Wednesday, May 07, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion
We’re all aware of the most influential antisemitic book in modern history, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appearing in the early 1900s then adopted and disseminated by the A-Team of International Antisemites—Russia and the Soviet Union, the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and so on—this famous forgery purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting held by the “Elders of Zion” behind the scenes of the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Of course there are no such Elders and there was no such meeting, and large chunks of the text were directly plagiarized from an 1864 book sketching Machiavelli’s political philosophy, but those facts, though widely known from at least 1921 onward, didn’t stop the book from spreading around the world and directly inspiring Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution, Hamas’s jihadist Final Solution (they quote from the Protocols as if it were factual in their foundational charter), and the long, ongoing campaign of Russian-Soviet anti-Zionism. And what about this book inspires such deadly behavior? It’s that it reveals to the world the great conspiracy of the dastardly Jews plotting to control the world and subjugate or destroy all the non-Jews, explaining in detail exactly how they will do that (by controlling the banks, the media, governments, starting wars, etc.). When faced with that dastardly evil-doing, who wouldn’t respond by attempting to annihilate the threat?
Of course it’s all delusional nonsense, demonstrably false nonsense, which is why all rational, clear-headed, decent people recognize in the Protocols not the documentation of a conspiracy but what is pejoratively referred to as a conspiracy theory—one deliberately designed to justify and incentivize hate and violence against the Jews.
The irony, of course, is that all the attention paid to the Protocols—believed by tens of millions, to this very day, to be factual—obscures the increasingly apparent fact that there actually does exist a global conspiracy, a literal conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, albeit in precisely the opposite direction. Sometimes working together, sometimes working in parallel, sometimes centrally directed, sometimes dispersed, sometimes secretly, sometimes very much in the open, collectively there is an enormous body of individuals, organizations, and governments who have all been working toward the same inglorious end for well over a century now.
It’s not that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate or eliminate the peoples of the world. It’s that the peoples of the world (or at least enormously large constituents thereof) are actively conspiring to subjugate and (in all too many cases) to outright eliminate the Jews.
Let’s examine their protocols.
1.
Though the underlying Jew-hatred goes back millenia, ground zero for this modern conspiracy is of course pre-Soviet Russia itself, whose rampant, pervasive, and often violent antisemitism produced the original conspiracy-theory Protocols in the first place, and in so doing launched the actual conspiracy against the Jews. We might call the mysterious unknown forgers of the Protocols the original Elders of Anti-Zion.
The degree to which the Protocols then influenced Hitler and the Nazis is well known. But Hannah Arendt suggests that the Protocols didn’t merely instill in them their genocidal hatred of the Jews for their alleged plot to subjugate the world, but in fact directly inspired them to launch their own plot to subjugate the world. She quotes Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels saying, “The nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world,” then adds her conclusion: “The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination.” She continues: “This was what [head of the Nazi SS] Himmler had in mind when he stated that ‘we owe the art of government to the Jews,’ namely, to the Protocols which ‘the Führer [had] learned by heart’.” See the neat Nazi trick here: accuse the Jews of conspiring to world domination, which then justifies, in “self-defense,” your attempts both to destroy the Jews and to dominate the world yourself. The entire Nazi machinery, then, from its massive propaganda operations through its killing fields and camps, was one large conspiracy to subjugate and eliminate the Jews.
Nor may we overlook the central role played in this conspiracy by the scholars, the intellectuals, the professors, the ones producing the ideas and arguments that motivate the leaders and then become the propaganda that mobilizes the masses. Whether scholarship can ever be “purely objective” is a question for another time, but not relevant to the fact that “scholarship” can be intentionally weaponized to advance one’s political aims or, more modestly, can become corrupted by one’s ideological commitments. That’s a fancy way of remarking that Nazi “scholarship” was directly and deliberately involved in advancing the conspiracy against the Jews. Perhaps nothing better documents that fact than Max Weinreich’s 1946 book Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People. Among the many shocking things documented in this book is the establishment of numerous “scholarly institutes” across varied disciplines to study the “Jewish question,” i.e. to develop the “science” to justify, ultimately, the political program of mass extermination. Suffice merely to quote Hannah Arendt, again, in her review of the book: “Dr. Weinreich's main thesis is that ‘German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter,’” ideas which included, of course, the “race science” that justified the alleged Aryan supremacy and Jewish degeneracy that in turn justify the Holocaust. Arendt then goes on to say, “It is also true, and Dr. Weinreich is right to insist thereon, that Hitler showed one of his crucial insights into the nature of modern propaganda when he asked for ‘scientific’ arguments and refused to use the standard crack-pot ones of traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.” The scare quotes around the word “scientific” are the key: it’s easy for decent people to reject obvious crude raw hatred, but dress it up in “science” and it goes down far more easily.
So what we have here, then, are the professors providing the intellectual ammunition in the conspiracy against the Jews.
Collectively, a large new cohort here of the Elders of Anti-Zion.
2.
Nor was it only the Nazis (and large swaths of the German population), of course: most of the countries they captured were soon coopted, sometimes involuntarily but often enough willingly, to participate in the conspiracy. Once again, Weinreich documents numerous “scholarly institutes” set up in conquered and adjacent countries as their intellectuals moved to get in on the action against the Jews.
Nor did the conspiracy spread only to the countries captured by the Nazis. Famously the Palestinian religious and national leader, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin collaborating with the Nazis. Photographs of him enjoying a visit with Hitler and visiting concentration camps with Himmler populate the internet, these scenes being breaks perhaps from his job, which included spreading Nazi ideology to the Arab and Muslim world through Arabic language propaganda and recruiting Muslims to participate in the Nazi military campaign. Though the long independent history of Islamic antisemitism prior to the twentieth century cannot be overlooked, neither can one overlook the explosive fuel added to that already burning fire when Nazi ideology was poured onto it. From this point onward much of the Arab and Muslim world was officially part of the now truly global conspiracy against the Jews launched by the Protocols.
The Nazis, fortunately, did not endure, though they bequeathed many followers even to this day. But next taking the reins (or taking them back) were the Soviets, who, though opposed to much of the Nazi ideology and bitter enemies of the Nazis themselves, unfortunately shared the relevant ideology that they themselves had launched some decades earlier—and then literally shared it, around the globe.
3.
Here the work of Izabella Tabarovsky is essential. In a series of articles—including “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” (2019), “The Cult of Antizionism” (2023), and “Zombie Anti-Zionism” (2024)—she meticulously documents the gargantuan ceaseless effort the Soviet Union made to attack the Jews particularly by delegitimizing the newly born State of Israel. Lest you think this was merely “anti-Zionism,” not “antisemitism,” the effort itself (she explains) was rooted in the Protocols, and some of the original Soviet propagandists were “admirers of Hitler and Nazism and used Mein Kampf as … a source of ‘information’ about Zionism” (2019). Indeed, as has been argued at length elsewhere, “anti-Zionism” derives for many directly from their antisemitism. If you start with the antisemitic delusion that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate the globe, then “anti-Zionism” follows immediately, both logically and psychologically: the State of Israel will just be for you the diabolical mechanism through which the Jews advance their diabolical scheme. Thus with the Soviets began another organized campaign, a veritable industry—a conspiracy—which in time produced “hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles,” published in the USSR, with “millions of copies entering circulation in the country” (2019).
But the campaign wasn’t restricted to the already vast-in-itself USSR. “Many were translated into foreign languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others,” in order to be disseminated all over the globe through the Soviet Union’s powerful state-owned media apparatus, “whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents’” (2019). This “truth” was thereby spread in particular to the many Third World nations that were becoming “decolonized,” many of which were in the Soviet orbit. (For more on this, see Tabarovsky’s discussion of the enormous number of international conferences the Soviets organized to inculcate the ideology and advance the conspiracy to these many countries (2024).)
And the translation into Arabic, in particular? The Soviet Union, closely allied with the Arab countries for many decades, widely propagated its conspiracy all over the Arab world as well. But in this case it involved quite a bit more than just the translation and dissemination of virulently antisemitic, anti-Zionist tracts, important as those were.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the Soviet bloc, offered some striking revelations in a 2003 Wall Street Journal article and subsequent interview. According to him, it was the infamous Soviet spy service, the KGB, that “dreamed up” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), including hand-picking and training Yasser Arafat, its most important leader, a task in the service of which “the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” Through their training of Arafat they gave him “an ideology and an image … remold[ing] him as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him--the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz … and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews.” The KGB continued to finance and to guide the PLO over many years in its violent campaign against the Jews—in addition, of course, to being the primarily military backer of the Arab countries engaged in their ongoing war on Israel. In a 2006 article, Pacepa states:
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel ... As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me … We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel … According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Mission accomplished, one can only say. And naturally a key role in accomplishing that mission was played by everybody’s favorite antisemitic forgery:
In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service … to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our ‘sphere of influence.’ Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for … Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my [service] had dispatched around 500 undercover agents to Islamic countries … [B]y 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world. In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion …
And lest you think this Soviet-driven conspiracy against the Jews is somehow all in the past, consider current President of the Palestinian Authority (itself an outgrowth of the PLO), Mahmoud Abbas, currently serving the 20th year of his four-year term. In 2016 the New York Times reported that Abbas had served as a KGB spy in Damascus in the early 1980s. This was entirely plausible given that he had earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. degree in 1982 in Moscow, with a dissertation that both cast doubt on the Holocaust and, in one of an uncountable number of common anti-Zionist talking points, attempted to prove that Zionists were closely affiliated with the Nazis. If you are wondering where he got these antisemitic ideas, Tabarovsky describes the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, which awarded him his degree, as “the linchpin of Soviet ‘Zionology’” (2023), the latter word in square quotes to indicate that the enormous slew of “scholars” producing the onslaught of antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda saw themselves as engaged in a “scientific” endeavor.
Just as “Hitler’s professors” had produced antisemitic “science” then disseminated it wherever they conquered and into the Arab and Muslim world, so too the Soviet “scientists” (call them “Brezhnev’s professors”) did exactly the same—with the Soviets going even further to establish the PLO, “educate” and train its leaders, and finance and guide its virulent anti-Jewish activities (including terrorism) for decades. Needless to say, their quest to fuse the long history of intense Islamic antisemitism in those regions—itself perhaps characterizable as a centuries-long systematic effort (i.e., a conspiracy) to subjugate the Jews—with the more modern Protocols-conspiracy antisemitism was enormously successful, thus producing the intense Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred, with its concomitant desire to subjugate and eliminate the Jews, we see today.
Needless to say, too, with the Soviet campaign above the Elders of Anti-Zion grew in number dramatically.
Two items of particular note concerning the campaign.
First, it was carefully and intentionally crafted. The goal was to delegitimize Zionism, the Jewish national endeavor, so deliberate efforts were made to link that endeavor to and identify it with Nazism (as Abbas did above), to identify it with all manner of terrible things (racism, fascism, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, etc.), and accuse it of assorted horrible crimes (such as genocide and later apartheid). In service to that end it clearly shared the relaxed attitude toward “truth” of the Protocols, meaning that “truth” was pretty much optional. Particular impetus to the effort was given by Israel’s stunning victory over the Soviet-backed Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War, which promptly motivated the Soviets to shift their emphasis from the military war against the Jews and their national endeavor toward advancing the “cognitive war” instead. This they did as guided by their “scientists,” the “Zionologists,” by going all in with their newly created “Palestinian” identity led by their newly created PLO. The plan now became to reframe or reconceive the entire conflict in the region. Prior to 1967 much of the world understood it as a conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the minority Jews struggling against the more powerful majority Arabs, the Jews a David v. the Arabs’ Goliath. But after 1967 the Soviets began stressing the same propaganda terms with which they had been framing their more general battle against the West. During much of the Cold War and the period of global decolonization they proclaimed themselves to be “anti-colonialists” supporting “national liberation movements” against the “imperialist” West, and so now the Middle East conflict was deliberately reframed as one in which the indigenous (newly invented) “Palestinian people” were fighting off the “imperialist-colonialism” of the invading Jews. Overnight the “Jewish-Arab” conflict became the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, where the Israelis looked big and strong and the Palestinians puny and weak, thus instantly reversing the “David-Goliath” framing. Some go so far as to say that the very “Palestinian” identity was formed or crafted in this period precisely to play this role, with the Soviets, via their work with the PLO and Arafat, being the central agent.
The whole thing was a psy-op, in other words—an extremely successful one that, to this day (as we’ll see shortly), brings the political left across the globe into the global conspiracy against the Jews.
The second point is once again to emphasize the role of propaganda—in particular, as produced by the “intellectuals,” the “scientists,” the “professors”—in developing and advancing this conspiracy. In addition to the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies Tabarovsky also discusses the “KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public” (2019), itself producing the literature then translated into other languages and distributed abroad by the Novosti Press Agency, “a news service and an important arm of Soviet foreign propaganda.” But now to get a more “vivid picture of Moscow’s approach to solving its Zionist problem” we can glimpse at just one example of the many that Tabarovsky (2019) examines, an article from 1969 or 1970 entitled “Anatomy of Israeli Aggression.” Written by Yevgeny Yevseyev, “one of the key ideologues of … Soviet anti-Zionism—the so-called Zionologists,” the article reports on yet another Soviet conference, the “Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples” occurring in Cairo in 1969. Protocols-style, the article frames Zionism as part of an imperialist global conspiracy against the national liberation movement and communism, affiliated with and a continuation of Nazism, and inevitably engaged in “genocide, racism, perfidy, duplicity, aggression, annexation,” and therefore, in essence, an enemy of most of the globe. The goal was thus to mobilize “world public opinion” by disseminating information about alleged “Israeli atrocities.” If all that sounds familiar it is because you are aware how the anti-Zionist progressive world approaches Israel to this very day, only it was all hatched quite deliberately over the past five decades. What we see in this article is literally a sketch of the playbook—the protocols—of the campaign to destroy the Jews and their national endeavor. And just as we saw with the Nazis, the campaign against the Jews would borrow many of the methods allegedly laid out by the Jews themselves in the fabricated Protocols—while being motivated by (falsely) accusing the Jews of being guilty of them!
And lest you underestimate the true scale of this campaign against the Jews, note that this article was published in the “World Marxist Review—the English edition of the Prague-based Soviet theoretical journal Problems of Peace and Socialism. Published in 40 languages and distributed in 145 countries, the journal reached an estimated half million of the most committed leftists around the globe” (2019).
Another way to think about the scale of this: at its peak the Soviet Union was more than 1000 times bigger than the State of Israel, with nearly 100 times its population in 1967 (a particularly salient year in the anti-Zionist conspiracy). If it were just the Soviet Union v. Israel it already would be an enormous Goliath against a tiny David. But it wasn’t just the Soviet Union—it was the Soviet Union, the entire Arab and Muslim worlds, and most of the Third World. We have nothing less than an actual mammoth global campaign to subjugate the Jews and destroy their national endeavor, all based on the fabricated (and delusional) allegation of that tiny population’s conspiracy to subjugate the behemoth instead.
4.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Western leftists, the “progressives.”
As Tabarovsky puts it, “It was at the Soviet-sponsored conferences that the Western left got to rub shoulders with its Third World revolutionary heroes. It was here that Moscow worked to inculcate its brand of conspiracist anti-Zionism by tying it to every progressive cause of the time” (2024).
Space limits prohibit looking at the “continuous flow of international events increasingly entrench[ing] the idea of Zionism as the enemy of all progressive causes across the Third World” (2024) that consumed the 1970s and 1980s. Nor can we look at the extensive similar data presented in Tabarovsky’s 2022 article, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse.” Instead we’ll jump ahead into the present to see that the conspiracy against the Jews—whose playbook was hatched in the Protocols, advanced by the Nazis, then launched across the globe by the Soviets—continues without skipping a beat to this very day, primarily under the umbrella of leftist “progressivism.”
I’ll briefly examine several aspects of it, starting with some of its methods.
(1) “Idea-laundering”
This practice seems to me alarmingly prevalent in the leftist-dominated world of the humanities and social sciences, as well as in what we might call the “NGO-UN circular echo chamber,” most of which is today quite ill-disposed toward the Jews and their national endeavor. Peter Boghossian, citing Bret Weinstein, uses the term “idea laundering” for it; the anonymous blogger (aptly) going by “Elder of Ziyon” has also written about it, for example here and here. As Elder sums it up, it’s the process by which “academia pretty much makes things up while pretending that they are following some sort of scientific method”:
One person will make up a theory, and unlike scientific theories, it requires no proof or corroboration. It just needs to appeal to the target audience—of other people in social sciences. Then, that paper will become one of the sources for many other papers that take the unproven theory as fact, and then extend it into la-la land. The cycle repeats … People need to realize: Social science isn’t science. Citations aren’t proof.
Boghossian gives a similar sketch:
It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something … Second, academics who share these sentiments start a peer-reviewed periodical … They organize [it] like every other academic journal, with a board of directors, a codified submission process, special editions with guest editors, a pool of credentialed “experts” to vet submissions, and so on. The journal’s founders, allies and collaborators then publish articles in … their journal. Soon, other academics with similar beliefs submit papers, which are accepted or rejected. Ideas and moral impulses go in, knowledge comes out. Voilà!
Eventually, after activist scholars petition university libraries to carry the journal, making it financially viable for a large publisher like Taylor & Francis, [the journal] becomes established. Before long, there’s an extensive canon of academic work—ideas, prejudice, opinion and moral impulses—that has been laundered into “knowledge.”
Boghossian uses an example from “woke” scholarship, while Elder uses this example from anti-Zionist “scholarship”:
Someone makes up a concept like "settler colonialism" and within years it is a recognized field of study, where opinion is presented as fact and previous papers are treated as legitimate no matter how sloppy they are, as long as they agree with what the current author "feels" must be true. Ideas like "Israel is an apartheid state" or "Zionism is racism" or "violent resistance is legitimate" or "Israel engages in pinkwashing" are accepted as not only true, but proven, because of previous papers by Israel haters. Then the more adventurous academics try to extend this house of cards into new areas—if Zionism is racism, then maybe it is sexism, too! Can I define "Israeli apartheid" as a form of genocide?
It's hard not to think of the Nazi “scientists” and Soviet “Zionologists” doing exactly this in their “scientific” campaign against the Jews.
But of course it’s not just academia. I mentioned the UN above, so for another timely example, consider the case of Francesca Albanese, the current (and eighth!) “UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine.” First, if the United Nations’ appointing a permanent Inquisitor charged with endlessly finding crimes of which to accuse Israel is not part of a global conspiracy against the Jews, it’s hard to imagine what would be. But more to the point, let’s examine how “idea laundering” has worked with respect to the allegation of “genocide,” quoting from Norman Goda’s recent paper, “The Genocide Libel”:
In July 2024 Francesca Albanese claimed on Twitter that the Israelis had killed not 37,000 people in Gaza, the already-inflated number from the Gaza Ministry of Health, but rather 186,000. The figure came from phantom arithmetic in a letter published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which claimed to predict the discovery of additional deaths at a four-to-one ratio. Albanese’s post was seen over 607,000 times. The 186,000 number was soon trumpeted by Aljazeera, The Guardian, The Nation, Middle East Eye, Democracy Now! and other such outlets. Inter Press Service (which covers the UN) called it a “staggering” estimate, which “has resurrected accusations of genocide,” as it had come from “one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journals.”
Never mind that the original letter was immediately widely denounced as non-credible by many with expertise in the matter; that didn’t stop it from being cited relentlessly in anti-Zionist circles and appearing in countless student anti-Israel resolutions. Never mind that the allegation appeared in a non-peer-reviewed “letter” to the journal; that didn’t stop others from sourcing it to the “prestigious peer-reviewed” journal. Nor has the fact that, during the current extended ceasefire (as of March 2025), its prediction of thousands of people “indirectly” killed or missing buried in the rubble has turned out to be wildly inaccurate, triggered any retractions either. That number was literally made up, invented, dressed up in pseudoscientific reasoning, then echoed around the world to the point, where by December 2024, anti-Israel NGO Amnesty International is publishing a 300-page report subtitled “Israel’s Genocide Against the Palestinians in Gaza” citing that number. You can be sure that the UN and international legal bodies will not be far behind.
In short: an accusation is alleged or invented, then papers are written all citing each other making the accusation which makes it all sound legitimate, and then these papers make their way into some NGO reports affirming the accusation by citing those papers, and then they make their way into UN reports by citing the NGO reports, and then they turn into international lawfare by being cited in accusations before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. These accusations then get cited as the basis for further articles making the allegations and in various boycott resolutions and so on. Ultimately the examples—all directly echoing the allegations in the Soviet orchestrated campaign, not coincidentally—include all the usual allegations such as Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, genocide, etc.
It's all just literally following the playbook.
Such campaigns may not be centrally directed, the way the Soviet campaigns, proceeding by the same processes, may have been, but the effect is a same: an entire international network of “scholars” producing this “scholarship,” i.e. “laundering ideas” to make them seem “scholarly” or “scientific,” are de facto working together—in other words, a global conspiracy—to delegitimize the Jews and their national endeavor.
(2) Big Lies, and “genocide”
Though all antisemites from right to left use the “Big Lie,” its use by leftist progressives, alleging to be the “community of the good” and committed to “justice”—which you might think involves a commitment to truth—is especially pernicious. The phrase, “the Big Lie,” derives from the Nazi propaganda playbook, referring to a strategy of telling lies so enormous and telling them repeatedly that large numbers of people come to believe them, not least because they think that no one would say such brazenly false things so they must be true. Andrew Pessin has dealt in detail elsewhere with a large set of the familiar “Big Lies” told against Israel: “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” etc.
But it’s worth a moment here to say something just about the particularly monstrous charge of “genocide.” In fact enormous swaths of the world have been attempting to find Jews guilty of desiring and/or attempting genocide from at least the Protocols onward, and particularly since the modern term “genocide” was coined by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Here let me merely refer you to Goda’s article again, “The Genocide Libel,” to take you through the literally relentless (and often astonishingly contorted) efforts to charge the Jews with genocide, from 1944 to this day. It would not be unfair to summarize these efforts as follows: “If the Jews do action x, then x constitutes ‘genocide,’” with x varying from allegation to allegation and in no cases involving anything resembling actual “genocide.” Needless to say, x also includes such actions as defending themselves from the genocidal attacks of their neighbors. Again, the whole thing reads like a playbook. In the minds of the conspirators the Jews have been found guilty of the heinous crime in advance; endless legal and rhetorical maneuvers are then employed to make the charge fit something the Jews have actually done. Given the international nature and scope of the campaign, not to mention its longevity, this is again a true global conspiracy against the Jews.
(3) More lies, double standards, and weaponized omission
Next consider some other rhetorical techniques—like idea laundering—that are so omnipresent, or systemic, in the progressive anti-Zionist literature that it cannot be an accident.
The most fundamental way to promulgate the evil of the Jews and their national enterprise is simply to erase all context from their actions, for example completely omit the various Arab actions to which Jewish actions are typically a response. Imagine you were describing a war but you completely left out one of the battling armies, in particular the army that actually started the war, and instead described only the other army, the responding army: it would sound like that latter army was just waltzing in to places, shooting indiscriminately and blowing everything up. So described, the actual aggressor is exculpated of all responsibility (they’re not even there!), and the side defending itself is transformed into the aggressor; indeed its actions suddenly look a lot like disproportionate and reckless killing, ethnic cleansing, genocide etc. Ilan Pappé, one of the most disreputable “scholars” of anti-Zionism of whom I’m aware, proceeds exactly this way in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. In his account the Israelis—the Jews—are shooting at everything in sight, and you’d essentially have no idea an actual two-way war was going on and there was a reason for the shooting—namely, that they were defending themselves from the invading armies that were shooting at them, that had, incidentally, started the war in the first place!
It's also worth a look at another entirely representative example. In a 2023 article, Shany Mor dissects the work of the UN Human Rights Council’s “Commission of Inquiry,” established in 2021 again (like “Special Rapporteur” Albanese) to find Israel guilty of any and every possible crime they can imagine and make stick. A whole book could be written just about this commission as yet another tentacle of the global conspiracy against the Jews—literally just one of dozens of different ways the UN establishes structures that will find the Jews and their national enterprise guilty.
But we’ll be brief.
The Commission operates under two mandates. The first is to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. Not only will it naturally focus only on Israel and utterly ignore any such violations by the Palestinians, but, as Mor notes, in its work
“Laws” are created for the Israeli context which apply to Israel alone. Gaza is occupied territory somehow, despite there being no Israeli soldiers or civilians in the territory since 2005. Palestine is a “state” though no legal definition of statehood could possibly apply to either the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or the Hamas regime in Gaza … The Green Line separating Israeli and Jordanian forces at the end of the 1948 war is treated as an international boundary (though not with Jordan) despite the fact the UN-brokered armistice agreement explicitly stipulates that it is no such thing. Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, which even the UN’s own Palmer commission found is perfectly legal in the laws of war, is repeatedly referred to as a form of “collective punishment.”
That illustrates two additional widespread anti-Zionist techniques: inventing things (smaller lies, perhaps) and applying double standards. But here let’s focus on the second mandate, which is to identify “underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability, and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.” All the blame will of course be placed on Israel and none on the Arabs or Palestinians, not least because everything the latter ever do will be entirely ignored. As Mor puts it, there are unstated “ground rules” for the discussion:
The Arab war against the Jewish state will not be mentioned, nor will the comprehensive Arab ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities throughout the Middle East. There may be some anodyne mentions of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, always coupled with references to Israeli military action, but there will be no assessment of the larger cause for which that violence was undertaken. And there will definitely be no mention of repeated peace offers including an independent Palestinian Arab state that were violently rejected because they involved a full reconciliation with the existence of a Jewish state next door.
Once you are aware of this technique in particular—the omission of the Palestinians and Arabs, the disappearance of all agency and accountability on their behalf, the invisibility of Israeli efforts to find peace—you will find it nearly everywhere in the anti-Zionist literature. I’m not alleging central planning, here, but it is undeniably systemic, and it does mean that the global campaign against Israel, like the Commission of Inquiry itself, is not in fact (as Mor puts it) an “inquiry” but an “inquisition”: it is a show trial with its conclusion established in advance, invoking numerous ubiquitous tricks, including the omission of the Palestinians and Arabs, to guarantee arrival at the predetermined conclusion.
A systemic campaign against the Jews.
(4) Progressive ideology
We turn from some common techniques of the progressive left to the ideology itself.
Consider the conception of the Jew that they have been developing under a number of names for their ideology: Critical Race Theory, DEI, Social Justice, Wokeness, etc. (for simplicity we’ll just call it all “progressivism”). As Pamela Paresky notes in her 2021 essay, “Critical Race Theory and the Hyper-White Jew,” “CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privileged, and hidden power—themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.” Their official primary target is “Whiteness,” including White Supremacy, White Privilege, etc. But next thing you know Jews are accused of passing for White and acquiring or exploiting that supremacy and privilege, notwithstanding the fact that actual White Supremacists revile the Jews for not being White and in the case of the Nazis actually genocided them for that. Similarly, the fact that Jews are, on average, “successful,” ends up working against them on the progressive worldview. Never mind that many Jews are not particularly successful; never mind that Jews had to overcome enormous prejudice to earn what success they have earned in the US and the West in general. Rather than see the fact that Jews are “disproportionately” represented in various fields as a reflection of that success, of literally overcoming oppression, that disproportion instead is labeled “inequity,” which, through the progressive lens, is interpreted as a matter of unearned privilege, of the Jews operating as an oppressor class that in fact has kept more marginalized people down. (Never mind that Jews have also disproportionately dedicated themselves to helping marginalized people!) In effect, on their view, Jews are colluding with White Supremacy in order to obtain and perpetuate their higher status, much to the detriment of the various marginalized identity groups (women, persons of color, LGBTQ, the disabled, etc); Jews, in other words, are responsible for oppressing nearly everybody. The more “successful” Jews are, the more evil they turn out to be. The Protocols couldn’t describe it any better. (Never mind, too, Jews’ impressive record of “giving back” when they are successful, contributing to society in all sorts of ways, philanthropy, standing up for others’ rights, etc.)
Paresky doesn’t specifically address the Israel aspect, beyond observing that the cognitive warriors of the progressive left “use the latent antisemitic themes of CRT to propagate a false narrative about Israel.” But the application of this ideology to what I prefer to call the “Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict” (or IPJAMIC, because it’s at least as complicated as that acronym and in fact far more) is quite straightforward. Notwithstanding the utter divorce from actual facts, Israelis are seen as White Supremacist oppressors of the Palestinians, who are seen as marginalized oppressed people of color. Because group identity entirely trumps individual identity, it amounts, roughly, to asserting that every single Israeli is a White Supremacist (even the dark-skinned ones) oppressing every single Palestinian, who are all persons of color (even the fair-skinned ones). With that group identity trumping individual, and with the (false) narrative that the Jews have been engaging in an ethnic-cleansing, genocidal, subjugation campaign against the Palestinians, then every single Palestinian (even ones who might in fact be doing quite well in life) is justified in “resisting” every single Israeli (even ones who might in fact be doing quite poorly). With that group identity reigning supreme no Israeli can ever be a victim, and no Palestinian can ever be an aggressor or perpetrator—even when Palestinians invade Israel, torture, rape, dismember, behead, and massacre nearly 1200 mostly Jewish civilians and snatch another 250 away as hostages. That’s not a barbaric mass terrorist atrocity on the progressive worldview, but a national liberation movement of the oppressed against their oppressors.
Never mind again the utter disconnect from factual reality in this narrative, and the fact that Zionism was and is a national liberation movement of an oppressed people par excellence that these very people should be celebrating. On the progressive worldview that now dominates campuses and so many of our meaning-making institutions (the academy, the media, the law, the corporate world, entertainment, etc.), Jews are not only White Supremacists colluding with other White Supremacists to oppress the non-White, but in fact even worse: since Jews are, on average, more “successful” than the norm, Jews are actually “uber-White” or “hyper-White,” the Whitest of the White—the worst of the worst, the most evil, conspiring to subjugate the globe.
There is ultimately, literally, no difference between the progressive worldview and that of the Protocols’: they both allege that the Jews are engaged in a conspiracy to subjugate the globe and eliminate other races and they use that as a basis to marginalize Jews and attack their national endeavor. In the real world, to the contrary, it is the progressive worldview that weaponizes this delusional conception, invented and propagated by its “scholars,” to perpetrate its own actually global conspiracy to subjugate and eliminate the Jews.
(5) “Systemic oppression”
Let’s examine one more key aspect of the progressive worldview. As Shaul Kelner explains in his 2024 essay, “Turning Critical Theory on Its Head,” that worldview is deeply influenced by the “Frankfurt School” of analysis also known as “critical theory,” which aimed to analyze the “structures of domination” built into society and ultimately resist or revise them. Critical theory is in fact the direct source for the very idea of “structural” or “systemic” oppression so widely alleged by the left. Indeed Kelner refers to this concept as now “standard fare” in graduate programs and academic journals.
Now no one familiar with Jewish history, both in the Christian West and in the Islamic world, could fail to apply the categories of “systemic oppression” to that beleaguered population. Both Christianity and Islam believed theirs was the right to rule, and even while they battled it out with each other they both subscribed to “supersessionist theologies vis-à-vis Judaism,” taking it for granted that Jews were, and were supposed to be, subordinate. Jews surely “should not wield power over Muslims and Christians,” and enormous legal, political, and social structures were established to enforce that. That is literally “systemic” and “structural” oppression staring us in the face.
This theoretical illegitimacy of Jewish power meant that, when Jews were able to succeed, something was deeply wrong, something was illegitimate: the Jews must be cheating, operating out of greed, controlling the banks, dual loyalty, not playing by the rules, in a word, engaged in a conspiracy to subjugate their legitimate masters. When the Protocols arrived in the early 20th century, and later in the Muslim world, it therefore found soil well fertilized by centuries of each religious tradition to receive its conspiracy-theory antisemitism.
Why is all this relevant? Because, by their own worldview, by their own alleged values, progressives should recoil from the historical reality above and side with the Jews, who are the absolute paradigm of historical victims of the very systemic oppression they claim they are devoted to overthrowing. Progressives should therefore throw themselves whole-heartedly behind Zionism, which, as the national liberation movement of these oppressed people, is itself quite literally the “critical theory” they adore as it would be applied to the Jews.
Instead, Kelner points out, we see very nearly the opposite. “Before our eyes,” he notes,
Columbia University deans responsible for creating inclusive communities text each other to mock Jewish students’ concerns about discrimination. Advocates of speech codes discover the virtues of free speech specifically for Arabic words and English phrases that get shouted even louder after Jewish students say they hear them as code for killing Jews. And when universities do try to discipline students who have harassed Jewish classmates, occupied buildings, and vandalized property, members of the faculty contest the penalties and call for amnesty.
Instead, in other words, the progressives are nearly universally committed to anti-Zionism. The conclusion is inescapable, says Kelner: that these phenomena are so widespread, on so many campuses, particularly since the October 7 massacre, indicates that they are not disconnected. “In my discipline [sociology],” he writes, “if researchers were to notice the same discriminatory patterns on so many different campuses and at so many different levels within each university system, their starting premise would be that the problem is systemic.”
So not only have Jews confronted a long history of systemic oppression, then, but in the progressive worldview now reigning dominant over many campuses, throughout the academy, and through many of our meaning-making institutions, that systemic oppression continues. As Kelner puts it, “Those parts of the academy that have most embraced critical theory have failed to critique the ways in which their own discourse participates in historically rooted, socially entrenched power dynamics that subordinate and marginalize Jews.” Interestingly, and not at all coincidentally, this ongoing systemic oppression of the Jews is based on exactly the same allegations that trace their way back through the Soviet antisemitic anti-Zionist campaign, back to the Nazis, and ultimately back to the Protocols. It is necessary to systemically oppress the Jews because the Jews themselves, in their nefarious behavior, are guilty of attempting to systemically oppress others.
The Protocols are alive and well, then, on our progressive campuses and in the progressive infosphere—and continue to justify the ongoing systemic oppression of the Jews.
(6) There simply is not space here to defend it, so I’ll just state it: The long-running campaign to boycott the Jews—dating back to the early 20th century, continuing through the Nazis and the Arab world but for the past two decades manifesting itself most prominently in the largely leftist-driven international “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement, is yet another manifestation of the conspiracy.
There is also not space here to discuss the enormous role of the United Nations in the conspiracy, other than to suggest that, when the Elders of Anti-Zion get together for their annual strategy meeting, it would most likely occur in one of the back rooms—nay, they are so numerous now it would likely occur in the General Assembly Hall—of the United Nations.
(7) Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
There were Hitler’s professors, there were Brezhnev’s professors, and we close with Hamas’s professors.
We now return eerily full circle. As Tabarovsky puts it in 2023’s “The Cult of ‘Antizionism’”—published just three weeks before the October 7 massacre—“A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of ‘scientific antizionism’ on American campuses. The ‘founding collective’ of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which aims ‘to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies’ and ‘to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.’” Indeed, the professors are back—not that they ever left.
There is so much that is objectionable about this Institute that a separate article (in addition to Tabarovsky’s detailed critique) would be required to deal with it. Let me just note here that, beneath the guise of a “respectable” academic enterprise, and no doubt protected under the umbrella of “academic freedom”—which as Kelner notes seems readily invoked when people are saying terrible things about Jews, but readily restricted whenever something is alleged to be “hate speech” or a “microaggression” against any other minority—the ICSZ will be a propaganda machine churning out “research” saying exactly the same things about, making the very same allegations (conspiratorial globe domination, colonialism, genocide, etc.) toward the Jews, as the Nazi “scholars” and Soviet Zionologists said and did decades earlier. This “research” will not only influence generations of students going through their classes but also flood the academy, serve as the citational basis for further “research,” then make its inevitable way into NGO reports, the UN, and international lawfare. It also trickles downward, as they prepare curricula for secondary and primary schools. The ICSZ has already had its first conference, has already produced a journal and podcasts, is already flooding social media with its wares. It is literally unfolding its “idea laundering,” per above, in real time.
And they don’t even hide it. Its website identifies the “points of unity” that they expect every member of their organization, and indeed every attendee at their conferences, to share, including that “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project.” Just like that, a basic fact, like the Earth is round or 2+3=5. Affirming that fact is the price of admission to their society, exactly the opposite strategy from any serious scholarly endeavor that aims at the “truth,” because the truth cannot be known in advance. Another “point of unity” is the proposition that “academic research is not politically or morally neutral.” Lots could be debated there, but they make it clear what they mean: “The Institute’s research aims to interrogate and intervene in racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces, among other harms.” In other words, they are not doing scholarly research but engaged in political activism. Like the “critical theory” that is their forebear, like Marx who is one of their ideological ancestors, their point is not to interpret the world but to change it. What they seek to change is the existence of the Jewish national endeavor, and with it the security and welfare of the Jewish people. Their scholarship, aimed at the end, will end up working “by any means necessary” to obtain that end—including fabrication, double standards, essential omissions etc. We’ve seen it all before, we have been seeing it since the Protocols first launched, and we are seeing it all again, in real time.
This is not scholarship—it is propaganda, designed to be disseminated through all the meaning-making institutions, and bring about the end of the Jewish national project and, with it, ultimately, the end of the Jewish people.
Like the Nazis, like the Soviets, the Western progressive movement has now aligned seamlessly with the long history of Islamic antisemitism in a large-scale, overall coordinated campaign, to subjugate and ultimately eliminate the Jews.
Needless to say, Hamas’s October 7 massacre for them is not a terrorist atrocity but an inspiration—and their scholarship will be filled with all the many theoretical ways of justifying it.
And there are so many of these people—they are all over the academy. Not only has the ICSZ formed, already produced conferences, workshops, and a journal, but in February 2025 Brown University academics held a conference on “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” which turned out to be, of course, an anti-Zionist hatefest where numerous speakers said many antisemitic things and where they already announced next year’s conference on a similar theme; Columbia had a similar conference called “Zionism and Its Critics” scheduled for March 2025; in April 2025 Princeton is hosting a two-day hatefest called “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Practice” which is billed as a follow-up to a University of Toronto conference of the same name this past November 2024; and Connecticut College has, as of April 2025, enjoyed a now thirteen-lecture (and counting!) Hate Series, because twelve lectures repeatedly alleging that Israel is evil, evil, evil (and therefore so are the Jews who support Israel) were apparently not enough to make their point. (Incidentally, as if on cue: many of the lectures openly found ways not merely of justifying the October 7 massacre but really praising it.)
Hamas’s professors indeed.
5.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion generated a cornucopia of conspiracy theory goodness, delusionally alleging a Jewish conspiracy to subjugate the globe and eliminate many of its peoples. That in turn led to mass violence, including genocide, against the Jews. Meanwhile for much of the past century, and reaching an absolute fever pitch in the past several decades, and boiling over into a literally violent frenzy in the past eighteen months, the Elders of Anti-Zion have been propagating an actual conspiracy to subjugate, and ultimately eliminate, the Jews.
These are their protocols.
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Andrew Pessin is author, most recently, of the new 2-volume book, Israel Breathes, World Condemns, documenting and analyzing how and why college campuses came to the point where they cheerfully celebrated the October 7 Hamas massacre: Vol 1, “The Trajectory,” Vol 2, “The Aftermath.” For more information about him and his work, visit www.andrewpessin.com.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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