Antizionism is a totalitarian conspiracy theory rotting the West from within

The far Left has embraced a specific, modernised hate ideology with an eliminationist agenda that targets the state of Israel

What has happened to the progressive Left? It used to fight poverty, climate change and racism. Today, many of its adherents obsess about Israel, about Jews, about “Zionism”, and sound indistinguishable from the fascists and Black Shirts they once fought against.

Veterans of the Battle of Cable Street must be turning in their graves: like Squealer and Napoleon in Animal Farm, the far Left has transformed into those they once despised. It’s now a case of “four-legged anti-racism good, two-legged anti-Semitism even better”.

The degeneration is complete; the horseshoe theory of politics is confirmed. A group that bemoans Russian influence everywhere has swallowed uncritically a Soviet campaign of anti-Israel delegitimisation launched in the 1950s for purposes of repression and Cold War realpolitik. Activists who claim they are immune from misinformation have embraced TikTok psyops. A modern movement is renewing the most ancient of hatreds. Trans advocates who dismiss religion as the “opium of the people” collaborate with Islamists.

It’s not Jews, we keep being told, it’s the Israelis. If only they didn’t “overact”, there would be no anti-Semitism; if only British Jews repudiated Israel, they would be left alone. The anti-Semites supposedly have no agency and merely respond to unbearable provocations. Everything about this narrative is a lie, and it will destroy the West if it succeeds in rotting our minds, warping our critical faculties and chasing away the Jewish diaspora.

There was once a legitimate debate about whether Zionism, the idea that Jews should again have their own state in their ancestral homeland, was the best way forward for the long-suffering Jewish people in the context of decolonisation and emancipation. Pogroms in Russia and the Middle East, the West’s refusal to let in fleeing Jews in the 1930s, the Holocaust, the UN’s creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of virtually all Jews from Muslim countries resolved that question. Zionism became the reality. Anti-Zionism was obsolete.

Yet anti-Semites, from the pro-Nazi ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to the fools involved in setting up UNRWA to ensure the Israeli-Arab conflict couldn’t be resolved, were having none of it. The KGB’s Operations Zarathustra and Sionistskiye Gosudarstva culminated in the 1975 UN declaration that Zionism was racism, and the Western far-Left gradually realised the potential of that Big Lie.

Many activists have now embraced antizionism, spelt without a hyphen to distinguish it from the traditional pre-1948 variety. It is a specific, modernised hate ideology with an eliminationist agenda that targets the state of Israel, and only Israel, for dissolution, projects upon it everything they loathe about the West, and comes with an entire, warped analytical framework. It is the new anti-Semitism for our times.

Just as Marxists thought ditching private property was the answer to everything, antizionists fixate on the world’s only Jewish state, the abolition of which they believe to be the omni-solution to all of the world’s problems (such as, to them, capitalism, militarism and sexism). They are indifferent to the plight of Muslims or other minorities in any other country; they only care about conflicts involving Jews. None of the 23 countries with Islam as state religion or the 53 majority-Muslim countries, or any Christian or other nation or “ethno-state” is targeted: just the only Jewish state, seen as the purest embodiment of Western evil.

“From the river to the sea” antizionists promulgate a “one state solution” whereby Jews are disarmed and become a minority again. The result would be ethnic cleansing, at best, and genocidal extermination at worst. The antizionists tell Jews to “go home”, but deny that anywhere is their home, and want to ensure they never have one. These Lefties are no better than far-Right fanatics who would expel all non-white people from the UK.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories always rest on incendiary libels designed to depict Jews as uniquely, unforgivably evil and to fuel violence against them. Antizionism claims Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians, a new lie that it kills children (the original blood libel), enforces apartheid (a new untruth) and betrays every tenet of woke “social justice” ideology.

Crucially, all of these claims are axiomatically unchallengeable under the totalitarian, anti-rational premises of “postcolonialism”. Jews are redefined not as refugees (often from Arab lands) but, in an act of gross inversion, as “white settler colonisers”. They are oppressors, by definition, genocidal, self-evidently, and can never be victims. One doesn’t need to prove this; asserting it is sufficient.

Fake facts, decontextualisation and kangaroo courts can retrofit “evidence” to “confirm” these claims, but the narrative is set in stone, the conclusion pre-written.

Karl Popper would have dismissed such an unfalsifiable theory as unscientific; Orwell would have decried the doublespeak, whereby essential concepts are rendered void of meaning by intellectual vandals.

Antizionism is a psychosis dressed up as a theory of justice, the ultimate pathological, nihilistic, anti-Western brew, a disgusting concoction of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism and critical theory, fused together with aspects of Nazism, Christian anti-Semitism, Islamism and Cold War Soviet nostrums.

The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the allies did to the Nazis. It trivialises the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitimate, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalises intifada terrorism as freedom-fighting.

The genocide libel rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. They want to force British Jews to denounce Israel, to renounce friends and family, to pass a purity test. Modelled on the Cultural Revolution’s struggle sessions and the “taking of the knee” ritual, antizionists celebrate “good Jews”, in politics or the arts, who have turned against Israel, who have proved their loyalty, who “converted”, who humiliated themselves.

The antizionists have blood on their hands. Their lies have worked. They have radicalised white Lefties, and emboldened recently arrived extremists. The hatred is atavistic, and follows the pattern of a social contagion.

Each time Israel is attacked, UK anti-Semitic violence instantly surges. Anti-Jewish pogroms trigger more Jew-hatred, especially when Israelis are raped and butchered.

Psychologists call this arousal transfer: one violent act heightens other people’s aggression level. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, violence against Jews triggers a quasi-ecstatic reaction in sick minds, and a collective bloodlust ensues. Maniacs detect weaknesses, and go in for the kill. Many suffer deindividuation: they lose their sense of self, and join in the mob.

Is that who we have become? Is the Leftist-Islamist alliance here to stay? Is anti-Semitism the New Normal? I refuse to accept it. This is not Britain. This is not us.

By Allister Heath, A Telegraph's editor.
Allister Heath is the Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, a position he has held since April 2017.