What Ezra Klein Gets Wrong About Anti-Zionism

Ezra Klein is right that anti-Zionism is no longer a fringe position. He’s wrong about why.

His argument, stripped down, is that Israel made this happen. The occupation, Gaza, the settlements, the casualties — reasonable people drew reasonable conclusions. Anti-Zionism spread because Israel gave people reasons to oppose it. The logic is tidy. It also leaves out half the story.

For most of the people who hold anti-Zionist views today, the framework came first. Not as a response to Israeli conduct, but as a prior — built over decades in activist spaces, campus culture, and international institutions long before Gaza. The question isn’t what Israel did to produce this moment. It’s what was already waiting when the moment arrived.

The diaspora is a specific case within that larger story. American Jews and liberal allies who built a political and communal identity around Israel — not just as a homeland but as a liberal democratic project, a rebuke to powerlessness, a place that justified the hyphenated American Jewish existence. That identity was always in tension with Israeli political reality, held together for decades by distance, selective engagement, and a peace process that kept the two-state horizon visible. But the anti-Zionist framework was already operating in the spaces where that identity was weakest. Gaza didn’t create it. It handed it an audience that was already being prepared.

Klein spends considerable space on Hasan Piker — whether he’s an antisemite, whether Democrats should appear on his show, whether cancellation works. These are real questions. But they’re downstream of a more important one that Klein gestures at without fully answering: what does it mean that anti-Zionism is now a mainstream position among Democratic-leaning Americans under 35?

Klein’s answer is essentially: look at Gaza. And Gaza is not nothing. But this framing treats anti-Zionism as a conclusion — the rational endpoint of watching Israeli conduct and turning away. What it doesn’t reckon with is that anti-Zionism is also a starting point for many of the people who hold it. Not a response to specific Israeli policies, but a prior — absorbed through activist spaces, campus culture, social media ecosystems that treat Jewish statehood as categorically illegitimate. Piker didn’t arrive at his Hezbollah flag appreciation through careful analysis of Oslo. The sequence runs the other way.

On the question of cancellation, Klein is largely correct. Shunning Piker doesn’t make his views less influential — it just ensures that the people engaging his audience aren’t liberal Zionists. Democrats avoiding podcasts they found ideologically uncomfortable in 2024 was both bad politics and a failure of democratic instinct. If you won’t go where your critics are, you forfeit the argument.

But here’s what that concession doesn’t settle: whether appearing on Piker’s show, or platforming him as a political ally, requires accepting his framework. Klein treats these as the same question. They aren’t. You can believe in open conversation and still think that “liberal Zionist” as a Nazi analogue isn’t a debating position to be engaged — it’s a category error to be named. The problem with how Democrats have handled this isn’t that they pushed back on anti-Zionism. It’s that they pushed back badly, with accusations of Jew-hatred that collapsed a real distinction, and in doing so made themselves look like they were defending Israeli government policy rather than something more fundamental.

Klein is careful to distinguish between Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism, and the distinction is real. But it does less work than he thinks when applied to Piker specifically. Consider the actual record. Piker said “America deserved 9/11.” He said his favorite flag is Hezbollah’s — not as provocation, but as a statement of solidarity with a designated terrorist organization whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and whose military wing has spent decades killing Jewish civilians. He compared liberal Zionists to Nazis. He called critics “rabid ultra-Zionist pigs.” And when confronted with documented evidence of mass rape on October 7th, he said — on stream, not in the heat of a single moment but repeatedly — that it “doesn’t matter.” He described the accounts as “rape fantasies” and “hallucinations.” His subsequent defense was that he meant the rapes don’t justify Gaza. But “it doesn’t matter” is not a legal argument. It’s a tell. It tells you what the framework is willing to set aside in service of the conclusion it already holds.

It’s a pattern. And the pattern is not of someone who examined Israeli conduct and reluctantly concluded that Zionism is indefensible. It’s someone who decided that first, and has been working backward ever since.

That conclusion didn’t emerge from Gaza. It has a longer history.

Let’s be honest about what we’re actually talking about. The movement to delegitimize Israel did not begin in Gaza. It did not begin on October 7th. It did not begin with Netanyahu. The intellectual and activist infrastructure that treats Jewish statehood as uniquely illegitimate among all nationalist movements has been constructing itself for fifty years. “Zionism is racism” was a UN resolution in 1975. BDS was founded in 2005 — two years before Hamas took control of Gaza, and long before a single bomb had fallen in the current war. The framework — that Israel is not a state with bad policies but a project that should not exist — predates every grievance Klein cites.

This is the move Klein doesn’t make, and it’s the most important one. He treats anti-Zionism as a conclusion. Something reasonable people arrived at by watching what Israel does. But for most of the people who hold it, anti-Zionism is a premise. It comes first. The specific atrocities get cited as evidence for a verdict that was already in. That’s not analysis. That’s confirmation.

Piker didn’t watch the news from Gaza and reluctantly conclude that Jewish self-determination was illegitimate. He operates within an ideological ecosystem that decided that before October 7, before the current war, before most of his audience was politically conscious. When Klein asks us to engage that position seriously as a political viewpoint that has simply become mainstream, he’s asking us to treat the conclusion as earned when the framework was imported wholesale.

The question isn’t whether criticism of Israel is legitimate. Of course it is. The question is whether opposition to Israel’s existence is a rational policy position or an ideological prior dressed up in the language of human rights. Klein never quite asks it.

None of this requires believing that the Israeli opposition is a peace movement. Bennett is not a two-state advocate. He built his political identity partly in opposition to Palestinian statehood, and no serious analyst expects a Bennett-led government to deliver a final status agreement. That is not the argument.

The argument is narrower, and more important. A government without Ben Gvir and Smotrich — which Israeli polling now consistently projects — would almost certainly end the active acceleration of West Bank settlement expansion. It would stop the state’s functional tolerance of settler violence against Palestinian civilians. It would restore a working relationship with the Palestinian Authority rather than working to collapse it. It would not pursue the agenda that Netanyahu — who once endorsed a Palestinian state at Bar-Ilan and spent the following decade systematically undermining the possibility of one — has openly boasted of preventing for decades. The coalition enabling it exists in no small part because a prime minister facing corruption charges needed far-right partners willing to keep him in power. These are not small things. They are the difference between a political horizon and the deliberate elimination of one.

This is what Klein’s framing cannot accommodate. He describes Israeli conduct as the cause of rising anti-Zionism — and some of that conduct is genuinely indefensible. But he treats it as fixed, as the inevitable output of the Zionist project rather than the product of a specific government held together by a razor-thin coalition that current polling suggests most Israelis want gone. When you collapse that distinction — between Israel as it is behaving today and Israel as its own democratic majority might reconstitute it — you are not responding to Israeli policy. You are endorsing a conclusion about Jewish statehood that was already written before this government took office.

None of this is to minimize the rightward drift in Israeli society, which predates October 7 and is real, documented, and alarming. It was built over decades — a failed peace process, a collapsed Oslo, years of terror met with the repeated experience that withdrawal produced more violence rather than less. October 7, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, didn’t create that trajectory. It supercharged it. A trauma response layered onto an existing wound is not a permanent political identity. A trend is not a verdict.

There is something clarifying about this moment, if you are willing to look at it clearly. The Israeli public that Klein’s piece implicitly writes off — too complicit, too rightward, too captured by Netanyahu’s project — is the same public that polls at nearly 75% wanting him gone. That is watching Smotrich’s party dissolve below the electoral threshold in poll after poll. That is one election away from a government that would, at minimum, stop treating Palestinian political rights as an obstacle to be permanently eliminated.

To abandon Zionism now, in response to a government that most Israelis oppose, is not a moral reckoning. It is a category error. It mistakes a political moment for a permanent condition. It accepts the far right’s own premise — that this Israel is the only Israel — and draws the conclusion the far right would prefer: that the argument for Jewish self-determination is lost.

Anti-Zionism dressed in the language of human rights does not help Palestinians. It does not pressure Israel. It does not build the coalition that could actually change Israeli policy, because it has decided in advance that Israeli society is irredeemable. What it does is make the people willing to fight for a different Israel — inside Israel and in the diaspora — feel that the ground has been ceded beneath them.

Klein is right that conversation is necessary. He is right that cancellation has failed. Where he goes wrong is in treating anti-Zionism as a political position that has simply matured into respectability. It hasn’t. It has found a permission structure in Israeli conduct, and a delivery mechanism in people like Piker, who decided the conclusion before examining the evidence. The work of liberal Zionism — harder now than it has ever been, and more necessary — is to refuse both the current Israeli government and the ideology that uses that government as proof that the project itself was always wrong.

That argument is available. It is honest. It does not require defending what is indefensible. It requires only the belief that Israeli democracy is real, that it is under threat, and that the outcome is not yet written.