A reply to Shalom Lappin’s “Anti-Zionism as Redemptive Racism.”

Shalom Lappin’s article “Anti-Zionism as Redemptive Racism” was both eloquent and compelling in its historical construction of the roots of modern anti-Zionism, its increasing recoding as antisemitism, and its implementation by both more extreme left and right-wing commentary.

From the perspective of a slightly more engaged, yet nonetheless amateur observer, the article added considerable depth to my understanding of the genealogy of anti-Zionism, its proxy application for antisemitism, and the recurrence of anti-Jewish narratives through different manifestations of totalitarian political systems.

My own engagement with discourse around Israel is sadly limited largely to online comment sections, but the negative civilisational claims endowing Jews with some form of metaphysical corruption are recurrent within that discourse. It feels entirely uncontroversial to note that this is connected to increasing antisemitic violence, exporting threats well beyond the borders of the conflict itself. The author is persuasive in locating aspects of this phenomenon within broader postmodern and postcolonial frameworks that flatten Jews into symbolic representatives of oppression itself.

Forty-eight hours prior to reading the article, I encountered claims that conquest was “in the DNA” of Israelis and that Holocaust memorial institutions function primarily as cover for legitimising Israel’s own “genocide.” Interestingly, both arguments deployed what the article might call “the good Jew” in order to borrow legitimacy for the totalising ideas they were expressing.

That said, the article also prompted a further thought.

While correctly identifying the way discourse around Israel increasingly unites otherwise opposed ideological ecosystems, the piece perhaps misses the extent to which the form of the discourse may itself be contributing to the very dynamic it critiques.

The article convincingly traces recurring anti-Jewish structures through different historical manifestations. But at times it appears to move from genealogy as explanation toward genealogy as an almost total interpretive framework, in which contemporary anti-Zionism increasingly becomes understood principally as the latest manifestation of antisemitism itself.

This risks collapsing morally and psychologically distinct phenomena into a single explanatory stream.

A Western activist engaging in abstract postcolonial metaphysics, a genuinely antisemitic conspiracist, a traumatised Palestinian responding to immediate lived catastrophe, and a casual observer reacting emotionally to images of dead children may all arrive at criticism of Israel through radically different psychological, historical, and moral routes. To flatten these into a single ideological continuum risks losing discriminative precision.

Ironically, the article itself occasionally appears to reproduce some of the same totalising discourse structures it criticises elsewhere: collapsing complexity into single-cause dynamics, reading overlapping concerns as evidence of deeper ideological convergence, and allowing historical chronology to establish moral legitimacy prior to present accountability.

None of this invalidates the author’s broader warning. The convergence between antisemitic traditions and contemporary anti-Zionist discourse is real and deserves serious attention. But historical explanation can itself become recursively self-confirming if every criticism of Israel is increasingly interpreted primarily through the lens of latent antisemitism.

At that point, explanation risks becoming insulation. And the danger is not only moral confusion, but the gradual inability to distinguish between genuinely recurring antisemitic structures and the far messier reality of human political, emotional, and moral response.

—Mark Entwistle