One of the most persistent errors in how antisemitism is discussed is the belief that it flows from ideology – that antisemitism is something generated by the Left, or the Right, or Islamism, depending on who is misbehaving at a given moment. History suggests something more unsettling.
Antisemitism is not only downstream of ideology. It is portable.
Across centuries, antisemitism has shown a remarkable ability to detach itself from one philosophical framework and reattach to another, reshaping its language while preserving its structure. It borrows the moral vocabulary of whatever movement it inhabits, presents itself as principled critique rather than inherited prejudice, and offers radicals a ready-made explanation for why the world is broken – and who is to blame.
Anti-Zionism has become one of antisemitism’s most effective modern vehicles precisely because it allowed ancient tropes to be rebranded as contemporary politics. What we are witnessing today, as right-wing antisemites increasingly adopt the language of left-wing and Arab anti-Zionism, is not a novelty. It is a recurrence.
And the history that produced it is far more entangled than our political categories allow.
For most of modern history, Zionism had nothing to do with left-wing antisemitism. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century leftist antisemitism was rooted in Enlightenment secularism, early socialist thought, and misdirected anti-capitalism. Jews were cast not as nationalists or colonizers, but as embodiments of abstraction, money, cosmopolitanism, and bourgeois exploitation – obstacles to the realization of a rational and egalitarian society.
Marx’s On the Jewish Question treated Judaism itself as a metaphor for capitalism. Proudhon and Bakunin were more explicit, describing Jews as parasitic, conspiratorial, and socially corrosive. This was what August Bebel famously called “the socialism of fools” – a critique of capitalism that replaced systemic analysis with scapegoating.
Zionism, when it appeared at all in left-wing discourse, was typically dismissed as a bourgeois distraction from class struggle. It was not yet the organizing metaphor it would later become.
European-style antisemitism begins circulating in the Arab East in the nineteenth century, carried by colonial penetration, missionary activity, and European education networks. One early and concrete marker is the Damascus Affair of 1840, a blood libel modeled on European Christian accusations and actively escalated by a French consul. This was not an Islamic inheritance; it was a European import.
In the Arab world, Zionism was greeted with alarm, and they needed a philosophical framework to fight it especially for Western audiences. Christian antisemitism found particular resonance in some Arab Christian milieus, where exposure to European religious polemics, nationalism, and racialized discourse was often earliest and most intense. Early Palestinian nationalist journalism in the 1910s and intellectual leadership included a significant Christian Arab component, long before the era of Islamist mass mobilization.
By the early twentieth century, a hybrid vocabulary already existed – one in which European antisemitic motifs could be localized, repurposed, and politicized.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini did not start Palestinian antisemitism but he ran with it. Initially he placed it in the context of Islamism, claiming that Jews planned to attack Muslim holy places and raising funds based on that fantasy. The Mufti's antisemitism and anti-Zionism clearly predate his formal alliance with Nazi Germany. Where they came from is not reducible to a single source: local elite rivalries, imported European tropes, religious mobilization, and the dynamics of mandatory politics all played roles.
What Nazism provided was not the creation of his antisemitism, but its acceleration, systematization, and internationalization. Fascist and Nazi ideology offered him a global explanatory framework, material resources, and a language of total struggle. His alliance with the Axis was opportunistic, ideological, and mutually reinforcing – but it built on pre-existing foundations.
This pattern – local antisemitic motifs fused with external ideological systems – repeats again and again.
The most consequential transformation came after the Holocaust.
In the West, overt antisemitism became morally radioactive. In the Soviet sphere, it was re-engineered. Stalin’s campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans,” followed by the Doctors’ Plot and the Slánský trials, performed a decisive maneuver: they translated classic antisemitic tropes – conspiracy, dual loyalty, elite domination – into the language of anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism.
Jews were no longer targeted as Jews, but as Zionists, Western agents, and subversive elites.
This framework was exported aggressively. Soviet propaganda recast Israel as a racist, colonial outpost of American empire, a narrative that spread through Eastern Europe, the Arab world, and Western leftist movements. Anti-Zionism became a way to say what could no longer be said openly.
The Western Left’s embrace of decolonial theory in the 1960s and 1970s created a powerful point of convergence.
Third-Worldism reframed global politics as a struggle between colonizer and colonized. After the Six-Day War, Israel was reclassified – often abruptly and without historical nuance – from post-genocide refuge to imperial aggressor. Arab nationalist narratives, Soviet anti-Zionism, and New Left ideology fused into a single moral grammar.
All the antisemitic and anti-Zionist tropes converged. Concepts such as settler-colonialism, indigeneity erasure, racialized power, and structural domination – developed in other contexts – were retrofitted to the Jewish case, often by erasing Jewish history altogether. Older antisemitic tropes survived the translation intact, rebranded as structural critique.
Within the Palestinian movement itself, ideological incoherence was not a weakness but a feature.
Secular Marxist groups like the PFLP and Islamist movements like Hamas routinely cooperate, coordinate attacks, and avoid mutual criticism. Yasser Arafat mastered the art of balancing Islamists and leftists under a single nationalist umbrella. Palestinian nationalism subordinated theology and ideology alike to the primacy of anti-Zionism.
This mattered far beyond the Middle East. It taught Western activists that Islamism was not an obstacle to leftist solidarity, but a legitimate partner in “resistance.” It normalized silence about illiberalism, Islamist antisemitism, and violence in the name of unity.
Today's antisemitism on the Right is different from previous, crude neo-Nazi forms. Contemporary right-wing antisemites have discovered that left-wing and Arab anti-Zionist rhetoric offers moral camouflage. Language about apartheid, genocide, settler-colonialism, and global elites allows them to recycle older claims about Jewish power while borrowing the credibility of human-rights discourse.
This is not accidental. David Duke openly praised left-wing critiques of the “Israel lobby” for giving his views respectability. Neo-Nazi outlets have long cited progressive anti-Zionist publications as evidentiary support. More recent figures have simply made the synthesis explicit. And the desire for solidarity trumps ideology - when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 in Israel proper, it characterized it as an attack on "settlements" and the Left immediately dropped any pretense of differentiating between Israel's pre-1967 borders and "occupation" to legitimize Hamas' position.
The ideological content barely matters anymore. Antisemitism adapts itself to whatever language will pass.
This is why the Left/Right binary fails so badly as an explanatory framework.
Antisemitism is not a consequence of ideological error so much as a reusable narrative technology – a way of personifying abstraction, assigning moral blame, and repurposing innate antisemitism as a moral position. It thrives wherever movements need an omnipotent villain who is both inside and outside the system.
Sometimes that villain is capitalist.
Sometimes colonial.
Sometimes globalist.
Sometimes Zionist.
The labels change. The structure does not.
The current moment feels novel because the alliances feel strange: “anti-woke” conservatives echoing decolonial slogans, white nationalists waving Palestinian flags, leftists defending the indefensible to preserve solidarity. But this is not a rupture. It is a recurrence.
Antisemitism has always been a shared underground passage between radical movements. When one entrance collapses, another opens.
The tragedy is not merely that Jews keep finding themselves at the center of other people’s moral dramas. It is that societies keep mistaking the costume for the cause – congratulating themselves for opposing the wrong version of an ancient hatred while unknowingly reproducing its logic in a new dialect.
History does not absolve either side. It indicts both – repeatedly.
And it leaves us with a sobering conclusion: antisemitism is never re-invented. It is translated.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Buy