured in the hyphen-less spelling of the term: antizionism, rather than the more common anti-Zionism.
Scholars have been making the case for this spelling and the conceptual shift behind it for some years. It mirrors the now-standard change from anti-Semitism to antisemitism, which gained broad acceptance following the recommendation of leading scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, Holocaust, and linguistics.
The reasoning behind that earlier change was clear: the hyphenated spelling implied that “Semitism” was a coherent phenomenon one could oppose, and that antisemitism was directed against all “Semitic” peoples or languages. This allowed antisemites to claim they were not “anti-Semitic” because they had nothing against Arabs or were themselves Arab. Removing the hyphen brought conceptual clarity, underscoring that antisemitism refers exclusively to prejudice against Jews and, like racism or sexism, names a distinct ideology.
The same logic applies to antizionism, and as a scholar of Soviet antizionism, I see the parallel clearly. The USSR recast Zionism for the global left, inventing a conspiracist version that equated it with humanity’s worst ills—fascism, Nazism, racism, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.[1] This obscene fantasy bore no resemblance to the Zionism of its founders or to the mainstream Jewish understanding of Zionism as a movement for national liberation and sovereignty of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
There is a direct link between this grotesque vision of Zionism and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Its architects—known in Soviet history as “Zionologists”—were members of the Russian nationalist far right who blamed Jews for every catastrophe to befall Russia in the twentieth century, starting with the revolution. Admirers of Hitler who espoused fundamentally fascist worldviews, some were also Arabists with close ties to Egyptian and Syrian regimes, later recruited by the KGB and the Kremlin when the USSR sought to shape and legitimize its antizionist theses. Installed in prestigious think tanks and research institutes, they retooled their antisemitic “knowledge” into progressive language designed to appeal to the global left.[2]
This is the perverse intellectual lineage the modern anti-Israel left [IT1] [PP2] [IT3] inherits when it uses that language. Calling such a position anti-Zionist, with a hyphen, is a profound misnomer. The anti-Israel left isn’t arguing against Zionism as it exists in the real world, but rather a fiction manufactured for them, among others, by Soviet antisemites on behalf of an oppressive regime that cynically distorted reality in pursuit of its Cold War geopolitical objectives. As the post-October 7 reality has shown, today’s anti-Israel libels follow the same patterns of demonization, disinformation, and propaganda.
Removing the hyphen may not seem like the radical step this moment calls for, but—as with antisemitism—it adds much-needed precision. In a 2019 paper, British legal scholar David Seymour explained why he believed that opposition to an imaginary Zionism should be recognized as a freestanding ideology. Just as “the ideology of antisemitism tells us nothing about Jews” but everything about antisemites, Seymour argued, “the ideology of antizionism tells us more about itself” than it does about Israel or Zionism.[3] It follows that it should be spelled accordingly: antizionism, without the hyphen.
Sociologist David Hirsh, in turn, observed that the “‘Zionism’ against which antizionism defines its ideology” is “something conjured by the anti-Jewish imagination.” The antizionist conceives of Zionism as “colonialism, apartheid, racism, the surveillance state, as being like Nazism, and as everything else that good people oppose”—in other words, a caricature profoundly at odds with the Zionism embraced by most Jews. Just as antisemites battle a fantasy of “the Jews” born of their imaginations, antizionists battle a fantasy of “Zionism” that exists nowhere on earth but in their heads.[4]
Jews who opposed Zionism before World War II—whom contemporary antizionists, including Jewish ones, often invoke to justify their stance—were engaged in a legitimate debate over a new idea that had yet to prove itself. But those earlier critics would not have recognized, in the modern left’s portrayal, the movement they opposed. The question of whether Zionism could fulfill its promise to save early 20th-century Jews from violent European antisemitism was settled when the war and the Holocaust proved it right in the most terrible way. Deploying antisemitic tropes to smear it for progressive audiences is not a continuation of that debate.
Rather than viewing antizionism as a position opposed to Zionism, then, we should recognize it as a standalone conspiracist ideology operating on the same logic as The Protocols.
In the wake of October 7, it is becoming increasingly clear that although opposition to Zionism does not have to be antisemitic in theory, in practice it virtually always is. History bears this out. In the USSR and Poland, the entrenchment of conspiracist antizionism following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War made what remained of Jewish life impossible. Soviet Jews were virtually completely secularized by then, yet they found themselves further marginalized and excluded as entire academic institutions and career fields closed their doors to them. Meanwhile, grassroots antisemitism absorbed and echoed the antizionist libels propagated by the state. Antizionism produced unmistakably antisemitic outcomes, proving the link between the two.
The dynamics that American Jews are experiencing today are increasingly moving in the same direction. It seems that more and more people now recognize that the time for debating whether antizionism and antisemitism are the same has passed. What we need to be doing is studying antizionism on its own terms as a system of ideas that harms Jews—even when it claims it doesn’t.
Izabellla Taborovsky is a Senior Fellow at The Z3 Institute, specializing in Soviet antizionism and contemporary left-wing antisemitism.
[1] Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Antizionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” Fathom, May 2019, https://fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zionism-and-contemporary-left-antisemitism/.
[2] A number of Russian scholars have examined the individuals who comprised this movement in depth, but their works remain untranslated into English. The two most authoritative books in Russian on the subject are Victor A. Shnirelman, Russkoe rodnoverie: neoiazychestvo i natsionalizm v sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: BBI, 2012), and Dmitrii Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 gody (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2003). I have discussed the Zionologists in Izabella Tabarovsky, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 5, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/5.1.97.
[3] David Seymour, “Continuity and Discontinuity: From Antisemitism to Antizionism and the Reconfiguration of the Jewish Question,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 2, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/2.2.30.
[4] David Hirsh, “Contemporary Antisemitism,” in The Routledge History of Antisemitism, ed. Mark Weitzman, Robert J. Williams, and James Wald (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 41.
