Antisemitism

Antisemitism has never operated in a stable form. It adapts to the available idiom — the accusations that are socially permissible in a given era. The content is largely continuous across centuries. The framing changes to fit whatever will not trigger social sanctions.

The logical test for whether anti-Zionism functions as a container for antisemitic content is the universal principle test: any principle applied exclusively to Jewish nationalism but not to comparable nationalist movements is not a principle — it is a conclusion about Jews.

Approximately 95% of Jews worldwide identify as Zionist in the minimal sense of supporting Jewish self-determination in their historical homeland. Anti-Zionism therefore targets the defining self-identification of the overwhelming majority of the world's Jews. An ideology that opposes the national self-determination of one specific ethnic and religious group while supporting it for all others is not a neutral political position.

If the objection to Zionism were a principled objection to ethnic nationalism, it would apply to Kurdish, Armenian, and Tibetan nationalism with equal force. It does not. The selective application of opposition to Jewish nationalism while supporting structurally equivalent nationalisms for other groups is the evidence that the objection is not about nationalism in general — it is about Jews specifically.

One of the most consistent markers of antisemitism across its historical iterations is the attribution of collective guilt — the treatment of individual Jews as responsible for the actions of other Jews, or of the Israeli state, regardless of any personal connection to those actions. This attribution pattern is normalised in contemporary discourse in ways that would be immediately recognised as racist if applied to any other group.

The asymmetry in diaspora violence since October 7 reinforces the point. There is no documented pattern of diaspora Jews attacking mosques or Muslim community centres as collective reprisal for Hamas's actions or for attacks on Israel. The reverse pattern — attacks on Jewish community institutions, individuals, and symbols attributed to Israeli government actions — is documented across multiple Western countries. The attribution of collective guilt runs in one direction only.

The structural logic is continuous with historical antisemitism: the individual Jew is never treated as an individual. They are always treated as a representative of, and therefore responsible for, the collective Jewish entity — whether that entity is conceived as a religious conspiracy, a racial network, a financial cabal, or now a state. The container changes. The logic is identical.

The Nazi analogy is applied to Israel in public discourse — including Swedish public discourse — at a frequency and casualness that has no equivalent application to other states conducting comparable or worse military operations. The asymmetry itself is diagnostic data.

The analogy is analytically incoherent as applied. The Nazis deliberately exterminated six million Jews with industrial infrastructure. Israel is engaged in military operations against a governing organisation that has declared its genocidal intent toward Jews in its founding charter, produced the largest single-day Jewish massacre since the Holocaust, and holds approximately 100 hostages. These are not morally equivalent situations under any serious analytical framework.

But the frequency of the analogy's application is not primarily an analytical question — it is a rhetorical function question. The Nazi analogy, applied to Israel, serves to:

The asymmetry test: if Nazi comparisons applied to other groups — comparing Russian conduct in Chechnya to Nazi methods, comparing Chinese treatment of Uyghurs to the Holocaust, comparing Turkish treatment of Kurds to Nazi policy — would meet the legal threshold under Swedish hate speech law (hets mot folkgrupp), then the same comparisons applied to Israel and by extension to Jews should be examined under the same standard. They are not. The selective permissibility of the Nazi analogy when applied to Jews and Israel is itself evidence of the antisemitic function it serves.

Western hate speech and anti-discrimination frameworks share a common architecture: they prohibit targeting people based on protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, religion, national origin. They were designed with direct expression in mind. They have a documented structural gap when the targeting operates through a political identity category that maps almost entirely onto a protected group.

"Zionist" functions as exactly such a proxy category. Approximately 95% of Jews worldwide identify as Zionist in the minimal sense of supporting Jewish self-determination. When "Zionists" are targeted for harassment, exclusion, or violence, the operative target is Jews — but the legal trigger (ethnic or religious category) is not activated because the surface category is political.

The proxy discrimination principle exists in Western employment law — courts in multiple jurisdictions have found that targeting people based on a characteristic that overwhelmingly predicts membership in a protected group constitutes indirect discrimination against that group. The legal reasoning for extending this principle to hate speech exists within existing frameworks. It has not been applied.

The reform argument is not that criticism of Israeli policy should be protected from criticism. It is analytically precise: when a political category ("Zionist") is used as the operative target and that category maps onto approximately 95% of a religious and ethnic group, the functional target is that group. The question is not what word is used. It is what population is being targeted — and whether the legal framework is willing to look through the proxy to the underlying reality.