“The Continuing Obligation to be Anti-Zionist,” by David Lloyd, is an original feature of Communis.
“Just as Nazism as a name for ‘barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all barbarisms’ outlived the collapse of the ‘thousand-year’ Reich from its own extremities, the ugly brand of Zionism will outlive the bankrupt, brutal, apartheid ‘eternal state’ of Israel, whose collapse seems doomed to follow from its self-inflicted delegitimation. The state that came to claim, if belatedly and cynically, its sacred right to exist from the suffering of the millions exterminated in Europe’s Holocaust can hardly hope to survive its brutal infliction of the same will to exterminate on the Palestinian people, in full view of the appalled gaze of the world.”
— David Lloyd
For about six months after October 7, 2023, a car would stop periodically in front of my home, for just the few seconds it took to yell “Your neighbor is an antisemite,” before speeding off down the hill. This sporadic and rather infantile pattern of harassment was trivial enough in the horrific context of Israel’s still unceasing genocidal war and the destruction that has been unfolding on our screens, endlessly communicated from a Gaza that continues, after more than two years of genocide, to sustain and resist the unleashed fury of the Zionist state. Most of our neighbors were supportive, ridiculed the accuser and tried to catch him in the act or photograph his license plate. But his hasty flight was all too quick, as if the accusation were a shameful act, like pissing on someone’s doorstep or dumping garbage over a neighbor’s wall.
It was only late in the day that I discovered that our fugitive harasser was a former colleague who could at any time have rung our doorbell and asked me to explain why I had written articles or given talks in solidarity with Palestinian liberation or helped to organize BDS resolutions in various academic associations. I have never made any secret of my commitment to the Palestinian cause and would have been all too happy to engage with him, even if he harbored the most ardent disagreement with my views and actions. But he preferred to remain anonymous and refused any possible dialog.
This was hardly surprising. The demand for dialog, always the watchword of Zionists on campuses so long as the Palestinian side of any possible dialog was scheduled for unabashed and anti-intellectual repression in advance, is not presented any more. Dialog and debate have shed too much light on the historical and contemporary crimes of Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime for Zionists to countenance them. The only condition under which dialog is now even contemplated is one in which the reality of Israel and its apartheid regime, genocidal project, and endless violations of international and humanitarian law must be denied and the plight of Palestinians under its regime rendered unmentionable. Wherever the simple facts of the Zionist regime are invoked in debate or in public speech or, as Saree Makdisi has observed, “when that which has been for so long denied is forced back into the view of the consciousness that has denied it, the reaction is sheer fury, rather than intelligent and articulate counterargument (of which there is such a paucity in contemporary American Zionism).”[1]
Petty a form of nuisance as our neighbor’s harassment was, it is nonetheless symptomatic of the ongoing collapse of Zionism’s once unchallenged legitimacy. It signals the loss of the unassailable self-evidence that Israel’s propaganda once enjoyed. The harassment was indeed petty, as so much of the settler mentality characteristically expresses itself in petty acts of meanness, bullying, and humiliation whose negation of the humanity of the colonized is the precursor to lethal violence and genocide. Witness the snickering Tik-Tok videos freely disseminated by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, as they loot and desecrate Palestinian homes, or the wanton acts of vandalism and viciousness promulgated with ever-increasing frequency by settlers on the West Bank. Over time, small-minded pettiness habituates the settler and the fascist to the closure of the mind and the numbing of the senses that prepare the capacity for genocidal acts carried out with routinized and brutalizing cruelty.
Likewise, even in its fleeting and embarrassed form, the agitated insult that was meant to defame and ostracize its target sheds light on the logic of the Zionist instrumentalization of accusations of antisemitism, which serves to bar the proponents of any form of Palestinian liberation, or even their simple claim to rights, as beyond the pale of civil discourse. As many have pointed out, this feckless and perilous manipulation of genuine antisemitism tends to devalue real instances of ‘Jew-hate’ that have flourished among the right-wing conspiracists and religious fanatics that Zionists now embrace as their most reliable allies—as, indeed, the movement long cultivated European antisemites, from Arthur Balfour to the Nazi regime, in order to realize their goal of colonizing Palestine.
But the instrumentalization of antisemitism, despite its fall-out for Jews everywhere, has proliferated since October 7. Its cynical and promiscuous invocation is more of a symptom than a tactic in Israel’s war on open society. It is a symptom of the increasingly evident fact that Israel has lost legitimacy, not on account of some insidious conspiracy of antisemitic fanatics, but by virtue of its own indefensible policies and practices and in consequence of its ever more unspeakable acts, all of which are the logical workings-out of Zionism as a political philosophy. From the start, Zionism sought to found a state that would be a Jewish state in a land already inhabited by an indigenous population, the vast majority of whom were not Jews. Among them, the minority of Arab Jews (an accurately descriptive term steadily expunged from Israeli terminology) had lived for centuries, not without conflict or the official discrimination that affected all non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but with a degree of harmony and integration unthinkable for the European Jews among whom Zionists sought to recruit their settlers. To establish such a state, as the early Zionists unabashedly avowed, required, as in past European settler colonies, the displacement or elimination of the indigenous inhabitants by all means necessary: by force and threat, by the manipulation of imperial laws, by purchases from conniving absentee landlords, all under the sheltering protection of the British colonial authority and its military power.
To do so, not casually but systematically, as an intrinsic element of the overall Zionist project with its exclusionary goals, demanded as its corollary the racial devaluation of the Palestinian people and, indeed, of Arabs in general, as backward, not yet civilized, incapable of democracy, as having failed to exploit the resources of the land by virtue of their backwardness. As Ghassan Khanafani recognized, “the Zionist cause could not justify its conquest of Palestine without leaning on the same justification of all other conquests throughout history—i.e., by citing physical, civilizational, mental and moral superiority… to justify uprooting an entire people from their land.”[2] Prior to their expulsion in the Nakba, Arabs had to undergo a process of “moral eviction” that Zygmunt Bauman showed to be the necessary prelude to the Nazi genocide of European Jews.[3] The myth of Israel turning the desert green is the projection of this quite typical settler disdain for the native that enables the assertion of their own moral and political supremacy. For all the supposed reverence for the “Holy Land,” Zionism’s extractivist logic reveals a no less disdainful and instrumental relation to the land and its resources, that has been almost as devastating to the fragile ecologies of the region as it has been to its indigenous inhabitants.
The establishment and maintenance of Israel as an apartheid state, in all of the areas that it controls and suppresses through a broad spectrum of carefully differentiated means, flows inexorably from the Zionist philosophy and its enterprise, a political project that cannot exist without the twin evils of ethnic supremacism and apartheid. These are not the aberrant contingencies of an otherwise liberal polity or the deviant excesses of a minority of settler extremists. They are the essence of Zionism as a political philosophy spawned in the racialist crucible of nineteenth-century colonial Europe.
At the very core of Israel’s existential raison d’état lies the continual displacement of Palestinians, from the massive expulsion of 750,000 or more in the inaugural Nakba of 1948 to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is the unconscionable culmination of the massacres of Deir Yassin and Tantura, aimed at terrorizing Palestinians into leaving their homes and their lands by outright mass murder, and of the massacres in Khan Yunis and Rafah during the Suez campaign of 1956. It has long been recognized that Israel’s 17-year regime of siege and blockade of Gaza, illegal under international and humanitarian law, constituted not only collective punishment but what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe already in 2006 termed an “incremental genocide.”
At this point, indeed, we can no longer temporize by calling Israel’s 24-month brutal war on Gaza since October 7 merely “genocidal in tendency”. In the view of innumerable experts, its total war has already enacted a genocide, in full view of the global media and of the public and their political elites and with the frequent and publicly expressed incitement of state officials.[4] Though the persistence and tenacity of the Palestinians, grounded in an indomitable attachment to their land, remains to give hope that they will re-merge from the utter destruction inflicted on Gaza with all their commitment to living on, Israel’s ferocious, calculated targeting of every cultural institution, every item of infrastructure or institution of civil society, every hospital, school, and university, every shelter and every fragile means to life, whether water, fuel, or the minimal food aid permitted to enter the strip, was explicitly designed to make life of any kind unlivable in virtually every corner of this crowded open-air prison.[5]
Regardless of the much-vaunted UN Security Council Resolution 2803 and its farcical proposals for a pacified Palestinian wasteland, the ethical obligation to be anti-Zionist remains as urgent as ever. Already since the September 2025 ceasefire that Israel so rapidly and unilaterally violated, as is its wont, and the precarious return of Gazans to their devasted homes, the officially documented and reported death toll from Israel’s merciless assault has risen to 69,000 and more. In July 2024 the respected British medical journal The Lancet had made the dire prediction that, even on a conservative estimate, the total of deaths in Gaza due to Israel’s assault, directly and indirectly (that is, by the effects of “causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases” exacerbated by destroyed health-care infrastructure and by severe shortages of food, water, and shelter), could amount to 186,000. That figure now seems a low projection as sixteen months later the population continues to suffer the after-effects of the most intense deployment of weaponry since the second-world war, concentrated on this tiny territory. More recent estimates agree that “The minimum scientifically plausible number of deaths attributable to the genocide overall is more than 460,000.” What else could this be called but a genocide?
The cold-blooded murder of at least 20,000 children, many of them less than a year old, often by the calculated shots of snipers playing cruel games with innocent victims, increasingly by the slow death of starvation, realized the racist dictum of a recent Israeli minister of justice that Palestinian children are vipers deserving of annihilation. For decades, Zionists have been denying the very existence of the Palestinian people, a chorus now echoed by Trump’s minions even as he contemplates the wholesale transfer of those human obstacles to his real estate plans. Faced with the unyielding persistence of the people whose existence they deny, Israel has tried to reduce the Palestinian population by all the arts of colonial demographic control, from full-on massacres to dispossession and expulsion to the plethora of laws that target Palestinian reproduction and simple togetherness.[6] Now their genocidal fantasies and polices have been enacted in the glare of white phosphor and 2000-lb bombs, directed with unheard-of valor against civilian targets, so openly that even the ever-cautious justices of the International Court of Justice and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had to admit the probability that this Israeli latest war on Gaza does constitute a genocide.
And yet, for fifteen months, the Biden administration, together with its vassal states among Europe’s former colonial powers, continued to fuel and support this genocide with ghoulish sanctimony and proclamations of their unshakeable loyalty, not to US law or its constitution, or to the international treaties, international law, or humanitarian conventions that are the supreme law of the land, but to Zionism. For months after his obsequious October pilgrimage to the court of Netanyahu, I was haunted by the image of Joe Biden, thin parchment skin stretched over his skull, locked in a theatrical embrace of his rival Trump’s counterpart, the fugitive war-criminal and anti-democrat Netanyahu: what a well-schooled performance by Delaware’s career-long vulture of empathy who had never missed an opportunity to make political capital of his own or others’ pain and had no compunction about furnishing the instruments of mass murder while abusing the history of the Holocaust to smooth the way for another.
As for those who, in servile obeisance to their master or to a brutal colonial ideology, from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the morally despicable spokesman for the White House, Matthew Miller, persisted in their knowing disavowal of a genocide they did everything in their power to abet, or in the denial of the Israel-crafted famine that had already gripped Gaza for months, one can only hope that every morsel of food that enters their glutted mouths will turn to ash, tasting of rot and the putrefaction of the corpses they so delighted in multiplying. If anything, even after eleven more months of unabated slaughter, one has to prefer the unmasked brutality of the current president with his vulgar real-estate versions of the final solution and his openly Christian Zionist lackey, on his knees in the US embassy that Trump brazenly moved to Jerusalem in his previous administration: they at least tear the veil from any pretense that the US or the Western powers stand for the international regime of rights and justice and lay bare the rictus of a decayed imperial power.
The mendacious watchwords fall from the lips of this gallery of ghouls as Palestinians continue die under Israel’s reign of terror: Israel’s right to self-defense; the only democracy in the Middle East; terrorists hiding among civilians; the axis of evil; the war of civilization against barbarism. Never mind that, as an occupying power, Israel has no right to self-defense against resistance; never mind that Israel, as an ethno-religious supremacist state with nearly seventy laws discriminating against the Palestinian minority on its books, can hardly be considered a democracy; never mind the untrammeled and orchestrated barbarity of Israel’s murderous assault: each justification is calculated to carve the gulf between Palestinians and humanity, to deny them history, social life, desires and aspirations, let alone the right to resistance and liberation and defense against Israel’s serial wars on the strip. Their very right to exist, to continue to live on and cherish the land on which they have lived for centuries is casually buried beneath fantastical chatter about real estate opportunities or Jewish historical rights to “Judea and Samaria”. Anyone who dares point out that there is no savagery as brutal as civilized warfare is instantly condemned as an antisemite perpetrating some blood libel. No matter how much blood has actually flowed under Israel’s relentless bombings and shellings, courtesy of the United States and its billions of dollars or of Europe’s armaments industries, in this latest assault, as in the previous five, the mere statement of that fact is as scandalous as the naming of the facts of Israel’s apartheid or its ongoing Nakba.
Unlike antisemitism, which has always targeted Jews for who they are, anti-Zionism condemns its adherents for what it does, for what unfolds from the inner logic of the ideology and its aims.
Yet to every one of its critics who has been defamed as an “Israel hater”, an antisemite, a supporter of Hamas “terrorism”, epithets slung these days with promiscuous abandon, like spaghetti thrown against the wall to see if it will stick, Israel has given every reason for their antagonism. The genocidal assault that Israel unleashed on Gaza, and the campaign of ethnic cleansing and murder that its military, in close alliance with the extremist settlers it protects, continues to carry out across the illegally occupied and colonized West Bank, offer the final proof of what Palestinian analysts have long predicted. Zionism has finally devolved into open rather than covert fascism; the self-described “most moral army in the world” has shown itself to be an unbridled murder machine, the peons of this “community of crime” flaunting their perverse and lurid fantasies on TikTok so that the world could document their valiant deeds. Incapable of defeating the concerted and unexpectedly disciplined resistance of the Palestinians, it took out its furious vengeance on a displaced and defenseless non-combatant population while lying about Hamas sheltering among them despite the supposedly 700 kilometers of tunnels that they simultaneously accused them of hiding in.
Nor are the crimes of the current regime an exceptional aberration impelled by wounded fury at Hamas’s humiliating victory over Israel’s Southern Command in their Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Opposition to Zionism cannot be framed around stopping the genocide alone, urgent as that is. To cite Samera Esmeir, “Genocide as a frame is not sufficient to capture how Israel has been forcing Palestinians in Gaza, time and again, to start over and again, as though they did not exist before.” Everything that Israel has done over the last 24 months of its century-long war on Palestine—the West Bank and in ’48 Palestine differing only in degrees of intensity from Gaza—is continuous with well-articulated Zionist doctrines and aspirations since that settler-colonial ideology’s tenets were laid down during the heyday of Europe’s no less brutal colonial era.[7] It is the culminating _expression_ of the inner logic of Zionism as a supremacist political philosophy, that required in practice the elimination of the native: the ongoing Nakba is, as Esmeir says, Israel’s eighty year-long attempt at “severing the Palestinians from the land.”[8]
So to be anti-Israel is to be anti-fascist and anti-colonial. It is to be against genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is to abhor war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unlike antisemitism, which has always targeted Jews for who they are, anti-Zionism condemns its adherents for what it does, for what unfolds from the inner logic of the ideology and its aims. To be an Israel-hater is, then, to be what any half-way moral individual would aspire to be, to be opposed to Israel, even to be opposed to Israel’s very existence in its current form, insofar as its acts and its laws prove it to be the contemporary embodiment of fascism and the legitimate heir of a European colonialism that French poet and politician Aimé Césaire accurately described as the logical precursor of Nazism. Those colonial powers that still seek to exert their fragile dominance over the globe, and that aid and abet at every turn Israel’s apartheid, Israel’s genocide, Israel’s scoffing at international law, should heed what Césaire had to say to European civilization’s sanctimonious self-justifications in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe: “that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated , that they are responsible for it ….”[9]
Palestine has long been one of the front lines of the global resistance to formations of neo-colonialism and of the international network of authoritarianism that vaulted up on the back of the effort—strongly advocated by Netanyahu since the 1980s—to characterize any resistance to colonialism with the broad brush of terrorism. By the same token, anti-Zionism has become the front-line of the fight against fascism domestically, whether in the USA or in Europe, precisely insofar as Zionism bears with it not only the “fascist temptation” that—as Albert Memmi once observed—opens the way to authoritarianism in the “mother country”, but also the portal by which of late reactionary forces have been able to impose on the institutional state apparatuses of Western nations a draconian regime of silencing, prosecution, and the legal terrorism of “lawfare”.[10] With bitter historical irony, Zionism has become a prime lever for the destruction of the liberal state in the name of the prohibition of an antisemitism that, though spawned in Christian Europe, gave Israel the excuse to project its own evils onto Europe’s historical other, the Islamic world. Those defenders of “Western civilization” who have remained silent or cheered on the genocide will hear the echoes of Césaire’s words when the fascists finally turn on them.
As Césaire unhesitatingly grasped, the Nazi terror was merely the domestication of the long-standing techniques and instruments of European colonialism developed over centuries at the cost of countless non-European lives. By a no less bitter historical irony, the same historical and colonialist commitment to Zionism, dressed up as the _expression_ of a new-found philo-semitism, has legitimated a colonial genocide, not merely overlooked, but actively armed, aided and abetted by the former colonial and genocidal powers, virtually without exception. As Germany’s Chancellor Merz declared, referring to Israel’s recent criminal assault on Iran, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.” His statement could equally well have been about Israel’s gratefully accepted and historic mission, assigned to it by the former Euro-American imperial powers, to make of historic Palestine a little Western colonial garrison for the domination of the Arab and Islamic world.
Those powers, without whom the Zionist colonization could scarcely have lasted a year, have also transformed resistance to that genocide into criminality. It is cold comfort to recall now the rationalizations by which the United States and Western European states denied shelter to refugees from a Europe subjected to the Nazi regime or the laws by which they barred Jewish immigration and to decry as no less racist the fact that those laws are now used to deport Palestinian activists. The scandal of that cynical resurrection of antisemitic laws is overshadowed by the mendacious rationalizations concocted by the institutions of civil society in our own time for their ongoing repression of the opponents of the Gazan genocide, from presidential edicts to the university administrations that anticipated Trump’s authoritarian proclamations by actively brutalizing and prosecuting their own students for exercising their moral duty, if not their legal and procedural rights, to protest a state’s criminality. History will not forget these supposedly humanist institutions’ proactive and willing work to protect and defend an unabashedly fascistic Zionism whose racist logics have unfolded to the full in the last two years.
To the anguished question that Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi posed, as to “whether … other slaughters will take place, unilateral, mechanized, willed, at a governmental level, perpetrated upon innocent and defenceless populations and legitimized by the doctrine and contempt”, one can only reply that yes, they are already taking place, in the eyes of the world, right now. And, as Levi feared, it has found “its new buffoon … to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory and so contaminate the world.”[11]
Yet it would be wrong to equate Zionism with Nazism. Nazism gave its name to the ultimate atrocities of the twentieth century, from the mass murder of the concentration camps to the dehumanizing ideology that justified the liquidation, not only of Jews but also of the Roma, of homosexuals, of Slavs, of the disabled, of communists. Among its horrors was the sanitization of its slaughter, its clinical use of Zyklon gas and the industrial technologies of cremation, its medical experiments on its victims, its mathematization, bureaucratization and statistical recording of its atrocities, that gave a new, bloodless face to genocidal logics otherwise all too familiar from Europe’s colonial regimes. Zionism has already given its name to the most vicious atrocities of the current century. Just as Nazism as a name for “barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all barbarisms”[12] outlived the collapse of the “thousand-year” Reich from its own extremities, the ugly brand of Zionism will outlive the bankrupt, brutal, apartheid “eternal state” of Israel, whose collapse seems doomed to follow from its self-inflicted delegitimation. The state that came to claim, if belatedly and cynically, its sacred right to exist from the suffering of the millions exterminated in Europe’s Holocaust can hardly hope to survive its brutal infliction of the same will to exterminate on the Palestinian people, in full view of the appalled gaze of the world.
Drawn from the shameful pit of atrocities and genocide that have been the practice of settler colonies everywhere, Israel’s genocidal practices are nonetheless new, not only in the unprecedented force of their annihilating technologies, but also in their reversion to the bloodiest, dismembering wastage of human bodies and lives, the unrelenting demolition of buildings, schools, universities, power and sanitation plants, degraded into piles of rubble. Though massacre and elimination have characterized every settler-colonial project, the furious rapidity and wanton destruction deployed by Israeli in Gaza has no precedent, though it is to be feared that it will have iterations in the emerging authoritarian and militarist axis for which it sets the example. The image of this barbaric destruction will engrave the lasting sepulcher of Zionism, the byword for atrocity in the twenty-first century. There remains nothing for us but to resist and to refuse this ideology and its genocidal aims, by all means available, from boycott and divestment to sanctions and arms embargos, from encampments to strikes. It is the ethical as well as the political obligation of our time.
Notes
[1] Saree Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), p. 141.
[2] Ghassan Khanafani, On Zionist Literature, trans. Mahmouud Najib (Oxford: Ebb Books, 2022), p. 80.
[3] Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), cited in David T. Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 87.
[4] Along with numerous human rights organizations, including B’tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, the International Association of Genocide Scholars has declared that Israel’s current war on Gaza constitutes a genocide. Their findings were confirmed this month by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a finding remarkable only for the length of time it has taken.
[5] See David Lloyd, “Israel’s Cultural Bomb: For Refaat Alareer”, Social Text 43.2 (163: June 2025), pp. 1-16.
[6] See Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) on the ways in which “children’s lives and bodies are transformed into political targets” (6) in the context of Israel’s “demographic anxieties”(4) and further on “demographic anxiety”, Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 106-7.
[7] On the origins of Zionism as Christian Zionism and in the context of Europe’s colonial ambitions, see Hanine Shehadeh, No Place for Ismael: Christian and Jewish Zionism and the Liquidation of the Gaza Ghetto, Political Theology (04 Nov 2025.): https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2025.2583638.
[8] Samera Esmeir, “The End of Colonial Government”, in From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, ed Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren (London and New York: 2023), pp. 88 and 90.
[9] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans Joan Pinkham, intro by Robin D.G. Kelley (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 36.
[10] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, intro. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans, Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Books, 1967), p. 62.
[11] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2013), pp.92 and 231.
[12] Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 36.
Featured image: Aimé Césaire. Uncredited public-domain photo courtesy of Writers Mosaic Magazine.