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........

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