When Criticism Crosses into Demonisation
Criticism of Israeli government policy is not antisemitism. Democracies invite scrutiny, and Israel — like any state — must remain subject to moral and political debate. Israeli society itself is fiercely argumentative, with robust internal dissent across the political spectrum. False accusations of antisemitism — when genuine policy criticism is mislabelled as bigotry — are real and counterproductive, obscuring actual antisemitism when it appears.
Yet much contemporary discourse about Israel does not resemble policy critique. Instead, it relies on a narrow set of moral accusations—coloniser, apartheid, genocide—that function less as analytical claims than as ideological verdicts. These are not conclusions reached through historical inquiry or legal reasoning; they are conclusions imposed in advance, with evidence selectively marshalled after the fact.
This essay does not conflate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. Rather, it examines three specific claims that operate differently. These are not arguments about what Israel does, but categorical accusations about what Jews are. Together, they form the ideological core of contemporary antizionism — and help explain why hostility toward Israel so frequently spills over into hostility toward Jewish communities far beyond the Middle East, including here in New Zealand.¹
1. The Coloniser Libel: A Category Error Disguised as History
The foundational accusation of antizionism depicts Jews as “white European settler-colonisers” in Israel — foreign intruders imposing themselves on an indigenous population. This framing is not merely historically inaccurate; it represents a fundamental category error.
Colonialism refers to a foreign imperial power exploiting distant territory on behalf of a metropole. Zionism does not fit this model. The Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Jewish civilisation emerged there over three thousand years ago.² Hebrew is a native Near Eastern language.³ Jewish religious practice, law, and collective memory are inseparable from the land’s geography. Archaeological evidence, contemporaneous historical records, and a continuous (if often vulnerable) Jewish presence attest to this connection across millennia.⁴
Zionism arose not as a European colonial enterprise but as a national revival movement of an indigenous people seeking political self-determination after centuries of exile, persecution, and statelessness.⁵ Jews did not arrive as representatives of an imperial power; they arrived largely as refugees, often in defiance of British restrictions that severely limited Jewish immigration even during the Holocaust.⁶ Land was purchased legally — frequently at inflated prices from absentee Ottoman landlords — and a suppressed indigenous language and culture were revived.⁷
Acknowledging Jewish indigeneity does not negate Arab connection to the land. Arab residents also possess deep familial, cultural, and historical ties, with many families having lived in the region for generations, with significant population growth during the Ottoman and Mandatory periods.⁸ Their connection is genuine and merits recognition.
But acknowledging Arab rootedness does not transform Jewish return into colonialism. Two peoples can both have legitimate ties to the same land without one being rendered a foreign invader. The coloniser libel fails not because Arabs lack standing, but because it uniquely denies Jewish standing. It imposes a European settler-colonial framework that does not fit Jewish history, erases Middle Eastern and North African Jews entirely, and reduces Jewish identity to a racial caricature convenient for modern activism.⁹
The political function of this libel is clear. If Jews are framed as colonisers, their presence becomes illegitimate, their sovereignty provisional, and their self-defence immoral by definition. Jewish existence is rendered contingent and revocable. Decolonisation, within this framework, does not mean compromise or coexistence — it demands the dismantling of Jewish sovereignty itself.¹⁰
2. The Apartheid Libel: Legal Language as Moral Weapon
The second accusation brands Israel an “apartheid state,” deliberately invoking South Africa’s former system of racial domination.
As applied to Israel proper, the claim is demonstrably false. All Israeli citizens — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze — possess equal civil and political rights under the law.¹¹ Arab citizens vote, serve in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court, work as judges and physicians, and participate fully in public life.¹²
Critics therefore shift focus to Judea and Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”), where Israeli civilians live under civil law while Palestinians are governed by military administration. This reality raises serious moral and political questions. The prolonged military occupation — arising from unresolved sovereignty disputes and persistent security threats rather than racial ideology — imposes real costs on Palestinian life.¹³
Yet apartheid is a specific crime under international law, requiring intent to establish and maintain racial domination as the defining purpose of the system.¹⁴ Israel’s stated rationale — security needs and the absence of a final-status agreement — may be contested, but it is not racial domination. The occupation may be prolonged, morally troubling, and in urgent need of resolution; that does not make it apartheid.
The distinction matters. One critique addresses policies, duration, and pathways to peace. The other declares the Jewish state inherently racist and irredeemable. That is why the term “apartheid” is chosen despite its analytical weakness: it functions as a moral weapon, not a legal description.¹⁵
3. The Genocide Libel: Legal Misuse and Holocaust Inversion
The most extreme accusation is that Israel is committing genocide.
Under international law, genocide requires specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such.¹⁶ Civilian casualties, even on a large scale, do not meet this threshold absent genocidal intent.
Israel facilitates humanitarian aid, medical evacuations, food deliveries, and infrastructure repair even while engaged in active warfare.¹⁷ It issues evacuation warnings, establishes humanitarian corridors, and coordinates aid entry with international actors. These actions are incompatible with claims of deliberate destruction.
Demographic evidence further undermines the allegation. Gaza’s population grew from approximately 730,000 in 1990 to over two million before the current war.¹⁸ Life expectancy rose consistently throughout this period.¹⁹ These facts are incompatible with genocidal intent.
Isolated inflammatory rhetoric by individual officials does not constitute state policy. Genocidal intent must be demonstrable at the level of systematic state action.²⁰ Israel’s judicial oversight, rules of engagement, and humanitarian coordination contradict such a claim.
The genocide libel’s power lies not in law, but in inversion: recasting Jews as Nazis and weaponising Holocaust memory against its victims.²¹
Selectivity as Evidence of Ideology
No other nation-state faces calls for dissolution over its founding circumstances — not Pakistan, not Australia, not the United States. No other democracy fighting asymmetric warfare is labelled genocidal for civilian casualties — not France in Mali, not the United Kingdom in Iraq. Meanwhile, actual apartheid systems and active genocides receive sporadic attention at best.
This asymmetry is not accidental. When one state is judged by exceptional standards and described as uniquely illegitimate, the issue is no longer human rights — it is ideological fixation.²²
Why Antizionism Is Not Policy Criticism
Zionism, in its most basic sense, is the belief that the Jewish people — like other peoples — have the right to political self-determination in their historic homeland. Approximately 80–90 percent of Jews worldwide identify as Zionists in this sense — that is, supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.²³
Antizionism rejects that legitimacy ab initio. It does not propose reforms or borders; it denies Jewish sovereignty itself. No equivalent demand is made of any other people.
As David Hirsh has observed, antizionism often functions as a contemporary form of antisemitism by targeting the political expression of Jewish identity.²⁴ When Zionism is treated as uniquely immoral, Jewish civic belonging becomes conditional.
This is not critique. It is exclusion.
The New Zealand Context: Imported Narratives, Local Consequences
These libels do not remain abstract in New Zealand. They increasingly shape campus politics, union motions, and public discourse. Jewish students report being pressured to renounce Zionism in order to participate in progressive spaces, where affirmation of Israel’s right to exist is treated as moral disqualification.²⁵
Local councils and activist bodies have adopted language drawn directly from international campaigns, often without understanding its historical or legal implications. Resolutions condemning Israel as ‘settler-colonial’ or ‘apartheid’ pass with little scrutiny of these terms’ historical or legal accuracy. In these settings, Israel is not debated alongside others; it is singled out, moralised, and symbolically expelled.
The result is not solidarity with Palestinians, but the marginalisation of New Zealand’s Jewish community under the guise of justice.
Conclusion
Recognising these three libels does not require agreement with every Israeli policy. It requires the ability to distinguish between criticism and demonisation; between debate and delegitimisation.
These libels do not emerge from careful analysis of Israeli policy; they represent the imposition of predetermined conclusions onto complex realities. When Jews are uniquely portrayed as colonisers, racial supremacists, or genocidal monsters, what emerges is antisemitism adapted to contemporary progressive language.
When history is distorted, law is weaponised, and genocide is redefined to suit ideology, the result is not justice — but the corrosion of truth. Reclaiming intellectual honesty is essential not only for debate about Israel and Palestine, but for the moral integrity of pluralistic democracies such as New Zealand.
Endnotes
- David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017).
- Amnon Ben-Tor et al., The Archaeology of Ancient Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
- Angel Sáenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
- Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012).
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).
- Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
- Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
- Georges Bensoussan, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Lyn Julius, Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018).
- Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (New York: W. W. Norton, 2024); See also Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: All Points Books, 2020).
- Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 5752–1992 (State of Israel).
- Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder,” Azure 36 (2009): 27–54.
- International Crisis Group, Managing Israel’s Security Dilemma in the West Bank (Brussels: ICG, 2012).
- International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, United Nations, 1973.
- Douglas Murray, On Democracies and Death Cults (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 1948.
- United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Gaza Situation Reports, 2023–2024.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), Population, Housing and Establishment Census (Ramallah: PCBS, various years).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators: Gaza Strip (Washington, DC: World Bank, various years).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators: Life Expectancy at Birth, Gaza Strip (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1990–2023).
- William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Deciphering the New Antisemitism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
- Pew Research Center, Jewish Identity in Israel and the Diaspora (2016); American Jewish Committee, Survey of American Jewish Opinion (2022); Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain (London: JPR, 2017).
- Bernard Harrison, Blaming the Jews: Politics, Philosophy, and Antisemitism (London: Continuum, 2012).
- David Hirsh, “The Livingstone Formulation,” in Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017).
- New Zealand Jewish Council, Campus Climate Reports and Student Submissions (Auckland: NZJC, 2023–2024).
- Union of Jewish Students New Zealand, internal documentation and student testimonies, 2023–2024.
