Antizionism and Antisemitism

Abstract

The three volumes reviewed in this article survey the ways in which left-wing antizionism incorporates key antisemitic themes. Contemporary leftist antizionism owes a large and generally overlooked debt to Soviet antizionist propaganda from the period 1949–89. Soviet antizionism in turn recycled the right-wing Russian antisemitism of the Tsarist era, as embodied in, for example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that also played a central role in Nazi antisemitism and has been adopted also by Islamist anti-Semites in groups such as Hamas. A wider appreciation of the disturbing genetic and thematic overlap between Nazi, left-wing, and Islamist antisemitism might help to render debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more productive and less poisonous.