The so-called horseshoe theory attempts to explain why parts of the extreme left and extreme right sometimes converge in their support for antizionism.
By antizionism, I do not mean merely opposition to Zionism as a political doctrine. Nor do I mean historical Jewish anti-Zionism. I mean a broader contemporary worldview that combines hostility to Jewish national self-determination with the demonization of Israel, the use of exceptional standards when judging the Jewish state, and, in some cases, the extension of collective accusations or hostility from Israel to Jews more generally. This worldview is often closely connected with what might be called Palestinianism: the treatment of the Palestinian cause as a central moral framework through which a much wider range of political questions is interpreted.
There may be an explanation for the convergence around antizionism that differs from the horseshoe theory. It may be connected to attitudes toward economic organisation and the distribution of resources.
The movements most strongly affected by antizionism—the extreme left, parts of the extreme right, and Islamist movements—often also favour some version of a centralised economic system.
Centralised and decentralised economic systems
Purely centralised and purely decentralised economic systems are rare. Most real economies contain elements of both. Nevertheless, the systems can be distinguished by examining two central questions:
How are prices determined?
Who owns and controls the means of production?
A modified centralised system may still use money as a means of exchange and permit private transactions in consumer goods. However, prices are frequently set, limited, or heavily influenced by a central authority. A large share of productive resources—factories, natural resources, infrastructure, and sometimes land—is owned or controlled by an actor closely connected to the legislative and enforcement apparatus.
Unofficial markets usually develop even in strongly centralised economies. They remain secondary, however, and are often illegal or merely tolerated.
A modified decentralised, or market-based, system also contains centralised elements. Taxes are collected and redistributed by the state, while governments provide public services, infrastructure, education, and social insurance.
Nevertheless, prices are primarily determined through exchange between independent actors, and the means of production are mostly owned by numerous private individuals and organisations.
Governments may attempt to influence prices through subsidies, regulations, price ceilings, or state monopolies. Private owners of capital may likewise try to influence legislation and enforcement in their own favour. In a predominantly market-based economy, however, these elements remain secondary to decentralised ownership and market price formation. Some forms of improper influence may also be illegal.
The level of taxation and regulation can therefore serve as one indication—though not the only one—of how far an economy has moved away from a decentralised market model.
The observed correlation with antizionism
At an observational level, support for centralised economic control appears to correlate positively with the adoption of an antizionist or Palestinianist worldview.
In an exploratory dataset assembled with the assistance of ChatGPT, 1,000 influential social-media accounts were assessed on both dimensions. The estimated correlation between holding an antizionist worldview and supporting collective or state control of economic resources was approximately 0.72.
For comparison, a correlation of around 0.7 can be found between total arm length and standing height in anthropometric data. A correlation of 0.72 would therefore represent a substantial relationship rather than a marginal one.
This estimate must be treated with considerable caution. The accounts were not selected as a random sample of the general population. The variables required interpretation rather than direct measurement, and the classification was conducted by an AI system rather than by several independent human coders following a validated research protocol.
The number should therefore not be treated as a precise scientific estimate.
Nevertheless, it points in the same direction as my personal observations: there seems to be a clear relationship between sympathy for centralised economic organisation and contemporary antizionism. This suggests that the two may be connected through one or more underlying factors.
It is also worth noting that economics departments—where one would expect a greater concentration of people familiar with the limitations of centralised allocation—appear to be less affected by organised antizionist activism than many departments in the humanities and social sciences and even natural sciences and engineering.
If this observation is correct, it may help explain why antizionism has spread so easily within certain parts of academia: There are several reasons why systems of centralised resource distribution may appear attractive to academics.
Academic careers depend on central allocation
Consider the aspirations of an ambitious doctoral student, especially in the humanities or social sciences.
The desired outcome is often a permanent or tenured academic position. Such a position does not closely resemble ordinary participation in a competitive market.
The basic salary is relatively secure. Its level and subsequent development are usually determined through institutional procedures rather than through direct negotiation with consumers. Performance is assessed by department heads, committees, funding bodies, and academic peers.
This assessment is necessarily imprecise. Academic freedom limits the extent to which research can be directed through narrowly defined performance indicators. Much academic work is undertaken because the researcher finds the subject interesting or important, not simply because it maximises a measurable output.
Even research funding obtained outside the university is generally allocated by a central committee rather than purchased by a direct consumer.
The aspiring academic therefore seeks admission into a system in which employment, salaries, status, research funding, and access to resources are distributed largely through institutional decision-making.
This does not make academia equivalent to a command economy. It does, however, mean that academic life depends heavily on central allocation and peer assessment rather than on direct market demand.
Someone whose desired professional future depends on gaining approval from committees may naturally find committee-based allocation more reasonable and legitimate than someone whose experience is primarily based on decentralised commercial exchange.
Specialised expertise can create excessive confidence
Academics may also develop the impression that expertise in one specialised area gives them unusually strong judgement in unrelated fields.
This tendency is visible in many antizionist arguments. Academics sometimes refer to their qualifications in one relevant subject as authority for conclusions about history, international law, military affairs, economics, demography, religion, or Middle Eastern politics, even when they have no specialised expertise in those areas.
This confidence may lead them to underestimate the difficulty of identifying and maintaining a sufficiently competent group of administrators to allocate resources on a large scale.
Centralised economic organisation appears manageable if one imagines it being administered by intelligent, informed, and morally serious experts.
The actual problem is more difficult. A society must continuously select those experts, assess their competence, provide them with accurate information, correct their mistakes, control their incentives, and prevent them from using their authority in their own interests.
Academics who are accustomed to seeing themselves and their colleagues as qualified evaluators may have greater confidence than the general population in the possibility of solving these problems through expert administration.
Central planning offers the appearance of intellectual order
A decentralised market economy has an important psychological disadvantage: no individual fully controls or understands it.
Most economic decisions are made locally by people and organisations possessing limited information. The general direction of development cannot therefore be predicted with confidence.
As Friedrich Hayek argued, this decentralised use of dispersed knowledge is one of the market system’s principal strengths. It is also one of the reasons market economies appear disorderly and intellectually unsatisfying.
Markets experience crises, generate unexpected outcomes, and resist comprehensive modelling. Their benefits may outweigh their risks, but the system does not provide a clear and unified picture of where society is going.
For people trained to seek coherent explanations, models, and general structures, centralised allocation may therefore seem more rational. It creates the impression that society can be understood and directed according to a unified plan.
This impression is often misleading.
The apparent simplicity of central planning conceals the enormous difficulty of collecting information, comparing different needs, assigning value, anticipating consequences, and correcting mistakes without reliable feedback from decentralised exchange.
A planned system may look more intelligible on paper precisely because many of its most difficult problems have been hidden inside the planning authority.
Academics may expect to benefit from centralised valuation
Academic work in Western societies often pays less than work requiring a comparable investment of time, education, and intellectual ability elsewhere in the economy.
From a market perspective, this is understandable. The number of people interested in academic employment is large, while the direct demand for many forms of academic research is limited. The personal and intellectual satisfaction associated with academic work also allows universities to attract highly qualified employees without offering salaries comparable to those available in some private industries.
In a centralised economy, however, salaries need not be determined primarily by the balance between supply and demand. They may instead be assigned according to political, educational, administrative, or ideological criteria.
Academics may therefore imagine that their knowledge, qualifications, and social importance would receive a higher economic valuation under a more centralised system.
In other words, a person who believes that the market undervalues academic work has a personal reason to prefer a system in which experts or public institutions decide what different forms of labour should be worth.
What is often overlooked is that one of the principal attractions of academic employment in Western societies is academic freedom.
Such freedom cannot be taken for granted in a system in which employment, salaries, research funding, publication, and access to institutions are controlled by the same central authority.
A system that gives academics greater material status may also give political administrators greater power over what academics are permitted to study, teach, and publish.
Possible common foundations
There are therefore several reasons why people within universities may be more sympathetic than the general population to centralised systems of economic distribution.
There also appears to be a strong correlation between sympathy for such systems and contemporary antizionism.
But correlation is not causation.
Support for centralised economic control does not logically imply hostility toward Jewish self-determination. Nor is it immediately clear why preferences concerning ownership, price formation, and resource allocation should produce the demonization of Israel or the extension of collective accusations to Jews.
The relationship may instead arise from deeper characteristics shared by both worldviews.
At present, I cannot identify the exact mechanism connecting preferences for centralised resource control with antizionism.
The relationship may be psychological, institutional, ideological, or a combination of all three. It may also be partly produced by political networks and academic environments in which both positions are transmitted together.
Nevertheless, the observed correlation deserves further study.
It may offer a more useful explanation than the horseshoe theory alone for why movements that otherwise appear radically different repeatedly converge around antizionism—and why that convergence has become particularly influential within parts of academia.
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