CIJR | Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
L'institut Canadien de Recherches sur le Judaisme

Analysis

Anti-Zionism is the New Antisemitism in Professional and Academic Circles

Melbourne Gaza protest Zionist Criminals, End the Palestine Holocaust.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Melbourne Gaza protest Zionist Criminals, End the Palestine Holocaust.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

 

Harold Behr

Times of Israel, July 4, 2025

“Could there possibly be an underlying antisemitic strain at work, woven into the text with arcane academic justifications?”

Ideologues on the far left of the political spectrum hold as one of their tenets the belief that Israel is a white colonialist-fascist entity which was superimposed on the Middle East by imperialist powers towards the end of the First World War, that its establishment has resulted in the dispossession of an entire people – the Palestinians – and that the mission must now be to help the Palestinians to repossess a land which is rightfully theirs.

According to this doctrine, Jews per se will be safe in the new utopia as long as they do not subscribe to the Zionist ideology. Hence the strident protestation from leftist quarters that anti-Zionism is not synonymous with antisemitism and that to maintain otherwise is a calumny and a cover for Israel’s continuing nefarious war against the Palestinian people.

A war of words is presently being waged in parallel with the military war and is spreading like a forest fire through academic and professional institutions. This was brought home to me recently by a parochial dispute on my own doorstep in the United Kingdom. As a psychiatrist affiliated to a network of therapists specializing in group analysis – the application of groups to the solving of personal and societal problems – I am privy to rancorous exchanges, justified as ‘dialogue’, in the columns of one of the network’s professional journals. But really, these articles serve in the main as platforms for leftist propaganda.

The so-called dialogue which has taken over a recent issue of the journal in question is richly embroidered with supportive references taken from historiography, politics, sociology, group dynamics and psychotherapy, conferring on the articles an aura of academic respectability. Almost all the articles are tendentiously weighted against the existence of Israel as a sovereign state. ….SOURCE

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