Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 68: Antizionism is inherently violent, with Adam Louis-Klein

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

After the massacre at Bondi Beach, anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein returns to the podcast to help us make sense of the new Jew-hatred.Antizionism, Adam argues, may be a form of hatred of Jews, but it's a far cry from the classical antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It's also not mere criticism of Israeli policies or governments. So what is it? And how do you fight it?Adam Louis-Klein is an anthropologist and writer whose work focuses on Jewish peoplehood, indigeneity, and contemporary anti-Jewish ideologies, especially the rise of antizionism. He is the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism and a postgraduate fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.Today's episode was sponsored by our friends at the American Technion Society.For more than a century, the Technion has powered Israel. Its graduates built the nation’s roads and bridges, its water systems and electrical grid. Israel’s high-tech industry emerged from the Technion — the very foundation of the Startup Nation. Today, as Israel recovers from the devastation of war, it needs the Technion more than ever. Technion scientists are developing new energy sources, sustainable food and water solutions and breakthrough medical therapies — creating innovations for a better world that will also reboot Israel’s economy.You want to help make Israel safe and strong. By supporting the Technion, you’re investing in the people and ideas that will rebuild Israel for a better future. Because rebuilding isn’t just about restoring what was lost — it’s about creating what comes next.The Technion built Israel. Now, the Technion will rebuild Israel. Join us. Visit ats.org/rebuildIf you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. We are just a couple days after the massacre at Bandai Beach. And I'm really glad to have Adam Lewis Klein back on the podcast to talk about what it all means. Adam has been a very thoughtful writer and thinker on these things. And I think we're going to just try and back back and forth what this moment is for Jews, what this moment is in the moment is in the people. the whole anti-Semitic anti-Zionist universe, the subtleties and nuances and complexities and overlaps and overlaps of all these terms, but ultimately how at the bottom on the ground where the rubber hits the road, it turns into violence. I want to tell you that we have a sponsor for this episode. For more than a century, the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, has powered Israel. Its graduates built the nation's roads and bridges, its water systems, and electrical grid. Israel's high-tech industry emerged from the Technion, the very foundation of the startup nation. Today, as Israel recovers from the devastation of war, it needs the Technion more than ever. Technion scientists are

developing new energy sources, sustainable food and water solutions, and break through medical therapies, creating innovations for a better world that will also reboot Israel's economy. You want to help make Israel safe and strong. By supporting the Technion, you're investing in the people and ideas that will rebuild Israel for a better future, because rebuilding isn't just about restoring what was lost, it's about creating what comes next. The Technion built Israel. Now the Technion will rebuild Israel. Join us, visit atts.org slash rebuild. Thank you so much for that sponsorship. And now just to give you a little bit of resume before we dive in with Adam, Adam is the founder recently, and we're going to ask about this, of the movement against anti-Zionism.

He is a postgraduate fellow at the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. He has, I don't know what to do with this, a BA in philosophy from Yale, an M.A. in philosophy from the new school for social research, an Emmy in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He's currently doing his Ph.D. at McGill. Fine. You think that intimidates me? That doesn't intimidate me, Adam. Okay? I went to Hebrew University, which is known in Israel's the last great German university. So none of these credentials impress me. No, that's a little bit impressive. How are you, Adam? I'm doing very well. It's great to be back on this show, Haviv. It's great to see you come into the light and start to seriously challenge some of the prevailing orthodoxies of academia and of the anti-Israel campaign and the

anti-Israel activist discourse. So I hope. you know, what tiny part having you on the podcast played in that many, many months ago I'm very proud of. I have no idea if it was like half of a tenth of a percent or if it was more, but I'm very proud of it anyway. You're doing great work. And what I want to do today is it really does feel like Bandai was something new. How did it hit you? How did the Bundy massacre? Where were you?

What did you see? What are your first takeaways from it? I should mention you wrote a piece in FP. I want to ask you about about explaining. what this kind of bigotry is about. What's your first sort of response to the massacre? I mean, obviously, it's a huge escalation in many ways, but one that so many of us were expecting.

And so, of course, so many of us were shocked but not surprised about this massacre. I think the hardest thing since this massacre is to see the discourse that's emerging and my own personal feeling that this discourse is caught in a kind of broken loop, essentially, that there's a lot of Jews responding saying, this is anti-Semitic, we are upset, we are angry,

we want something to be done about this. And then, of course, there are government officials. There are even anti-Zionists like Zahran Mamdani or Ilan Omar, who are perfectly happy to come out and say, this is anti-Semitic, we condemn this completely. And then we see Jews come along and say, you know, we don't want to hear from you. You are the anti-Zionists, right? Or they're not necessarily saying anti-Zionists, but they're saying, you know, you were saying globalized the intifada.

Like there's been a whole, there's maybe been 15 articles saying this is what globalized the interfaida meant. And so how can you stand by and condemn this? But, you know, that is actually the structure of the discourse today. So the way they set up their anti-Zionism always allows them. to disavow this anti-Jewish violence as something that's, one, it's either disconnected from anti-Zionism, from Israel. So they say, well, this has nothing to do with Israel. It has nothing to do with anti-Zionism.

So it's not us, not us. We don't have responsibility for this. Or they can say something that's almost contradictory, but makes sense within their sort of distorted ideology, which is that, well, Israel is to blame. Right. So people shouldn't be attacking Jews, right? But if Israel wasn't committing a genocide, if Israel wasn't doing all these evil things,

people wouldn't be so upset and take out their anger on innocent Jews. So their very discourse always basically functions to disavow their own responsibility. But when we just call them anti-Semitic, we aren't necessarily calling them to account because that's already baked in to what they're doing, right so I really feel that anti-Zionism as I write about and talk about a lot these days needs to be named and seen as the source of the problem both of the violence which was as we can get into was it was an Islamist version of anti-Zionism but also Western anti-Zionism which itself has this entire permission structure inside of it I want to stay with Bondi for a minute one of the striking things for me has been this question of blaming of blame

So many people, Australian journalists, major, mainstream, you know, Australian broadcast company or journalists, so many people online, so many people on the internet, Bernie Sanders decided to make his condemnation of the Bondi massacre half the statement, and it's like, I don't know, eight, nine paragraphs, half the statement is about Benjamin and Tengiao. So many people have said that the story here is a radicalization of some kind. If they're ISIS, that's not what it was. but let's imagine that it's possible that they're radicalized against Jews because they saw what is happening in Gaza. And what struck me as astonishing is that is not done with any other group.

In other words, in the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand back in 2019, this horrific massacre. Nobody then came out and said, well, you know, if great many Muslim ideologies and states and regimes weren't carrying out massive crimes, wars, genocidal wars, Yemen and Syria and Sudan and all these other places, then people wouldn't be radicalized into massacring Muslims in New Zealand. Many of these perpetrators in the Muslim world in the last just decade have done it for Islam in Islam's name. Now, do they represent all Muslims? Obviously not. And to argue that a massacre of Muslims in New Zealand can be pinned to that is such an obvious bigotry. It's such an obvious linkage that is so illegitimate. and yet it is literally mainstream for Jews

to the point where progressive Jews are now online posting on TikTok somebody sent me saying, I'm a Jew and yeah, I feel unsafe and it's Israel's damn fault. There's literally never been an anti-Semitic line that Jews haven't adopted as their own. The first blood libel about the killing of Christian children was literally invented by a Jew converted to Catholic Catholic bona fides.

Is that how you say it, bona fides? I don't, one of those things you only ever read Point is, I've never heard that said about Muslims. I've never heard that argument that something other Jews might be doing bad on the other side. Never mind whether Israel is good or bad. Let's imagine Israel is evil for the purpose of this conversation. That is somehow a reasonable thing to raise as a moral discourse about a massacre of Jews in Australia. That is something that's unique about anti-Zionist discourse.

That I have never seen it in any other place. anti-Zionism to me is so utterly obviously anti-Semitic just for that reason. It's only ever deployed around Jews, about Jews, talking to Jews in ways that nothing that happens in the Muslim world is deployed against Muslims. Yeah, you know, it's almost like anti-Jewish ideology is a kind of lingua franca. It's a kind of cultural code. And when something contradicts anti-Jewish ideology, there's a lot of kind of narrative cleanup that starts going to going on to say, well, let's not turn this into an anti-Islamic moment. Let's not turn this into an Islamophobic moment. And of course, you had someone like Randy Fine. He's certainly not the best

representative. He's an American congressman, right? He's an American congressman. And he said something like this. He actually did say, you know, all this stuff happening in the Muslim world, we have to stop immigration from the Muslim world, stuff like that. He said a lot of virulent anti-Muslim things. He started saying we basically deport and denaturalized. all Muslims, which would be a very Islamophobic response to such attack. And when he says that, he gives fodder than to people who want to do this narrative cleanup and make this about Islamophobia. And the reason they do that is to try and create this neutralization. You have anti-Semitism, you have Islamophobia. You have pro-Palestine. You have pro-Israel. And you can

always basically take anything that supports Jews, that gives Jews. You have Islamophobia. You have pro-Palbohy. You have pro-Palestine. And you can always basically take anything that supports Jews, that gives Jews some kind of moral capital as victims or legitimizes Jews, and you can sort of neutralize it by saying, well, there's also this issue of Muslim victimhood of Palestinian victimhood, right? So it's really a way of trying to sort of subvert any acknowledgement of the problem of anti-Jewish ideology, not because there isn't Islamophobia, but because there's an attempt to constantly re-legitimize anti-Jewish. ideology as a kind of lingua franca that israel needs to be maintained at the center of attention as what's evil right because if jews are victims in bondi beach maybe that means jews are a vulnerable

community maybe that means then that israel has a right to self-defense right because we know that is created in the first place at least in part as a means to protect jews and if the people who are killing jews at bondi beach are connected to hamas or share a similar ideology Jitamas, that also is a different way to read everything that's happened since October 7th, that the attack on Israel was not legitimate resistance, it wasn't just political, quote-on-quote, that it was actually an extension of anti-Jewish hatred. It's the same hatred killing people in Kfarazza as it is in Bondi Beach, right? And that's a completely different way to look at the whole situation, and it's one that

risks legitimizing Israel and legitimizing Jews. So now I'm completely confused. You argue that anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism. And you just argue that it is a permission structure for denying Jews legitimacy, legitimacy of self-defense, legitimacy of having a country that can defend them, the legitimacy of their being targeted. And they do this essentially by saying, look, if Jews weren't so evil over there on the other side of the world, nobody would target them.

Jews somehow have to be de-victimized, and therefore we have to ignore the danger they're in. And it doesn't matter how many massacres or attempted massacres we see. It doesn't matter what ideologies are percolating. It bothers me that the Australian Prime Minister can't talk about Islam. I would be delighted if he said. we know from our friends in Indonesia that there are pacifist versions of Islam in this world. Islam can be one of the most beautiful gifts to humanity. We're dealing with a serious version of Islam that is absolutely brutal, genocidal, and has come to our shores.

And we need to deal with it seriously. Why can't he say that? Why can't he say it if it's the simple, obvious truth? Why can't he say it if the people engaged in this kind of violence are saying it, actually claiming that that's what it is that they're doing? What is this thing where the Jew can't have their 10 seconds of victimhood in the immediate aftermath of a massacre, while the religion of the perpetrator, the community of the perpetrator, has to be the victim in the aftermath of a massacre by somebody from that world? What is that? Isn't it anti-Semitism?

You know, I think that the distinction the anti-Zionists make between Zionist and Jew, right, which can exist in real, life because there are Jews who aren't Zionists and there are Jews who are anti-Zionists, but it's something that they themselves produce at the level they mark Jews as Zionists. I think this distinction is sort of the inverted image, let's say, of a more valuable distinction that is based in a more moral conception between Islamists and all Muslims. So they try and say anti-Zionists, well, I don't hate all Jews, right? I only hate Zionists. Zionists are these evil, genocidal, brutal, violent people,

but the rest of Jews are fine. Now, of course, that's not true. The people they mark as Zionists, they're actually just libeling in that way. They're often just ordinary Jews, people with a connection to Israel, or people who are marked as Zionists for all kinds of reasons. They don't pass the litmus test of the anti-Zionist movement,

but they're not evil genocidal people, right? Whereas the distinction between Islamists and Muslims, particularly jihadists, to be even more precise, those who pursue Islamist aims using violent means, right? That is actually a valuable distinction. And it is actually true that not all Muslims are doing this. But to be even more precise, I think to get out of this problem of,

is it Islamophobic, right, to point to anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish violence, right? And is it always going to be caught up in this neutralization game of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism together or competitive victimhood between Jews and Muslims, I think we need to hone in again on anti-Zionism

and just see what's happening here as the Islamist strain of anti-Zionism. There are different versions. There's the Soviet strain of anti-Zionism. And in the Soviet strain, it was very much developed to be different from classical anti-Semitism, to not look like Nazi-style racism

or racial pseudoscience. but to be about colonialism and racism and apartheid and genocide. And the Western anti-Zionism really derives from the Soviet anti-Zionism. So Zionism is racism and Zionism is Nazism. These foundational libels are still the same ones we see today, you know, when your average Iranian bot or just anti-Zionist, who has a Ph.D. calls you a Zion Nazi, right? That's the same language that the Soviets created. and it is separate from classical anti-Semitism. What you see in the Middle East is a different kind of convergence of different forms of anti-Jewish hatred.

So there is, of course, an Islamic anti-Judaic strong tradition. So Andrew Boston, for example, did great work in really uncovering this and looking at the primary text, because often we don't want to look at this, right? We want to say, oh, it was all European Nazism, which made its way into the Middle East in the 20th century through people like the Mufti or Johann von Leirs, who was a Nazi propagandist who moved to Cairo, converted to Islam under the Mufti, spread the protocols of the elders of Zion in Arabic throughout the Middle East. That all plays a role. There's also anti-Judaism within Islam. It comes from the Hadith and the Quran. There's a whole set of stories about Jews rejecting Muhammad's

Prophecy, plotting to kill Muhammad, faking the scriptures so that the Torah basically has been doctored and is not an original copy of the prophecies to Moses, rejecting Islam and losing the Jewish status as the chosen people. So all of that exists. All of that is part of what the Mufti is doing in his speech in 1937, Islam and Judaism. All of that is in Saeed Katow. And all of that's also in Al-Qaeda and ISIS. So ISIS today, too, even the anti-Zionists admit ISIS is evil, right? They've been kind of constructed as this universal Nazi figure that everyone sort of agrees as evil, strangely, even though they are not so different from Hamas or al-Qaeda. But it's one ideology. So instead of saying the anti-ZZZyrians,

is anti-Semitism, which I think is a very ambiguous statement, and it's inaccurate in certain respects, I would say that in the Middle East, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, that there actually isn't any anti-Semitism in the Middle East that is not also anti-Zionism, that hatred of Jews in the Middle East is always expressed through this civilizational war that is maintained against Israel and against Zionism. There's a deep ahistoricity to it. In other words, I consider anti-Zionism to have only one of two kinds. Either it is ignorance or it is bigotry.

You know, all the Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere are basically dead, except for those who became Zionist. In other words, Jews did not have options in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, a Muslim world that could empty of all its Jews. A Muslim world with a vast majority of the Jews who left the Muslim world, left as refugees. The Farhood pogrom in Baghdad is famous, but there's a dozen such pogroms in that period

against Jews in Libya and in other places. And so this whole idea of, I don't go to this sort of intellectual constructions. I go to simple historical experience. I don't know if you could say historical experience is ever simple, but just to follow what ordinary people actually live through. And then you discover that what does it mean to be anti-Zionist? Are you wishing the world hadn't treated the Jews in a way that left Israel as their literal only option?

Australia itself didn't take in Jews at their most desperate moment. Many of the Jews of Australia are Holocaust survivors, descendants of Holocaust survivors, but that happened afterwards. That didn't happen before. Australia wasn't taking in Jews when they needed another option and they had no other option. Israel was built by people who literally had no other option, and if they didn't take the Zionist option, they died. Most Jews weren't born Zionists.

Most Jews weren't Zionists at the beginning of the 20th century. They were Zionists by the 1930s. You'll never guess why. Right? And so to be an anti-Zionist is to what? What's the argument? You wish history hadn't happened that way? I agree with you, but you didn't say anything. Or you deny that history happened that way. It is a falsifying of history to invent a criminality to destroy a people. That is anti-Zionism. Isn't it? Is it? Yeah. Sorry. The sophisticated anti-Zionist, I think, would say they recognize Jewish. victimhood. And they recognize the Holocaust. And they might even say, oh, we recognize that Jews needed a place to go to. But the whole scheme was based on European colonial assumptions that essentially, even if Europeans had mass murdered Jews in the Holocaust, and of course, millions of

people collaborated in different countries that the Germans occupied and conquered, right? And there were millions of ordinary peasants, of ordinary administrators, et cetera, that collaborated across Europe. Even if Europe had this hatred for Jews and committed this mass crime, well, European colonialism is still the true global crime. It's the great explanatory framework for all evils in this world. And it was because of European colonialism that Jewish victimhood was privileged over Arabs and Palestinians. So Arabs and Palestinians were not seen as human, and so they were seen as being able to be replaced, essentially, by Jews. So Europe conspired to create this settler colonial project where they would ship off the Jews. Of course, this narrative basically removes all the agencies of Jews themselves, except when it's convenient to blame them.

But Europe would ship off the Jews to Palestine and would forcibly transfer or ethnically cleanse, Palestinians to create this state. And on that basis, this state then is fundamentally colonial, and it fundamentally requires the elimination of Palestinians. So that set of libeles of colonizer apartheid genocide is also an argument for why Israel is inherently unjust and one that can seemingly legitimize the notion that European anti-Semitism is wrong and that it was wrong to want to kick out Jews or kill Jews, and that Jew hatred itself, you could even say, is wrong, and that all they want to do is reverse this injustice against Arabs and Palestinians, and if Arabs and Palestinians are doing violence against Jews, it's just a result of this injustice.

And so it's the broader kind of structure of European Zionism that is the problem. But wouldn't, but that wouldn't, I have not yet found an answer to my argument, including among these, you know, Jewish professors who are anti-Zionists in their scholarship of Jewish history. And then I make this simple argument and no one ever offers an answer. What you are saying, I think, is a reflection. I mean, you and I are on the opposite side of the debate from them. So let them come forward. I'm happy to debate them on Twitter.

If they have something interesting to say, they could come on the podcast. But I have heard them say that. But that doesn't answer my actual point, which is the Jews caught in that vice, in that moment. are the, you know, if you wish history hadn't gone that way, Europe had behaved that way, the Ottoman collapse and the collapse of multi-ethnic empires into the new nationalisms hadn't been so dangerous and destructive for Jews and many other minorities, and the only thing that had actually gotten Jews to a place of safety was Israel. If you wish history hadn't forced the Jews into that position,

to not acknowledge that it forced them into that position is simply lying about history. To wish history hadn't forced them to is fine. That's a totally legitimate critique. but it's the critique of every single country on earth except Israel. You want to deny Israel existence. You want to make Israel unviable. You want Israel not to have been so successful at pushing back Palestinians up to the 1947 partition line or further in the 48-49 war or you want Israel to have failed. Maybe the Arab shouldn't have kicked out every last Mizrachi Arab Jew because then Zionism would not have been viable.

Maybe, you know, do you know what I mean? like if there had been until the Jews, until America closed its doors, something like 80% of Jews fled to America when they were fleeing the pogroms and the violence and the brutality and the oppression of Eastern Europe. They did not become Zionists. And many others also fled to Britain and Canada and other places. They became Zionist when left with no other option. So even that argument isn't an argument to the Jews of Israel. It's an argument to everybody else. Everybody else really does owe a lot to the Palestinians. The only people in this story, who literally had no choice in the story.

By the way, after the establishment of Israel and Jews have their safe haven, any policy, any decision, any war, any bombing, any dearest scene is legitimate fodder for critique. It's a country doing something. Obviously, it's legitimate to debate and critique it. The very existence of Israel being wrong is the argument that the existence of this nation is wrong, that this nation should not exist. Do they have an argument to that? because anti-Zionism seen in the historical lens,

rather than how you tackle it from the anthropological lens, to me is totally untenable. It's just, it's a ridiculous invention of a fake history, or literally they don't even invent a fake history. They just pretend like 40% of the book isn't in front of them when they read the history. And then move on from there to an ideology. I think the way in which they set up the discontinuity

between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is key, because they can say that they're not doing European anti-Semitism, because European anti-Semitism was based on the notion that Jews are an alien force that are infiltrating our societies, and we don't want them there. So we tried emancipation. We tried giving them civic rights, starting with the French Revolution and the various processes of liberalization in the 19th century Europe. And then by the end of the 19th century, Europeans had decided, many Europeans had decided that was a mistake and needed to be rolled back. And so anti-Semitism really was a rejection of Jewish assimilation. But anti-Zionism is actually kind of the inverse. And in this sense, it really is distinct from anti-Semitism. So anti-Zionism

says, well, actually, we don't have a problem with Jews and non-Jewish nation states. We think that Ashkenazi Jews, Jews from Poland, Russia, France, Britain are actually just British, French, Polish, and Russian people. And Mizrahim, Jews from Arab countries or Iran are actually just Arabs or Persians, I guess. And it's actually kind of the opposite of anti-Semitism in that way. And so that allows them to basically say, well, we are not doing anti-Semitism. And of course, that is actually kind of true. But then where's getting angry at you for anti-Semites? I apologize. But you're such a helpful explainer. But where's the rage at the Arabs? Because in 48, in 47 at the partition talks at the UN, you literally had Arab ambassadors at the UN debate on the partition plan, from Syria, from Iraq, saying the Jews don't deserve their own state because they're not a nation.

They're merely a religion, an Syrian Jew is a Syrian Arab. He is not a Jew by nation. And then saying, and if the Jews dare to do this thing of founding their own state, then the Jews of Syria and Iraq will be deeply unsafe. We will turn on them and we will oppress them. And I will not be able to control my people from doing this terrible thing. The Polish government literally said, a Polish ambassador to London, said if in 1938, after Poland stripped non-resident Polish Jews of their citizenship and convinced the Nazis

that actually, because they did that act, the Nazis actually rounded up 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany and pushed them to the Polish border because they didn't want to. end up with non-citizen, you know, stateless Jews on German soil. So there's basically a concentration camp that forms on the Polish-German border in 1938 before the war because the Poles are starting to strip citizenship of Jews. And Poland turns to the world and says the whole world needs to take these 17,000 Jews and Poland's not going to take them in. We just took away their passports.

And the Polish deputy ambassador to London literally publicly says they don't, the only thing Polish about them is their passport. They're not Poles. Everybody, everywhere says they're strangers. For centuries, for centuries, the Jews in the Russian Empire were not Russians. They were Jews, according to everybody, especially the Russian government. For centuries, the Jews of Germany and the Jews of Iraq and the Jews of Morocco, there's something separate. And so they only become Moroccans and Iraqis and Poles and Russians when they're being separate is now become a problem.

In other words, when they needed to be Russians, they weren't allowed to be Russians. And now that there's something else, they have to go back to being Russians that they never were according to the Russians. That's basically the discourse. And that's the only way you can actually hold to this view. I don't understand the anti-Zionist. I literally don't understand this person. How do they square the circle? Is it just ignorance?

Is that the evidence of bigotry that this whole thing falls apart at the slightest examination? How can an entire academic edifice constructed? To see these structures, miss this about Jews, to see these power structures, to see these ways of othering, to see all of this stuff, not see this, not see what they themselves are engaged in. So I'm going to give a response that might make some people a little bit upset. And it's because I think it is at least partially because of the Jewish community's own models and language for describing this, right? because they've outpaced us, really. It's because the anti-Zionists actually are so sneaky. They've outpaced us, and they've evolved Jew hatred.

They've transformed it from anti-Semitism into anti-Zionism, and they're waiting for us to catch up because they know that anti-Zionism is distinct from classical anti-Semitism, but they see that we are still describing it as anti-Semitism, as if it's exactly the same thing. We're looking for the same tropes. We're looking for the same tropes.

looking for tropes of financial conspiracy or racial infiltration or dual loyalty. While many of these people don't require these tropes, they only need this core anti-Zionism that constructs Israel as evil colonizer apartheid genocide, which is basically the inverse of the great moral values of our age, after Auschwitz, after the civil rights movement, after apartheid and decolonization, the colonialism of apartheid and genocide are the great evils. And anyone on the left, anyone who's progressive, anyone who believes in human rights would be opposed to that. You don't need to be a fringe skinhead, neo-Nazi. It's respectable people who want to oppose a colonial apartheid and genocidal regime. And they are not against all Jews anymore. They're not against a Jew just because

they're wearing a Kippa, at least a respectable Western anti-Zionist, that is. They are against Israelis and Israel. And we demand that that it. be shown to be anti-Semitic, right, as if anti-Israeli racism, as if a hatred of Israelis themselves, right, were somehow okay as long as it wasn't anti-Semitic. And so I think we need to show the anti-Zionism. We need to catch up with the anti-Zionists and say, we see you, we understand what you're saying, we understand that it's not classical anti-Semitism, that you're not, you don't want to push Jews out of Europe, you're demanding they go back to Europe, well, that's hateful

in its own way. It's an anti-Israeli racism. It's anti-Zionism. And anti-Zionism is a violent politics. Anti-Zionism drove Jews out of Arab countries by marking them as Zionist traitors, as Zionist spies, and as people who didn't belong within an Arab nation for that reason, right? Including huge numbers of very loyal anti-Zionist Jews who found that the world they lived in the Iraq, they were living in, the Libya they were living in, wouldn't tolerate them. How do we do that? All right. Let's say I accept your premise.

Anti-Zionism has reframed the entire debate, shifted it away from Jews. It's an erasure of history. It's an obsessiveness. It has all these characteristics that are rather easy to find in that Venn diagram overlapping with anti-Semitism. But it has enough difference that they can tell themselves that they're okay, that the essential thing is different. And so they're not anti-Semites. So I accept that. and that I certainly accept that they think it and that that's how they perceive it.

So all they are is just hatred of the last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere, which is totally not anti-Semitism. It's something else. If the Jews agreed to have not have survived the 20th century, they'd have nothing against them. Or if the Jews had agreed to all get up and leave and move to France, maybe, they'd have nothing against them, right? It's anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism. How do you build a campaign, and this brings us to the movement you've founded since the last time we talked? tell us about that movement.

How do you build a campaign that just says, wait a second, anti-Zionism in the anti-Zionist's own framing of it is also just a bigotry. How do you frame that? How do you explain that? What is your argument for that? And how do you teach that? So I think part of the reason we're so attached to anti-Semitism is both a word and a concept is because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was such an immense trauma for us as Jews. and also for the rest of society as well, to really process how it was possible that sophisticated, advanced, civilized European cultures could have committed such a crime.

And after the Holocaust, the term anti-Semitism, which really just referred to a specific political ideology, emerging with Wilhelm Marr in 1879 and obviously becoming the central ideology of the Nazi Party, that term was now refashioned to refer to all. Jew hatred across history. So it's all anti-Semitism, including medieval anti-Judaism, which has nothing to do with Semites, nothing to do with constructing Jews necessarily as a kind of infiltrating race. It's more theological, right? The Holocaust is seen as a kind of culmination of that entire history, and so anti-Semitism becomes the paradigm of all forms of Jew-Hatred. But when we look at anti-Zionism, we're actually looking at a lineage of Jew-hatred that is oblique to the lineage of classical anti-Semitism. So it intersects with it because we have people like the Mufti, right, who he incorporated Nazism into his attacks on Zionism and on Jews in mandatory

Palestine. But at the same time, we have another lineage that's not necessarily culminating in the Holocaust. It's taking its own trajectory. It's going through Soviet anti-Zionism. It has its Islamic, independent Islamic component as well. And it's coming into the West and then being transformed by this academic settler colonial theory, this anti-colonial critique that's very prestigious within the academy. So it's really kind of its own phenomenon, right? And so the movement against anti-Zionism helps people to see that phenomenon and make it legible. And it works to help the Jewish community and allies and anyone start to name anti-Zionism as the core problem that we're seeing today and recognize that we've entered the anti-Zionist age. So the dominant structure of Jew

hatred today is anti-Zionism. That doesn't mean that classical anti-Semitism doesn't continue to exist or even medieval anti-Judaism, people who call you a Talmudic devil, right? They're still doing medieval anti-Judaism. Anti-Zionism is a permission structure for those older forms of Jew hate to find space, but it's within this broader frame, within this anti-Israel zeitgeist, within Israel-Gystegeist, with an Israel constructed as the center of evil, as the symbol of all moral wrongs in our age. And in order to understand Islamist Jew hatred, we have to also embed it in anti-Zionism. So that Islamist anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism. It is through anti-Zionism that violence against Jews has happened throughout the Middle East.

It's happened in Palestine. It's driven the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a radical rejectionism of the existence of a Jewish state. And it's had horrible consequences for Palestinians. It's the cause of Palestinian suffering, and it's also what's driving attacks against Jews in the diaspora. So it's not about anti-Semitism versus Palestinian suffering or pro-Israel people weaponizing anti-Semitism to legitimize violence against Palestinians. Actually, anti-Zionism is the core problem behind both the suffering of Jews and the suffering of Palestinians. I feel like I agree with you, but something is holding me back.

It shares so much. It shares the standing the Jew up, you know, to be judged. That whole dynamic. It shares with anti-Semitism that heart, that core idea from early, early Christian and Muslim anti-Semitism of the Jews, you know, standing in the way of the redemption, refusing the great revelation, rejecting that then Marx secularizes into the Jew as the paradigmatic capitalist because the Jew doesn't farm the land. The Jew only runs capital, right? And then is, again, reframed by everybody. The Jew is the great danger to the folk for Hitler, and

the Jew is the great danger to the worldwide communist brotherhood of nations to Stalin. And so the Jew always standing in the way, it could be opposite things, but it's always the Jew. And here the Jew is standing in the way. You said it, the way you said it, anti-Zionism, you know, posits that Israel, that Zionism is the distillation of all the bad things in the world, of all the evils of the world. Really? I mean, Zionism and not like the Chinese regime? Zionism and not the brokenness of all the bottom billion in all the UN human development reports?

Zionism and not tyranny, Zionism and not Vladimir Putin? I mean, really? I mean, just, how? Isn't it just, I'm sorry, last time I'm going to ask this, I really feel like an idiot. I feel like you're saying something they can hear. And so you're the guy who needs to be campaigning there. But I'm sitting in little old parochial me, right, over a deep, deep inside the Jews. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, this is exactly the same thing. The Jew is again standing in judgment. The Jew, they even, they weaponize Jews who agree with them. exactly the way that the old Catholic inquisition would weaponize Jews who converted and were the, you know, sometimes the most virulent of inquisitors because they were trying to prove, right? They, it's, it's all the same models. I'm, I'm standing in the way of the redemption of the world. I'm not even talking about whether I'm doing terrible things that are wrong. There's a terrible, terrible, terrible war in Gaza with huge costs. There's a worse war in Sudan with even bigger costs and genocidal ideologies and mass starvation and Islam as the cause. differences in these ideologies as part of the driver of the war. And that doesn't exist. That's uninteresting.

That's just a Zionist attempt to deflect. I don't mind people coming at us over the Gaza War. Not I don't mind. God forbid there should be a war without criticism on this earth in human history. What's happening, the West's ignoring of Sudan is a tragedy. The West not ignoring Gaza is not the problem. They should pay attention to Gaza. But I'm standing in the way of the redemption of the world.

I'm the distillation of all. isn't this just the thing? I'm not going to ask it again. I just, isn't it just the thing, the old thing? So I think there are functional invariants across time, and one of them is the scapegoating of the Jew, right, of making the Jew a symbolic evil for all the problems in the world.

And so that is certainly similar. But of course, it's a shift of logical level, right? Because it's not Jews in the diaspora, really. It's the Jewish state. It's Jews as a kind of people or collective that certain Jews can be exempted from. And now I like actually the analogy you made to anti-Judaism and these sort of Jewish converts to Christianity, like John Pfeffercorn or Pablo Cristiani, right, who would act as these kind of experts on the Jews for the non-Jews to explain, you know, oh, I come from this community. I'll tell you that I know that they are really evil. You know, when Omar Barthov goes on the New York Times, he says, I'm Israelis.

So I can confirm for you that all these Israelis sound exactly like Nazis during the Holocaust. And he studied the Holocaust as well. So he has all of that accumulated authority. I actually like the analogy to anti-Judaism because I think the anti-Zionism is more similar to medieval anti-Judaism than it is to classical anti-Semitism. My concern is to continually see anti-Zemitism. Wait, hold on, hold on. It means of classical anti-Semitism. Okay.

So lay that out for us. Modern anti-Zainism is closer to the classical religious anti-Judaism? Yes, to religious anti-Judaism. Let me explain why, because the religious anti-Judaism, it constructed itself as if it was opposed to a kind of belief system, to a kind of ideology, right, that you could convert out of. So the problem wasn't Jews themselves. The problem was Judaism. It was the beliefs of Judaism that Christ was not the Messiah and that the, the,

They should follow instead the Talmud and the laws of the rabbis and these kind of overly legalistic and corporal kinds of regulations that had no real love and heart and spirit to them. And that was because they rejected Christ. So that was really what anti-Judaism was. And anti-Zionism constructs itself in a very similar way. It's not opposed to Jews themselves as a kind of race, but it's opposed to a supposed belief system called Zionism. And if Jews reject this belief system and become anti-Zionists, they will be saved. They'll join this universal vanguard of people standing up for equality and justice against the horrors of Zionism. So I think anti-Zionism is new and it's distinct from classical anti-Semitism that came before it.

And that's why I like the analogy actually to anti-Judaism, because it shows that it's distinct from classical anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th century. That was very helpful. Thank you. I'm glad I took that one extra question, that sort of stupid sounding question, to get that because that clarified it for me. I do think I see it much more clearly now. You wrote a piece in the free press where you made the following argument. This latest assault only reaffirms the ongoing reality of anti-Zionism as an essentially violent ideology. One that drives out Jewish communities wherever it takes hold. I think you're talking about the Arab world, through exclusion, discrimination, and even murder. This is not about a political opinion that crosses the line into anti-Semitic violence. We're dealing with anti-Zionist violence itself, the targeting of Jews as Zionists, legitimized by specific anti-Zionist liables. What academia has dabbled in is ideology is constantly being translated into violence. And, you know, we had the murders in Colorado and Mancha, that came before Bondi Beach, and there's going to be more, you know.

I'm telling you, there's going to be more, dear listener, viewer, and everybody will be just as shocked, and everybody will be, you know, very worried about not overly victimizing the perpetrators. It's an inherently violent ideology, and it's being espoused by people who claim the mantle of great morality by pacifist kinds of people in academia, who, on the altar of this anti-Zionist, idea structure are building out a permission structure for this kind of violence. Is that the

strategy is explaining that, is showing that the strategy for tackling this thing, for pushing back against anti-Zionism? So think about the paradigm that is so often used today, both by the Jewish community and by broader society and by anti-Zionists, which is that there's something called anti-Zionism, which is presumptively legitimate. It's a political opinion, it's a criticism of Israel, it's a criticism of Zionism, that at some point crosses the line into anti-Semitism. We hear that all the time, and what emerges is this kind of endless debate that's sort of designed to be insolvable of where exactly is the line.

Because, of course, it's been defined in such an abstract way, and anti-Zionism has emerged as a new ideology. It's not the same as anti-Semitism that no one knows where to draw it, right? And we have three different definitions of anti-Semitism. We have the IRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. We have the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, the JDA. We have the Nexus Declaration of Antisemitism. And they all draw the line differently because it's already been constructed as a kind of political debate.

Right. If I'm really critical of Israel, I'll probably be more permissive, right? I'll draw the line, you know, more restrictive, more permissively, right? And if I'm a huge supporter of Israel and I love everything the Israeli government does, then I want something that says that lots of stuff is anti-Semitic and it'll be really restrictive. I've never met that person, that last person, but I take your point. Yeah, but the way it's set up is like that. So it basically implies that someone who calls a lot of things anti-Semitic is more supportive of Israeli policies.

And someone who is more critical of Israeli policies calls less things anti-Semitic. So it's basically just a political debate. And our lived experience of Jew hatred as Jews is turned into a debate. And our authority to speak from our lived experience as victims of Jew hatred is stripped from us, essentially, and turned into this abstract debate. And we reproduce that paradigm. That same paradigm is operative when we say anti-Zionism has become anti-Semitism. This was an anti-Semitic attack. It crossed the line into anti-Semitic violence.

So we talk about anti-Semitic violence, but we don't talk about anti-Zionist violence. It's like anti-Zionism has to become something else to become violent. So in that quote, what I was trying to get at is that anti-Zionism is its own source of violence. There's a specific violence that comes with anti-Zionism and because it's driven by anti-Zionist liables, the colonizer apartheid genocide, and the marking of Jews as Zionists as a specific kind of character, a specific racialization as an object of. hatred, the evil Zionist. And if you're in an academic environment or activist space that's anti-Zionist, you can just feel this so palpably that the Zionists are doing this. This is this

kind of poisonous tone when they say the word Zionist, right? And that's because the Zionist is really the object of hatred. So we need to teach people about the history of anti-Zionist violence, like in Arab and Muslim countries that drove out 850,000 Jews, or in the social a union that discriminated against Jews that purged Jews. Or in Poland in 1968, where they drove about 13,000 Jews with this mass anti-Zionist campaign, all while classical anti-Semitism was illegal. So the government of Poland at the time could say we reject anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is racism, it's Nazism, it's fascism, we're absolutely against it and drive out

13,000 Jews using anti-Zionism. And then that just shows. shows to the degree to which just getting the IRA through, just getting organizations to even recognize the anti-Semitism as a problem, which basically everyone does today, is not enough. One has to see anti-Zionism as its own problem. When the bigot seeks a defensive line, the defensive line will be, I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm anti-Zionist. So we say, okay, but anti-Zionist is a violence-producing bigotry that generalizes people,

that libel's people constantly that is, you know, supported by classical anti-Semitism in some ways that is supported by older anti-Judist Jewish ideas in some ways, especially in the Muslim world. But nevertheless, it is its own bigotry. So when we say that, then they will say, but what about all the Jews? 30% of New York Jews may have the polls, I haven't seen recent polls, but the very early polls suggested, voted for Mamdani. And Mamdani is no fan of Zionism. Are those Jews, misunderstanding who they are. When they start coming at us and say, well, what am I allowed to say against Israel? What's the answer? How do we actually carefully articulate what the anti-Zionism argument is, what our argument against anti-Zionism is and why we think it is an illegitimate hatred rather than, not just because some people will take it to violence, some people will take good ideas to violence, arguably. I mean, that's not itself a proof. What inherent to anti-Zionism is evil and when is it not evil? It's always evil. So the way I respond to that basically is they want to say, well, tell me what I can say about Israel that's not anti-Zionism or that's not

bigoted. Well, that's not my role and I don't think it's necessary, right? Instead of saying what anti-Zion is not, I try and get people to see what anti-Zionism is. And once you see what it is, it's a very specific thing, right? Like I think of anti-Zionism. It's like an apple. It's an object in front of you. You see it. It's a phenomenon. And when you see a real thing, a real phenomenon, it's not an abstract debate where you don't know where to put the borders. You see the line around it. You see its outline and you see its border and you see it's something specific. So today no one really argues about when a critique of Jewish assimilation and becomes Nazism, right? We all kind of just recognize what Nazism was. It had all these weird theories about

Aryanism and seymites and the replacement of Aryans by some kind of. of Semitic spirit that was alien, right? It's a specific ideology. Anti-Zionism is incredibly specific. It's grounded in settler colonial theory, which is not an evident theory, right? Basically, settler colonialism is saying that there can be a type of colonialism where people just shows up and they build a community somewhere and then they become inherently genocidal. Well, that's not intuitive on its own. There's a lot of ideological baggage that you need to have to already believe that people migrating to a place and setting up a community are inherently genocidal toward others. Then there's the Nazi and Islamist and Soviet lineage that's completely different from this pre-1948

Jewish debates, whether that's Samar Hasidism, whether that's Bundism or even Jews who were drawn to Marxism just because they wanted to, they believed that anti-Semitism could be defeated by a world working class revolution. So anti-Zionism has its own lineage. It has its own ideological content. And it's so specific that once you see it, there's no, there's no point. Basically, the debate falls apart, right? The debate about where to draw the line will fall apart, because everyone will know what anti-Zionism is. And that's the point we do. What is anti-Zionism that makes the debate fall apart. How do I know it when I see it? Let me give you an example.

When I see problems in Israel that disturb me, when I see a Jewish extremist movement in Israel that is engaging in language that I find to be very barbaric or violent or they want to turn Israel into a kind of pseudo-biblical, halocic state where potentially we might bring back the Sanhedron and then stone people for desecrating Shabbat. Israel no longer looks like something that's incorporated, positive, liberal, democratic, enlightenment values into its society but becomes a kind of Jewish Iran. That is all very negative to me. I'm critical of that.

I don't want to see it. I don't think it's the right direction. I don't think it's consistent with Jewish values, as I understand them. But I don't think that critique has anything to do with anti-Zionism, because it's actually the opposite of anti-Zionism. So when I see these problems, when I see someone like Ben-Givir and his rhetoric, I don't see that as an extension of white colonial European Nazism. It's actually the opposite in this case.

It's a kind of failure of Israel to really integrate and reconcile its Jewish identity with democracy or really with its belonging to the West. So because Jews are sort of both Middle Eastern and Western and have to find a way to integrate those two components of their identity. Right. So it's not about being a European colonist. It's actually about not being fully integrated into Europe and the West and how to manage that. So there's a whole space of critiques, of internal discussions and debates that Jews can have, the others can have too about Israel, but that has nothing to do with anti-Zionism. And that is almost based on completely distinct premises because the premises of anti-Zionism are just about scapegoating Jews. They're just about. using Israel as a symbol of what the West now sees as wrong as Western colonialism, racism, apartheid and genocide. So we need to basically identify that so we can clear the way, basically. We see anti-Zionism. We can set it off to one side. And then we can keep so-called critically

discussing Israel. But as long as we can't clearly identify anti-Zionism, we're not going to be able to clearly identify that space of criticism either. And we'll keep calling things criticism that actually just anti-Zionist libos. So let's bring that back to the Middle East and also, therefore, to the massacre. In the Muslim world, we started with this. You started with this. In the Muslim world, it operates differently. Anti-Judaism of the old kind is much more prevalent.

You point to the connection between classical anti-Semitism and some of these ideas of the Muslim brothers, etc., of these people in Cairo, Baghdad, of course, the Rishid regime and all of that during the war. and the enormous influence of Nazi embassies in the Arab world and their publications during the period of Nazi rule in Germany. But all of those connections, all of those connections are nevertheless not determinant. In other words, the Muslim world had the ability to despise Jews,

the status of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, certainly toward the end when the Ottoman Empire turned on its Christians, the Greeks, the Armenians, and also the Jews on the non-Muslim minorities, didn't need the help of European ideas. It imbibed, inhaled those European ideologies with glee and joy, but it didn't need them to turn on the Jews. And so you have these ideologies in the Muslim world.

It's different. It's different from the progressive discourse. ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, drawing on Saikut, drawing on the Muslim brothers of the 1920s, they don't need this progressive discourse. Is that also anti-Zionism, if we understand anti-Zionism

as this series of libel that are based in, you know, progressive, Western or morality. I mean, a colonialist is only a problem if you don't believe in the Muslim conquest of the world, right? If you like Hamas do believe in the Muslim conquest of the entire world, why is colonialism bad? It's the only problem is who's doing the colonializing, right? So is that different? Is that the same anti-Zionism? How do you see the distinction there?

Yeah, if we think about the Red-Green alliance, basically what's happened is that a conquering society, a colonizing society, the second most successful imperial project in history, which was Islamic civilization, has been recoded as a victim of colonialism because they were defeated by another imperial colonizing society, which was Europe. And the Ottoman Empire, of course, collapsed with World War I. They sided with the aggressors, and they were defeated. And of course, Britain and France, when they were carving up the Middle East, had colonial aims and ambitions. They wanted to extract oil. They wanted control over the Suez Canal, etc. And that

did sort of harm Arabs, right? So Arabs had many ambitions to have an Arab nationalist super state. They didn't necessarily want to be carved up according to these random borders. And since that time, there has been a great instability. I mean, it's the same instability we've seen across the world in terms of creating these colonial partitions, exacerbating ethnic conflicts and sectarian religious conflicts throughout the world. And at that level, the problems that have occurred in the Middle East can be compared to the kind of decolonial tensions and genocides that have happened in Africa as well. But of course, what you have here is that there's a colonizing civilization that's being framed as the victims of colonialism and thus they can then take on the mantle of anti-colonialism,

Since they oppose the West, since they oppose Europe, and they now code Jews as basically a force of the West as white colonizers, right? They can take on the mantle of anti-colonial justice while pursuing an imperial project. And I do think that the world really needs to understand and begin to see Islam again as a civilization in crisis, right? Because it's a civilization that grew out of conquest. I mean, Sharia law was codified by. conquerors, the DIMI regulations on minorities throughout the Middle East where, you know, a DIME can't ride a horse, a DIME has to build their house lower than a Muslim. All of these humiliating regulations were ways of encoding imperial dominance, and they're built

into the Islamic religious tradition, because religious tradition was not separate from the political structures of this empire. And so when you get to modernity and you get to an international order in a world of nation states based on human rights and liberal values, there's a kind of crisis as to how Islam fits into this world, right? And so I don't see it as Islam is evil. I see it as Islam is in a crisis. It has these internal problems of how to evolve, how to reform itself, how to maintain their identity as Muslims, which is valuable, while also fitting into this order of human rights and liberal values. And it's the same problem that I was just saying that Israel has. How does anti-Zionism fit into that? So I think anti-Zionism partially fits into that by being

this scapegoat mechanism where Israel is really blamed for the problems of Islamic civilization, for the difficulties of Islam to fit into the modern world. And for all the sectarian and ethnic complex that exist in the Middle East, they're all the result of the evil Zionists of the little Satan is Israel and the great Satan is the U.S., but actually the little Satan is controlling the U.S. because, of course, Al-Qaeda believed that the U.S. was being controlled by Jews from the World Trade Center. And radical anti-Jewish ideology has motivated Al Qaeda and ISIS, et cetera, because they all share this concept that Israel and the occupation of the Holy Land is the great problem.

So I think Muslims or Islamic civilization needs to move beyond anti-Zionism to succeed and to do something else than trying to restore a lost empire. Adam Lewis Klein, thank you so much for joining me. We're cutting it short here. You have to go. I have to go. But this is an hour's long discussion that we will continue in our next opportunity. Thank you for everything that you do and for helping us clarify these issues. for debating these issues. I really do think Jews entered this moment utterly confused.

Totally confused. They did not know these ideas in academia, these kind of luxury beliefs of weirdo academics talking about these coded words, these terms da art. They did not know that this was real and substantive. And the rubber would hit the road and it would do so in massive violence and it would do so in protests and would do so in hatred. And so thank you for helping to create a vocabulary about that moment, which is the beginning of being able to actually have agency and do what we need to do. Thank you, Haviv. Really enjoyed it.