Part 1 — Origins and Ideological Foundations

Introduction: What We Mean by “Antizionism”

Antizionism is often presented as a principled political stance — opposition to particular Israeli policies, leaders, or governments. Genuine criticism of any state is legitimate and necessary. Israel, like any democracy, is not above scrutiny.

But ideological antizionism is something else entirely. It is a doctrine that rejects the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination — a right afforded to almost every other nation on earth. Where antisemitism targets Jews as individuals or communities, antizionism targets Jews as a nation, expressing hostility toward the collective Jewish presence in their historic homeland, Israel.

One influential framework for identifying this boundary is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which highlights patterns such as demonisation, delegitimisation, and the application of double standards to Israel.1 The definition, however, is not without controversy; alternative formulations such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism reflect ongoing scholarly debate.2 Its value here is practical rather than definitive: it offers a structured way to distinguish political criticism from ideological exclusion. Natan Sharansky’s “3-D test” remains one of the clearest operational tools for making that distinction.3

This essay traces how that pattern developed — from 19th-century Europe to Soviet strategy, Middle Eastern political theology, and modern international institutions — and how it came to shape contemporary discourse.

Distinguishing Criticism from Antizionism

Criticism of Israel asks: What should this state do differently?
Antizionism asks: Should this state exist at all?

This distinction becomes clearer in practice.

•     Arguing that Israeli settlement policy is unlawful is criticism.
•     Arguing that the existence of a Jewish state is inherently illegitimate is antizionism.

Frameworks such as Sharansky’s “3-D test” — demonisation, delegitimisation, and double standards — help identify when criticism crosses that line.

For example, describing Israel as illegitimate as a state — while affirming or practically accepting the legitimacy of other states formed through conflict — constitutes delegitimisation, not policy critique. Some ideological frameworks, particularly within decolonisation discourse, extend similar critiques to other states. The issue here is not the existence of such arguments, but their selective application and practical focus.

1. The 19th-Century Roots: Early Opposition to Jewish National Revival

Modern anti-Zionism arose in the same intellectual and political climate that produced Zionism. Two seemingly opposite forces opposed the idea of Jewish national revival — Jewish assimilationists and European antisemites — each for different reasons, but each rejecting Jewish peoplehood.

a. Assimilationists

In 19th-century Central Europe, many Jews sought emancipation through assimilation. They defined Judaism purely as a religion, not a nationality, arguing that communal survival could be secured through integration into European nation-states.

The Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.), founded in Berlin in 1893, embodied this perspective. Its statutes described Jews as “German citizens of Jewish faith,” explicitly rejecting the idea of Jewish nationality. As historian Avraham Barkai notes, the organisation saw itself as “the bulwark of German-Jewish integration.”4

Leading Reform thinkers — including Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim — advanced a religious rather than national conception of Judaism, tying Jewish continuity to spiritual universalism rather than national restoration.

Yet the Dreyfus Affair demonstrated that assimilation offered no protection. The paradox was stark: in seeking civil equality, assimilationists denied precisely the collective identity that history would prove essential for Jewish survival.5

This stands in contrast to early Zionist thought, such as Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882), which argued that antisemitism was not merely social prejudice but a political condition requiring national sovereignty.6

b. Antisemites

Antisemites opposed Zionism for the opposite reason: they believed Jews were an alien people who had no place in Europe. Wilhelm Marr — who coined the term antisemitism — rejected both Jewish assimilation and Jewish national revival, insisting Jews were a racial threat.7

Thus, from the very beginning, antizionism united two contradictory impulses:

•     those who wanted Jews to dissolve into other nations
•     those who wanted Jews to disappear from them

These movements differed profoundly in motivation and worldview. What unites them is not intent, but outcome: each rejects Jewish peoplehood and its political expression.

2. The Marxist Turn: Zionism as “Bourgeois Nationalism”

A new ideological form of antizionism emerged in the early 20th century through Marxist and socialist critiques. Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question (1844) explicitly linked Judaism to capitalist self-interest — a characterisation later Marxist traditions would extend to Zionism as a form of bourgeois nationalism.8

Vladimir Lenin framed Jewish national aspirations as reactionary, while Soviet campaigns later targeted Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans,” treating Jewish identity as politically suspect.9

By the mid-20th century, the Soviet Union had fused ideological antizionism with state policy. Jewish institutions were dismantled, intellectuals purged, and Jewish identity treated as incompatible with socialist internationalism. The 1953 Doctors’ Plot, in which predominantly Jewish physicians were falsely accused of conspiring to poison Soviet leaders, stands as a stark example of antisemitism reframed as political security.10

Archival research by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin demonstrates that the KGB actively promoted global propaganda portraying Zionism as racism, imperialism, and colonialism.11 Jeffrey Herf further documents how these narratives were disseminated across the Middle East and beyond.12

The origins of these arguments do not, in themselves, determine their truth. But they do explain how a particular framework — one that denies Jewish self-determination — was systematised, exported, and normalised globally.

3. Arab and Islamic Antizionism: Political and Theological Fusion

A distinct antizionist tradition developed in the Middle East, combining political opposition to Jewish immigration with religious and conspiratorial motifs, including ideas imported from European antisemitism.

During the Mandate period, figures such as Haj Amin al-Husseini incorporated Nazi propaganda into Arab political discourse — a transfer documented by Jeffrey Herf.13 Later, Islamist thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb reframed these ideas into a theological and existential worldview that portrayed conflict with Jews as enduring rather than contingent.14

The 1948 war did not end antisemitism in the region; it was absorbed into dominant political movements — particularly pan-Arab nationalism and, later, Islamist currents — and embedded in state discourse through media, education systems, and official rhetoric in several Arab states. Jewish sovereignty became the target, not Jewish behaviour. In countries such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq, state-controlled media and political rhetoric increasingly framed Zionism not simply as a geopolitical adversary but as a civilisational threat.

As Arab states gained diplomatic influence in the post-colonial era, this regional antizionism would increasingly be translated into international institutional language.

4. The United Nations and the “Zionism = Racism” Doctrine

In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” — the only instance in which a people’s national movement, rather than a state’s policies or conduct, was formally condemned as racist.15

The resolution emerged from a coalition of Soviet-aligned states, Arab governments, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Although revoked in 1991, its conceptual legacy endured.16

The 2001 Durban Conference against racism further embedded this framework within global civil society, where NGO forums openly revived “Zionism = racism” rhetoric and, in several cases, distributed overtly antisemitic materials.17

The result was the institutionalisation of a narrative in which Jewish self-determination was uniquely delegitimised.

The institutional success of this framework at the UN was itself partly enabled by the ideological shift that followed 1967, which gave the Soviet–Arab coalition a receptive global audience. The institutional success of this framework at the UN was partly enabled by the post-1967 ideological shift that reframed Israel within anti-imperialist discourse as a colonial power — a reframing that gave the Soviet-Arab coalition a receptive global audience.18

5. Post-1967: Antizionism as a Moral Framework

Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War transformed global perceptions. Anti-imperialist movements increasingly cast Israel as a colonial power rather than a vulnerable state.

Some of this shift reflected real-world developments, including Israeli policies in territories captured after 1967, which became legitimate subjects of international criticism. But these developments were also interpreted through ideological frameworks that positioned Israel as uniquely oppressive.

Influenced by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, this framework treated colonial relationships as morally fixed: one side inherently oppressive, the other inherently legitimate.19 Applied to Israel, this model often flattened historical complexity into a binary moral narrative.

This reframing — reinforced by Soviet narratives and geopolitical alignments — transformed political opposition into a broader moral indictment.

6. The Core Doctrines of Ideological Antizionism

By the late twentieth century, these strands had converged into a coherent ideological system. Four recurring doctrines define it:

Disproportionate scrutiny alone does not prove bias. But the institutionalisation of a permanent agenda item dedicated to a single state — without equivalent mechanisms applied to others with far graver records — requires explanation. That explanation cannot be reduced solely to geopolitical dynamics; it must also account for the ideological frameworks described above, which explicitly constructed Israel as uniquely illegitimate.

Counterarguments and Clarifications

It is important to address common objections directly.

Some Jews have historically opposed Zionism, including religious groups and secular intellectuals. This demonstrates that opposition to Jewish statehood does not always originate in hostility toward Jews as individuals. However, the doctrine examined here is defined by its function, not its origin: whether articulated by antisemites, anti-imperialists, or religious dissenters, Jewish national self-determination is denied as a matter of principle, regardless of context.

Similarly, recognising Jewish self-determination does not negate Palestinian national claims, which carry their own historical and moral weight. Competing national movements are not unique to this conflict. The distinction made here is narrower: recognising Palestinian rights is not antizionism; denying Jewish sovereignty as such is.

Finally, the description of Israel as the Jewish historic homeland reflects a substantial body of historical, archaeological, and legal evidence, including continuous Jewish presence and recognition under the League of Nations Mandate (which acknowledged the historic connection of the Jewish people to Palestine). That claim is debated, but it is not without foundation.

Conclusion: The Persistence of an Idea

Antizionism’s vocabulary has changed — from religious polemic to socialist critique, from Soviet propaganda to contemporary activism — but its structure has remained constant: the rejection of Jewish peoplehood expressed in political form.

As Bernard Lewis observed, modern antisemitism became political rather than theological, international rather than local.20 In its most influential contemporary form, it operates through antizionism.

Robert Wistrich and Deborah Lipstadt both argued that antizionism frequently functions as a contemporary expression of antisemitism.21 Their work reflects a broader effort to understand how older patterns of exclusion adapt to new political contexts.

The central issue, however, is not definitional but functional.

Criticism is a tool of accountability: it seeks to change policies, improve governance, and refine outcomes. Antizionism operates differently. It does not ask what Israel should do. It asks whether it should exist.

When criticism shifts from evaluating actions to denying legitimacy, it ceases to function as critique. It becomes a framework of exclusion — one that places Jewish self-determination outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable among nations.

References

1. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Working Definition of Antisemitism (2016).
2. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
3. Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Antisemitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16, nos. 3-4 (Fall 2004): 3-8.
4. Avraham Barkai, “Wehr dich!”: Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, 1893–1938 (Munich: Beck, 2002).
5. Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
6. Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, (1882).
7. Wilhelm Marr, The Victory of Judaism over Germandom (1879).
8. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844).
9. Vladimir Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question” (1913), available in Collected Works, Vol. 20. 
10. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
11. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 
12. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 
13. Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
14. Sayyid Qutb, trans. Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist’s View of the Jews (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 72–87. 
15. UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (1975).
16. UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86 (1991).
17. Anne F. Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference Against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law 96 (2002): 65–74. 
18. Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010). 
19. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 
20. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).
21. Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession; Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (New York: Schocken Books, 2019).