Stop calling right-wing criticism of Israel ‘anti-Zionism’

Recent interviews between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and between Candace Owens and Norman Finkelstein, have brought increased attention to right-wing critiques of U.S. support for Israel. Voices across the political spectrum have taken to referring to these critiques as “Right-Wing anti-Zionism” or “anti-Zionism on the right.” In recent articles in The Nation, Jet Heer cites the “Return of Right-Wing Anti-Zionism,” while Ben Lorber refers to Fuentes’ politics as “America First anti-Zionism.” A recent conversation on the Jewish Currents podcast On the Nose was called “Confronting the Anti-Zionist Right.” Meanwhile the ADL decries “Anti-Zionist Language from the Left and Right.”  I’d argue that naming anti-Israel dissent on the right as “anti-Zionist” is a profound misnomer and a strategic error for those on the left who wish to combat Zionism as part of a broader decolonial struggle.

Zionism is a settler colonial movement, aligned with U.S. imperialism, and deeply imbricated from its origins with European fascism, racialism, and antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is a transnational, anti-imperialist & decolonial movement that has been led intellectually and materially by the Palestinian resistance. Contemporary right-wing critiques of U.S. support for Israel, by contrast, are grounded in one or both of two tendencies: 1) a particular form of hyper-nationalism (one that often refers to itself as “isolationist” or “anti-internationalist”), and 2) antisemitic conspiracy theory. The former tendency generally leads its proponents to question the extent of alignment between U.S. and Israeli interests. The latter tendency may go further, weaving together denunciation of the state of Israel as such with antisemitic tropes like Jewish control of the media, “Judeo-Bolshevism” and Holocaust denial.  

But critically, neither tendency has anything to do with actual anti-Zionism, since both are fully compatible with underlying Western imperialist and settler colonial logics of Zionism, including ethnonationalism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. We might understand such right-wing politics on a spectrum from “critical of unequivocal U.S. support for Israel,” to, in more extreme cases, “anti-Israel,” but to label them “anti-Zionist” is a profound misnomer.

One danger of this misidentification is that it reproduces, in reverse, the spurious logic that conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The resistance by pundits and politicians like Fuentes, Owens, Marjorie Taylor Green and others to U.S. support for Israel is transparently rooted in antisemitism first and foremost.  Fuentes, in the Carlson interview, narrates the story of his political awakening largely in terms of his having been “cancelled” by conspiring Jews in control of the media. Greene decried Jewish space lasers years before she began to push back on funding for the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. To describe these actors’ criticisms of U.S. support for Israel as anti-Zionist, despite their broad alignment with the fundamental principles of Zionism, and their firm grounding in antisemitism, performs the same conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, in reverse, that Palestinians and the anti-Zionist left broadly have carefully and forcefully debunked for decades. In other words, it’s just as problematic to encounter antisemitism and call it “anti-Zionism” as it is to see anti-Zionism and call it “antisemitism.”

Additionally, framing right-wing critique of Israel as “anti-Zionist” adds complexity to what should otherwise be a relatively straightforward task: that of distinguishing our decolonial, liberatory politics from a reactionary, hypernationalist, fascistic, antisemitic, and otherwise repugnant one. Even for folks on the left who are quick to decry any suggestion of selective collaboration with the anti-Israel right, the framing of “right-wing anti-Zionism” can lend itself to overstating the areas of overlap in our politics. In the aforementioned episode of On the Nose, for example, participants recounted their alarm at the experience of finding points of agreement with Carlson and Fuentes, which were then interrupted by moments of blatant antisemitism. “There were times in listening to it,” one participant recounts, ”where I felt like, oh, you know, I’m like behind this car, and I’m like, I know this road. And then suddenly it’s like one wheel is like off in the ditch.”  

Certainly, there is a danger, which the On the Nose episode participants identify, in the classic fascist strategy of appropriating certain terms from the left to redirect popular resentment away from liberatory struggle. But such appropriations and other rhetorical overlaps are generally relatively superficial when placed in the context of the explicitly decolonial, anti-imperialist, and transnational principles of anti-Zionist politics. So while the podcast participants took care to parse out areas of divergence with the right-wing commentators under discussion, my concern is that their use of the term “right-wing anti-Zionism” complicates the task by inadvertently reinscribing a narrative of overlap, or suggesting a “horseshoe effect.”

With that said, there is a troubling alignment that must be named between right-wing and center-left/liberal critique of U.S. support for Israel (as distinct from leftist, decolonial anti-Zionist critique). Specifically, both camps – right and center-left – rely on the misguided premise that this support is contrary to U.S. national interests, and is driven primarily by the outsized influence of the “Israel Lobby.” In fact, as Max Ajl, Hebh Jamal, and others have shown, the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” is driven by a profound alignment of interests between the two partners in imperialism and settler colonialism, not by the machinations of a special interest group that bends U.S. politics to its will. Likewise, both Democrats and right-wing pundits routinely claim that certain egregious, genocidal acts by Israel are contrary to U.S. values or interests, rather than acknowledging that genocidal, settler colonial violence is at the heart of the American project. 

So the resonance between right-wing and center-left rhetoric on Israel does indeed reveal an alarming intersection across political factions: an alignment between liberalism and fascism. This intersection is extrinsic and inimical to the foundational principles of anti-Zionism: an anti-imperialist, decolonial movement that rejects U.S. global domination (including the ongoing colonization of Turtle Island) just as it rejects Zionist colonization of Palestine. As such, if “right-wing anti-zionism” is a misnomer, so too is “liberal anti-Zionism.” Neither form of critique is capable of – or interested in – supporting the liberation of Palestine through the indispensable – and inextricable – struggle against U.S. Imperialism.