After October 7, 2023, anti-Zionist hatred has gained a greater foothold in Sweden and Europe. "ZioNazi", "Genocide" and "Child killer" are examples of common anti-Zionist expressions. In England, the British environmental party, the Green Party, this weekend adopted a position that Zionism is racism, a classic anti-Zionist slogan.
"Say what you accuse the Jews of - and I will say what you are guilty of", wrote the Russian-Jewish author Vasiliy Grossman in "Life and Fate". Jew-hatred functions as a projection of the hater's or society's own shortcomings. Right now, old Jew-hatred, which there is a consensus that is wrong, is changing into a new variant with new language and new accusations. It is about anti-Zionism, the opposition to the Jewish people's right to self-determination and the existence of the State of Israel.
In recent years, anti-Zionism has eaten its way into our society. In many circles it has become legitimate and no spinal cord reflex is activated when the hatred is dressed in anti-Zionist language. We see it within the Left Party, at universities, in civil society, when public service gives a platform to anti-Zionism and when cultural personalities write on appeals. Society's reflexes are only triggered when the haters turn to classic anti-Semitism.
There are roughly three waves of anti-Semitism throughout history, each wave justifying itself with the highest moral authority of its time: religion in the 13th century, the pseudoscience of racial biology in the 1930s, and today human rights. Therefore, the practitioner can deny that he is anti-Semitic. She speaks the language of rights.
The first wave, anti-Judaism, accused Jews of refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah. It resulted in persecutions, ghettos, forced conversions and myths of bloodlust and alliances with the devil. The second wave was based on race. Jews were seen as an inferior race and a foreign people, and the myth of a secret world conspiracy was born. The culmination was the Holocaust.
Today's wave, the third, is directed against the Jewish nation and is called anti-Zionism. It is a synthesis of Nazi Jew-hatred, old Soviet propaganda and post-colonial theory. It is not a reaction to Israel's policies or to compassion for civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas, but a hate movement with its own history, its own theories and its own language, which has led to violence against Jews worldwide.
After the Six Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union built a propaganda apparatus around the thesis that Zionism is a racist world conspiracy that collaborated with the Nazis. Some fifty book titles were printed in nine million copies, and in 1975 the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be racism, a resolution that was only repealed in 1991. The propaganda spread to the Arab world and parts of the European left. Postcolonial theorizing then gave it an academic legitimacy, where Israel was made a European colonizer and decolonization became a sign of intellectual credibility.
The result is a language of its own. There, the word Jew has been replaced with Zionist, and Jews have gone from being seen as an inferior foreign "Oriental" race to white, genocidal colonizers whose historical connection to the Middle East is denied. It is fundamentally not about what Israel does, but about the existence of the country. Anti-Zionism is the only global movement that advocates the annihilation of an entire country, and it just so happens to be the country of the Jewish people. The word Zionist becomes a trigger for all evil, justifying violence and making any Jew who does not publicly distance himself from Israel's existence into a legitimate target.
The consequences for the Jews of the world are real – and more than the British Green Party branding this weekend. In December 2025, two men opened fire on a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach, Australia's deadliest shooting in thirty years. In October, two people were murdered at a synagogue in Manchester. In Sweden, Jewish schools and events must be protected, and "Zionist-free zones" must be established at universities and cultural venues. According to the J7 report, 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews in the Diaspora in over thirty years. Brå recorded 217 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024, almost doubling since 2022, and Swedish teenagers are being recruited by criminal networks to attack Jewish targets.
Jews in Sweden should not have to wait to be murdered before anti-Zionism is seen as the hate movement it is. Our society must act against anti-Zionism now.
