Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl — the journalist who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Pakistan while he was there reporting on religious extremist groups in 2002. Professor Pearl (UCLA) and his late wife, Ruth, established a dialogue program with Muslim and Jewish journalists through their Daniel Pearl Foundation. He coined the term Zionophobia: the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination anywhere in the Middle East.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel, Pearl observed the aberrant reaction from fellow professors and students and he has felt it necessary to sound the alarm about how normative it has become to reject the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. His new book is called, “Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl 2002-2025.” Pearl writes that 400 Zionist professors have stepped forward to say enough is enough after two years of reluctance due to fears of backlash.
I have worked to clarify what Zionism is over the last two plus years since there is so much misinformation, outright lies, and hatred directed at Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East. I have warned that the antisemitic slogans so casually and gleefully rendered by Western keffiyeh-appropriating fanatics would lead to actual violence. I truly and deeply wish I had been wrong.
McGill University professor Adam Louis-Klein recently launched a movement called MAAZ (Movement against Antizionism). On its website, MAAZ says, “Antizionism is not ‘criticism of Israeli policy’ but a movement built on defamation and denial — one that seeks the erasure of Jewish sovereignty and the diminishment of Jewish life everywhere. It does not debate borders or governments; it indicts Jewish existence itself.” He and others are engaged in accurately naming antizionism as racist and a hate movement while using the term in one-word form as antisemitism is now.
Louis-Klein was raised Jewish and involved in Jewish life when he studied philosophy at Yale. He then moved away from his Jewish identity as he adopted radical leftist views. What happened? October 7. He was doing research at an indigenous village in the Amazon rainforest with no phone or internet access. Two days later he was in a town, and the first thing he saw on the internet was news of the Hamas slaughter in Israel. He simply posted “Am Yisrael Chai” on Facebook as an intention of solidarity. In English, the phrase means “The People of Israel Live.” His social and professional contacts cut him off. He recognized that this was just one of many iterations in the long history of libels where Jews are dehumanized and falsely accused of being responsible for the world’s wrongs.
Anti-Judaism was the centuries-long hate generated by Christians, then Nazis concocted race-based hate against Jews where even a conversion to Christianity would not save them, and now we have antizionism as the indictment against Israel and Jewish peoplehood. All three versions have in common accusations that Jews offend purity — the purity of Christians, the purity of race, and the purity of a perverse notion of human rights.
Zionophobes are influenced by roots in the Islamist-Nazi alliances from the World War II-era and the antizionist Soviet tropes that have been around for over a century. Then as now, Jews were pitted against each other. The Soviet government encouraged and rewarded secular Jews for denouncing religious Jews or those who believed in a return to the homeland.
After the Bondi Beach (Sydney, Australia) massacre against Jews on Dec. 14, I felt despondent and could not sleep for days. Little 10-year-old Matilda was in joyous Chanukah celebration along with hundreds of others when monsters mowed them down shouting glory to Allah. This is human rights?! These sociopathic radical Islamists believe they are doing good when they kill Jews. If anyone reading this thinks that killing a 10-year-old girl standing next to her six-year-old sister at a gathering for the festival of lights is for a better world, you need to seek help. If you are still shouting out slogans condemning Israel in public gatherings, you should stop now. You are contributing to normative dehumanization and unthinkable violence. You are not innocent as you persist in willful ignorance and throw around the term Zionist as an insult and yell “globalize the Intifada” as a fun rallying cry while it is actually a greenlight to kill as many Jews as possible.
A recent guest columnist compared Zionism to the U.S. Confederacy. It is both ludicrous and offensive. Zionists are not white supremacists. Most Israeli Jews are not white in fact. Europeans invaded what we now call the U.S. and created the horrors of slavery. By contrast in Israel, Zionists — Israel’s original indigenous people — have helped thousands of African Jews to escape persecution with automatic citizenship and assistance in Israel.
The columnist also maligned the UMass Amherst Hillel organization as somehow “exclusionary” of Jewish students who are antizionist. I have several thoughts. Would it be unreasonable for a feminist group to exclude misogynists? Have you met the Hillel students at UMass? They are left, right and center, and they engage in critical discussions about the Israeli government, interpretations of Judaism, etc. just as everyone in Israel does. This does not mean they denounce the existence of Israel. This warped rhetoric is gasoline on the fire of antisemitism and antizionism. Hillel students all over the world are being threatened with violence for simply being Jews.
More to come about how Zionism is a force for good in the world from thinkers as diverse as Einat Wilf, Noa Tishby and David Suissa. It is essential that people understand Zionophobia as antisemitism while learning why Israelis and diaspora Jews from a multitude of political backgrounds identity as Zionists — with strong moral compasses and bravery against all odds.
J.M. Sorrell is a monthly columnist. She understands what Orwell meant when he wrote, “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”