New Study Explores How Antizionism Coincides With Antisemitism

The discourse over whether antizionism is antisemitic has reached an impasse.

One side argues that these are two sides of the same coin. Denying Israel’s legitimacy, demonizing its supporters, or applying standards to it that are not applied to any other country constitutes a modern form of antisemitism. Critics of that position respond that antizionism is a political viewpoint, and labeling it as antisemitic is to effectively silence legitimate criticism of Israel’s government or military actions. The argument then circles back to competing definitions, with neither side convincing the other.

I set out to examine this topic empirically, hypothesizing that antizionist attitudes might coincide with familiar markers of prejudice, including overlap with traditional Judeophobic antisemitism, hostility toward civilians, racialized moral judgments, and double standards. We now have evidence published in the journal Current Psychology which is consistent with all of those patterns, drawing on survey data from 3 volunteer samples totaling 2,256 (mostly college-educated and somewhat left-leaning) adult participants.

Building off previous work, my student and I measured two related but also distinct constructs, traditional Judeophobic antisemitism (including stereotypes about Jewish greed or conspiratorial power) and Antizionist antisemitism, which taps into delegitimization or demonization of Israel and its supporters, and the application of differential standards relative to other nations. This goes well beyond mere criticism of an Israeli government or policy. In all 3 samples we collected, a positive correlation emerged between these variables. This means that these two types of anti-Jewish attitudes overlapped considerably, although they were not completely interchangeable.

We also observed that antizionist sentiment was strongly associated with perceiving average Israelis (i.e., not IDF soldiers or politicians) as immoral (e.g., disgusting, untrustworthy, malevolent) and as oppressors. Left-wing political attitudes were also correlated with hostile attitudes toward average Israelis.

Interestingly, participants tended to view Israelis as whiter than Palestinians, regardless of how much they espoused antizionist viewpoints. And the more strongly participants perceived Israelis as white, the more they also viewed them as privileged and oppressive. But antizionist attitudes also played a role alongside ethnicity. Among those participants who scored high on antizionist sentiment, perceiving Israelis as white was associated with thinking of them as more immoral. Furthermore, among those participants with left-wing political attitudes, perceiving Israelis as whiter than Palestinians also correlated with greater support for Palestine over Israel and stronger antizionist sentiment.

These results suggest that viewing Middle Eastern peoples through a zero-sum, oppressor-versus-oppressed framework goes hand in hand with casting Israeli civilians in the role of “white oppressor” villains, and judging them in more dehumanizing terms.

The final part of our research examined double-standards. We were inspired by similar experimental studies by other researchers attempting to understand these dynamics. We randomly assigned participants to evaluate otherwise identical policy scenarios involving different target groups. One scenario asked whether Americans’ emotional ties to another country created a conflict of interest. Some participants read about Jewish Americans and Israel, while others read about Hispanic Americans and Mexico. Additional policy scenarios involved military service in foreign countries (Israel or Ukraine), academic boycotts (Israel or Russia), and national-identity laws (Israel, Jordan, or Denmark).

When these policy questions were framed as involving Jews and/or Israel, participants expressed harsher judgment if they also held antizionist attitudes. Importantly, our results revealed a pattern of double standards across many, but not all of the policy scenarios we used; some of them produced null effects. But when correlations did emerge between antizionist viewpoints and double standards, they always went in the same direction, which was consistently against the Jewish people.

Taken together, our data consistently show that the antizionist construct we measured repeatedly exhibited markers associated with other forms of group prejudice. This includes (1) a positive correlation with Judeophobic attitudes, (2) animosity toward Israeli civilians, (3) viewing Israelis more negatively as a function of their perceived ethnicity, and (4) anti-Jewish double-standards in policy scenarios.

This does not mean that antizionism and antisemitism are the exact same thing. Our findings are compatible with Adam Louis-Klein’s formulation of antizionism as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry that is psychologically distinct from traditional Judeophobic antisemitism. The discourse around how and whether antizionism “crosses the line into antisemitism” misses the point. Our research cannot deduce whether every antizionist belief is antisemitic. But it does show that the form of antizionist sentiment we measured consistently coincided with recognizable markers of anti-Jewish bias.

There is a practical lesson here as well, for all readers, regardless of their feelings toward Jews or Israel. When evaluating whether a political argument has become infused with prejudice, try imagining how you would react if the target was any other group of people, especially another minority group. Would a strong emotional attachment to another ancestral homeland also constitute disloyalty to one’s home country? Would it be morally correct to support an academic boycott of scholars in another country whose government takes actions you find reprehensible? If the answer to those questions changes when the target group changes, then the attitude is not clearly resting on a consistent principle or policy, and may instead rest on prejudice. This should prompt some serious reflection.

Instead of continuing an irreconcilable deliberation over whether antizionism is antisemitic, we could pivot to ask a more concrete and straightforward question: Does antizionism coincide with animosity toward average Israelis, ethnic-based prejudice, or unequal ethical standards? Whatever label one ultimately prefers for such a belief system, those patterns deserve to be confronted as a form of prejudice.

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