A recently launched campaign is trying to popularise the slogan “antizionism is a hate movement”. Although the underlying idea is well-intentioned it represents an inadequate approach to the problem.

Of course it is true that anti-Zionists hate Israel and by extension any Jews who refuse to renounce it. But it goes much further than that. Reducing anti-Zionism to a hate movement underestimates its pernicious power.

The organisation promoting the “antizionism is a hate movement” slogan is the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ). It is led by Adam Louis-Klein, a PhD student in anthropology at McGill university in Canada. In the last few months he has apparently come out of nowhere to make a great impact on social media and beyond. 

The positive side of his campaign is that he has focused attention on anti-Zionism in its own right. The problem with it is not that the mask slips to reveal an underlying anti-Semitism. Even when it eschews old anti-Semitic tropes it is a reactionary movement.

Louis-Klein also rightly focuses on what he calls the “libels” of anti-Zionism. That is the drive by Israel’s enemies to accuse it of being a colonial settler state, genocidal and akin to the Nazis. Understanding and resisting these notions is an essential task.

Where Louis-Klein goes wrong is in reducing anti-Zionism to a hate movement. By doing so he implicitly makes it comparable to other type of hatred. From this perspective different forms of hatred are primarily distinguished by the identity of their victims.

But, as I have argued previously in relation to different forms of anti-Semitism, it represents far more than hatred. It is the flawed perception that Jews represent the supposed evils of the modern world. In the case of classical anti-Semitism, from the nineteenth century onwards, this often took the form of Jews supposedly personifying the evils of speculative capitalism. For the Nazis the Jews represented “Judeo-Bolshevism”: that is they allegedly embodied the combined malign forces of capitalism and communism. In the case of anti-Zionism it typically sees Israel as representing the supposed malign forces of western civilisation, that is where the “libels” come in.

Those who reduce anti-Zionism to a form of hate fail to see its broader symbolic character. That is anti-Zionists genuinely see Israel as embodying the evils of western modernity. They are profoundly wrong but this perception explains why they devote obsessive attention to what is essentially a small state in the Middle East. Objectively it leads to absurd double standards but subjectively, from the skewed anti-Zionist perspective, it makes perfect sense.

It is not that anti-Zionism and opposition to western civilisation run parallel. It is rather that Israel is seen as a key symbol of all that is wrong with the West. The two elements are intertwined with one another. 

Israel becomes a way for sections of the western elites to express a loathing of their own societies. They are in principle opposed to, or at least deeply cynical of the ideals of national sovereignty, modernity and progress. Israel then comes to be seen as the epitome of these values. It then follows, from this perverse premise, that genocide and racism are the inevitable outcomes.

This perception of Israel as embodying evil also explains why contemporary western radicals claim to identify with the Palestinians. It is not about actual Palestinians but about them being seen as the negation of Israel. If Israel is seen as a malevolent force then it is easy to draw the false conclusion that Palestinians represent virtue. This explains the chant of “we are all Palestinians” on anti-Israel demonstrations. It is not that such marchers are actually Palestinian but they are proclaiming their own supposed goodness.

It is high time that anti-Zionism is recognised as a baleful force in its own right. But it is far worse than a hate movement.