“You are either with the Nazis, or you’re against the Nazis, you are either with the Zionists, or you’re against the Zionists, that’s it.” (Kumar, 2026)
There is no Jewish question, yet currents of the leftist milieu are obsessed with ‘the Jewish question’: the idea that the Jewish collective poses the ultimate harm to humanity. Unless, as a Jewish-identified individual, you are actively in support of the erasure of Israel proper (an exceptional Jew), then you are part and parcel of the question of what is to be done with these (ordinary) Jews. The two recordings below – from activists central to the “Zionism is Racism” motion passed at the Green Party conference on 4th October 2026 – are illustrative of this ideological phenomenon.
Ashok Kumar (2026) articulates clearly his absolute anti-Zionism as a deliberately polarising demand: you are either with us or you are against us, there is no middle ground, there is no liberal Zionism, take the line. He defines liberal Zionism as the lubricant of capitalist and imperialist ideology, and the purpose of anti-Zionism to reveal and flush this out. Both Kumar and his co-interviewee Lubna Speitan see liberal Zionism as the worst form of Zionism for its whitewashing. In his words, “please, I want that polarisation, because it becomes very clear, they’re demonic, and I’m obviously making the human rights argument against their ideology … it reveals their propaganda” (Kumar, 2026).
Responding to the question of what does Zionism mean to you, Speitan (2026) states that Zionism “is the embodiment of every form of oppression, of racism, of fascism, of imperialism, of colonialism … we are confronting not just an ideology but a practice that extends far beyond Palestine … if everybody doesn’t rise against it, it’s a greater world threat … every person, whatever their politics, whether you’re right or left wing, it’s in everybody’s interest to oppose and reject Zionism, and the way it has occupied our system.”
Sean Matgamna (2017) astutely observes, in an article titled What is “left-wing antisemitism?”, that the absolute anti-Zionist left present “a conspiracy of Zionism, conceived of as a demonic force outside general history and outside Jewish history”: “Beginning with the benign-seeming proposal to sink Israel into a broader Arab-majority entity in which “everyone could live in peace”, the chain of logic rooted in the idea that Israel should not have come into existence, that it is an illegitimate state, leads directly – since Israel will not agree to abolish itself – to support compulsion, conquest, and all that goes with it. Israel must be conquered.”
On the anniversary of 7th October, the jubilation expressed by many leftists three years ago was a cheer for total war: the possibility of total victory but the probability of total defeat. The horrors that have come since in Gaza (and the West Bank) perversely seem to fit a script for a messianic battle. All the while, the tragedy is that the plight of the Palestinians for their own homeland has become more and more remote. While Speitan and Kumar deem the fight for a ‘two nations, two states’ settlement to Israel-Palestine unacceptable, their total war rages on – with no end and without end.
