VIDEO: “Fighting Antizionism is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time”

VIDEO: “Fighting Antizionism is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time”

There is an all-out assault underway in Europe and the U.S. to drive Jews out of the political process and out of the country unless they bend the knee to antizionism. On June 10, 2026, we held an online event to explore that assault and how people are fighting back.

You are familiar with some of what is happening from our coverage at Legal Insurrection. “Zionist Free” zones on campuses and academic departments at universities. Jews attacked on the streets and wherever they gather. Claims of disloyalty of and control by American Jews who participate in the political process relentlessly pushed by some of the largest podcasters, influencers, and politicians. A complete obsession with the destruction of Israel that applies to no other country.

Kemberlee Kaye, Managing Director of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, moderated the discussion which feature me, Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Program on Education and National Security, and Andrew Pessin, Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College, and Founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism. More complete speaker bios are available at our post announcing the event.

WATCH the VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS

(selected by speakers, with approximate video time stamps)

(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, edited for transcript clarity, including combining separate sections without section breaks.)

William Jacobson

(00:02:51) We’ve done a couple of dozen over the years of these sort of events, and I have to say that in many ways, this is the most disturbing topic that we’ve had. I think everybody understands we’re not in a normal time right now when it comes to antisemitism in this country, when it comes to antizionism in this country, and the connection between the two. We’ll have a chance to talk about when is antizionism antisemitic. But I think it’s really important to understand before we even get to those sort of things, the time that we’re living in. If you read our website daily, there are Jews being attacked on the streets.

(00:04:00) There are attacks on Jewish participation in American life. AIPAC, which is an American organization made up of Americans, not exclusively American Jews, but Americans participating in our political process, has now become a point of attack from the Democrat Party. Many candidates will not accept donations from Americans who support Israel. And on the so-called woke, right? Not the mainstream right, but the wok, right, the influencers, the podcasters, et cetera. We are seeing the sort of rhetoric that has been mainstream, that used to be on the outer fringes of the neo-Nazi movement, so-called Zionist Occupied Government, sort of verbiage from unexpected sources.  Megyn Kelly uses the term ‘Israel Firster’ frequently. Israel Firster used to be a fringe term of the extreme left and the neo-Nazi, right. And it’s now been completely mainstreamed. It’s been completely mainstreamed….

(00:05:29) This concept that Americans supporting Israel is somehow disloyal to the United States. We don’t claim that about any other country. And what I’d like to explore is how we got to this point. The State Department just a few days ago issued a report indicating that Iran, Russia, and China have made a deliberate effort to inject antisemitic themes into American discourse, through social media, through the internet, through influencers, et cetera. I think they probably could have included Qatar … , countries like that for whatever the reason, perhaps political, they didn’t examine Qatar. But there is a concerted effort internationally to use antisemitism and the verbiage of anti-Zionism, not just to demonize Jews, but to create tension in the United States to set people against each other and, and to weaponize it really to our detriment.

(00:06:39) And we see it all the time on social media and the internet. You can’t spend any significant amount of time on X formally known as Twitter without being bombarded with bots. Sometimes it’s easy to tell, you know, John plus eight numbers, okay, <laugh> who joined three months ago, is attacking you there. So it’s a very organized effort, and that’s why I’m saying we’re not living in normal times. We’re living in a time where the fringe, but now the more mainstream, has been weaponized to portray support for Israel as inherently evil and in very antisemitic, anti-Jewish terms. And we’ve seen it in the Gaza conflict. A lot of fake images, images from other conflicts, getting tens of thousands of shares on social media. And it’s not even from Gaza. Inflated statistics from Hamas that are just regurgitated without question.

(00:07:49): ….  And it’s showing up in many places. It’s showing up in violence in the streets, and it’s showing up in my inbox.

(00:09:42): ….  People have been emboldened. I think October 7 was a permission slip for a lot of people to do and say things they normally wouldn’t. They may have had the thoughts, but they normally wouldn’t say it.

(00:15:15): … We are really at a time in this country and the world, but we live here in this country where international forces, political forces, religious forces, are really combining and coming together in some of the ugliest rhetoric  that’s showing up on our doorstep in our, in our emails. that is sometimes openly anti-Jewish, but frequently masquerades as being antizionist.

(01:22:12): It’s really about the survival of the country. The foreign governments are pushing this stuff into our systems, education systems, internet systems, social media, onto campuses because they know how destructive it is. So whether there’s hope or there’s no hope, you still have to fight it. And you have to fight it with everything you have. I do believe there is hope. I do believe that the significant majority of Americans, if they can put down the phone for a minute, will realize the craziness that we’re going through, the manipulation we’re going through. So I do think there’s hope, but it’s tough. I mean, it’s changing a culture is extremely tough. But I do think there’s hope and we have no choice but to fight it.

Brandy Shufutinsky

(00:17:33): And what I’m seeing in the work that I do is, you know, specifically focused on education, mostly K through 12 education is the normalization of that type of illiberalism with Zionism and Israel representing the counter to the beliefs that these entities actually seek to establish as normal. And so, how anti-Zionism is showing up in the K through 12 spaces is in two ways that pretty much overlap, the ideas and conversations and teachings about settler colonialism and about decolonization. And in order for those two ideas to be placed on Israel and on Zionism, what has to happen is one of the most fundamental aspects of bigotry, which is dehumanization. So, Jews as a people are erased and reduced to just a religion. And if Jews can be classified as just a religion and not a people, then there’s no reason for Jews to be recognized as indigenous to the land of Israel.

(00:18:37): There’s no reason to recognize Israel as a nation state for the Jewish people, and then Jews as the people get replaced and supplanted by a another. People that then justify the types of celebrations that we saw on October 8th. The celebrations of the Hamas led massacre against Israelis. But it’s really looking at the ideas of decolonization and settler colonialism and who’s pushing it, who benefits from it. And we’re seeing now in American schools, foreign entities funding and leading curricular materials that are being taught in kindergarten through 12th grade, to children that are against the values of democracy. And so the idea is that if a student is going to stand on the right side of history or speak truth to power, then they’re being told, they’re being taught that they have to be anti-Zionist, because again, this, this ideology and this worldview holds the Zionism and democracy as everything that we should stand against because they’re representative of the ideas and the power of the oppressor.

(00:45:21) I think one of the reasons comes from what both Bill and Andrew spoke about related to higher education. Where if colleges and universities are ideologically captured to believe that being an anti-Zionist is the morally right thing to do, well, that’s where teachers come from, and that’s how they’re able to build that pipeline into the K through 12 space. But I think one of the other reasons is that our schools are the wild, wild West. They’re an open door for malign and foreign influence to spend money to buy the future of our country. Because if they can institutionalize anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, any types of ideologies that are completely counter to our republic, to our constitutional rights, then they’ve captured the culture of our country. I agree with Bill, that some of the legal remedies to this may be bandaids, and that this is more of a cultural issue. But I also have to say that some of those band aids are necessary while we’re to stem the bleeding so that we can rebuild the cultural values that we at least were striving to decades ago, striving towards.

(00:57:31) I actually see it a little bit different. I think that progressives and Islamists share one very important thing in common besides hating Western civilization or arguably civilization at large. And that is an embrace of illiberalism and small “l” liberal values require respect for the individual, which that idea respect for the individual, liberty for the individual does not exist in progressive or Islamist societies. And that illiberalism right there is the uniting piece. And I think it’s important to pay attention to that because the things that they’re standing against are small “l” liberal values and nations that uphold those values. And that’s also where you get the horseshoe theory of the far-left and the far-right uniting in their illiberalism for the hatred of what small “l” liberalism represents. And Israel seems to be one of the first things that they attack.

(00:59:38): And that part can’t not happen again because they’re so opposed in other areas of society. But if you look at far left ideology and their views on race and their views on misogyny. Well, their ideas are actually misogynistic. They aren’t supportive of the rights for girls and women. They’re not supportive of equality for people regardless of race or ethnicity. In fact they want equity, which means the elimination of the individual and the preference of the right group of people, the right race of people over another. So even though they may use the language of being anti-racist, in fact the ideology is very racist. It’s very illiberal. It’s very undemocratic.

(01:02:41): So, what we’re seeing, which we touched on a little bit earlier, is the foreign funding of not just curricular materials that are used in K through 12 classrooms, but also teacher training. And the countries that are providing it are, you know, surprise authoritarian countries, countries that are not run democratically where people do not have rights of free speech and freedom to assemble and freedom of religion. We have been doing research on China, on Qatar, on Iran, and there are American K through 12 schools that are receiving funding and support from all three of those countries across the country, multiple states. This is not just a Blue State issue. We are unfortunately seeing that that level of foreign influence infiltrate multiple states across our country, multiple grades K through 12.

Andrew Pessin

(00:20:32) …. both Bill and Brandy talked about the Soviet origins of antizionism, but I actually think it goes back further. Isabel Tabarovsky’s work is fantastic, and so much of the vocabulary we see on campuses today amongst Western progressives is directly derived from the Soviets. So that’s not false, but in fact, if you really want to understand the roots of it, it goes back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that famous antisemitic text that appeared in Imperial Russia around 1903, which is of course, the source of the classic 20th century antisemitic stereotypes.

(00:21:29) …. we know it as a famous antisemitic text, but it’s also actually a fundamental and foundational antizionist text. It is not for nothing that that text is set at, is typically understood to be set at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and Basel…..

(00:22:21) …. On the Protocols view, Zionism becomes part of this Jewish plot to conquer the world and dominate and destroy other people. And so from the Jew hatred, the antizionism follows immediately. And we see this in the Protocols….

(00:23:20): And so this antizionism that’s based on the Protocols is full fledged in the Nazis….  What the Soviets basically did was take the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and rewrite it in Marxist Leninist terms. And that became the Soviet propaganda that college students are now just reciting by rote on campuses today. So there’s actually a straight line from the Protocols through the Nazis, through the Soviets to today….

(00:24:23) …. But the problem is too many people, almost everybody, certainly in the campus scene, certainly students, they have no idea just how evil the Soviet Union was…. But it turns out the program that they’re running on campuses is just a mirror image or just rooted in the Nazi program. So I think it would be useful for folks who are sympathetic to Israel, in addition to pointing out the Soviet roots of today’s campus antizionism, to point out the Nazi roots.

(00:27:53) And I think there’s a lot of problems with settler colonialism as an ideology and as a discipline…. But the most evil thing about it is the way it’s weaponized, specifically against Israel. So if we grant for a moment that it’s a legitimate form of scholarship, it’s a legitimate discipline, then the conclusion is clear. They should be all Zionists, right? What motivates people who pursue this discipline is that they want to empower colonized people and remove the colonizer, remove oppression. They ought to all be Zionists, because ZZionism is the most successful version of exactly that. So the fact that they’re not speaks volumes to me. It shows you how dishonest they are….

Kemberlee Kaye

I love this panel because we have a lot of different fights represented here. We have higher education, we have a legal battle, we have K through 12. But one of the things I find most concerning is that this is bled into broad culture, largely perpetuated by what we call the woke right and the influencer class, and the Candace Owens’s of the world who have blamed Israel for anything and everything, and who have successfully convinced people in believing that you can be anti-Israel or anti-Zionist, but that doesn’t mean that you’re anti-Semitic. It’s something I know that Professor Jacobson has lectured on for at least a decade, which is that the two are inseparable. 

We see these things being incubated in the academy. We see them being perpetuated in K through 12 these days as a byproduct of the academy. Years ago Brandy did a study for us, which we published, that discussed who teaches the teachers. So this ideology goes from the academies to the teachers and then then into the public system. And now we’re seeing people on the street believing that it’s possible to be opposed to the Jewish state of Israel <laugh>, but somehow you can still support the Jewish people. We really need as many voices in every single space and in every single sphere to correct this thinking, because it’s wrong. As our panelists have discussed, it’s all predicated on a lie. It’s predicated on Soviet propaganda. The thinking needs to be discussed, and it needs to be discouraged, and the truth needs to be brought to light.

And this is where we’re at a very critical point in time with so many things culturally and ideologically, that I would encourage you to be bolder than you ever have been before. And whether it’s your friend or a relationship that is important to you, if you know someone who is thinking wrongly about this, to bring that up and, and have that discussion in an honest way. We have gone well beyond the line of being able to just sit back and pretend like these things will just go away, because they have not, because no one has said anything, or not enough people have said anything. Not enough people have pushed back. So, at least in this space that I monitor closely, which I guess would be more of the cultural space and how the ideology permeates into broad culture, the fact that this has become so prominent and so pervasive, I find incredibly frightening.

I don’t live in fear, but it’s cause for concern. So I just want to encourage people to up your game in the boldness department, because it’s going to require people in every single sphere pushing back on these types of ideologies and really what are nothing more than lies, if we’re going to make any difference at all….

 I think all of this speaks to a collective ignorance that did not exist 20 years ago. I know even when I was in primary school, I had a little bit of a different upbringing growing up all over the world, but there was just, there was a very different value set. There was a very different type of content that was being taught in primary education. There was a knowledge passed down and taught about what happened in Iran, about the Soviets. When I was a kid, everything was the bad guys on TV  were either the Soviets or the Nazis.,

Those were the bad guys. And so many things have happened in the last couple of decades that are not shared, and they’re not being passed down to next generations in the way that they were to us. Speaking of my generation. Even outside of the educational space, the formal educational space, those things were just part of our culture and part of the things that we shared, and we’ve lost all of that. We don’t have three channels that everyone watches. So everyone’s watching the exact same programming and knowing the exact same movie quotes and watching all of the old cinema and the spaghetti westerns and The Wizard of Oz…. we’ve lost a cultural touchstone somewhere in all of this, thanks to both education and technology.

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