ANTI-ZIONISM, 1948–OCTOBER 6, 2023

The founding of Israel in May 1948 did not resolve the anti-Zionist argument: it redirected it. Before 1948, the debate centered on whether a Jewish state should exist. After 1948, it shifted to whether the one that existed had a right to continue. Theodor Herzl’s foundational argument, that Jewish political homelessness was the root cause of antisemitism and that only a state of their own could provide Jews security, was no longer debated theoretically. The Arab League’s rejection of partition and the war of 1948, fought by five Arab armies against the newly declared state, proved the military dimension of that project.

The war produced two defining consequences that would shape every subsequent argument: Israel’s survival beyond the UN partition lines, and the Nakba—whose claimed “right of return” became the central demand of Arab anti-Zionism for the following seven decades. The Six-Day War compounded both. The swift defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, transformed the conflict’s dimensions. Soviet anti-Zionism, already developing since Stalin’s postwar turn against Jews in the USSR, found a receptive audience around the world. Arab nationalism had a new grievance. And Western leftism, awoken by 1968, found in the Palestinian cause a struggle it could absorb completely into its own.

Anti-Zionism in this period operated through three largely distinct but mutually reinforcing means. The first was Soviet state infrastructure. Stalin’s postwar campaigns against Jewish cultural life inside the USSR (the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1948, the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, and the execution of Jewish intellectuals) established that Zionist hostility was not only a foreign policy position, but a domestic weapon. It was directed at Jews whose mere whisper of a connection to Israel was treated as grounds for suspicion. After 1967, the KGB developed Operation SIG to discredit Zionism, producing publications in dozens of languages distributed through organizations like the World Peace Council. The WPC’s November 1967 conference in New Delhi, attended by delegates from 55 countries, equated Zionism with Nazism before audiences spanning the Third World and the Western left. Soviet Zionologists, intelligence-affiliated propagandists including Yevgeny Yevseyev, distributed these publications to an estimated half-million committed leftists across 145 countries. Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, wrote his dissertation equating Zionism with Nazism at a Soviet think tank expressly charged with developing the scholarly foundations for this campaign.

The second channel was Arab nationalism. The Arab League boycott of Israel was sustained after 1948 into a comprehensive economic effort. Member states worked through UN forums to build a coalition, culminating in Resolution 3379 in November 1975, introduced by Soviet-dominated Somalia, which explicitly declared Zionism a form of racism. That resolution was repealed in 1991, but its vocabulary never disappeared. The third channel was Western leftism. American and European movements of the 1960s, reshaped by the civil rights movement and Third World solidarity, began absorbing anti-Zionism as a vital component of anti-imperialism. The Soviets had traded the word “Zionist” for “Jew” while keeping the underlying associations (dual loyalty, media control, governmental manipulation, and conspiracy) intact within a vocabulary that claimed to target a position and not a people. Stokely Carmichael, the famed Civil Rights activist who coined the term “Black Power,” entered this leftist world at a conference in Cuba in 1967. Angela Davis met Yasser Arafat at a Soviet-sponsored festival in Berlin in 1973. These figures carried the vocabulary into American politics, where it took root in academic campus life.

The post-1967 turn did not begin on campus as an abstraction. It moved through newspapers, exile networks, and the language of Third World liberation. SNCC was the first major civil rights organization to make the shift explicit, portraying the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide anti-colonial struggle. The Black Panthers carried it further, aligning themselves with the PLO and presenting Israel not as an outpost of American imperial power. Eldridge Cleaver’s exile in Algiers made the connection literal. From there, the rhetoric of the American radical Left entered a broader revolutionary circuit, linking Black liberation, Arab nationalism, and anti-Zionism into a shared grammar.

I.F. Stone gave white liberals a different path to the same conclusion, arguing that Israel’s post-1967 occupation could not be reconciled with the humanitarian conscience of the Left. Students for a Democratic Society then turned these ideas into campus doctrine, putting Israel in the anti-war movement’s larger vocabulary of colonialism, militarism, and empire. By the time Noam Chomsky entered the debate as a major intellectual voice, the story was already in place. His critique of the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocacy of binationalism helped give the anti-Zionists a language. What had begun as scattered postwar patchwork became something more durable: a grouping in which Israel was no longer treated as a state with policies to contest; it was a symbol of imperialism.

Anti-Zionism in this period carried an increasingly explicit position: that Israel was not only a state with objectionable policies, but one whose existence was itself a crime. The Nakba provided the foundation—the argument that Israel was built on ethnic cleansing, and that its continued existence required the removal of the Palestinian people. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) gave this position an academic voice, presenting Western and Israeli treatment of Arab peoples as a coordinated project of domination. His The Question of Palestine (1979) applied the same account directly, arguing the national movement was a product of European imperial expansion that had displaced an indigenous population. Palestinian historians like Rashid Khalidi produced works arguing that the founding of Israel was a premeditated act of cleansing, and that the post-1967 occupation was its logical extension. Postcolonial theory absorbed these arguments and generalized them: Israel as settler colonialism and Zionism as racial supremacy. By the 2001 Durban Conference NGO Forum, where the apartheid designation was codified, the vocabulary had been welded into a single charge. Israel was not a state that had done bad things; it was an illegitimate state whose dissolution was the only morally acceptable outcome. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), widely distributed across the Arab world throughout the Cold War, supplied a conspiratorial resource beneath the “respectable” and public versions of the same position.

Herzl’s foundational argument in Der Judenstaat (1896) was that European liberalism could not protect Jews from antisemitism, and that only statehood could. The Arab rejection of partition in 1947 was a direct challenge to that argument on geographic grounds. Stalin’s postwar campaigns against Jewish life in the USSR reflected a parallel concern: that Jewish nationalism, now embodied in a real state, was incompatible with Soviet communism. These rejections developed independently in the late 1940s, but converged at Soviet-sponsored conferences in the late 1960s, where the language of anti-colonialism was attached to the Palestinian cause and pushed through the Non-Aligned Movement, Western trade unions, and academic networks. The BDS campaign, launched in 2005, gave this politics a focus adapted to Western civic life. By 2010, the movement had homes across the range of Western spaces: universities, professional associations, cultural sites, and NGOs.

Antizionism in this period functioned as a way to argue that Israel was a uniquely illegitimate state. Soviet reach provided a ready-made vocabulary. Arab League diplomacy secured UN forum access and economic leverage. Western leftism opened universities, media, and cultural organizations to the argument. Postcolonial theory made the case of Israel into a wider argument about colonial power. Together these converging influences aimed not to reform Israeli policy, but to actively challenge the premise on which the state rested, providing a sophisticated veneer for physical violence and civilian terrorism.

Antizionist language from both the left and right recycled classic antisemitic themes (dual loyalty, media control, governmental manipulation, Nazi equivalence) with the word Zionist substituted for Jew. The Zionism-is-racism connection was successfully absorbed into NGO networks and Western activist culture, each transfer keeping the indictment’s force while presenting it in a sanitized, modern manner. The methodical erasure of Mizrahi history became a necessary component: acknowledging the Jewish expulsion from Arab states, with a number of over 850,000 Jews, disrupts the white-colonizer label entirely. By October 6, 2023, the vocabulary and habits were already in place. What had begun as a Cold War, Arab nationalist, and postcolonial campaign against Israel’s legitimacy had spread across Western civic life. October 7 did not invent this infrastructure: it exposed how ready it was to act.