I wasn’t a big supporter of Israel before October 7th. Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. I had begun questioning my views, along with my leftist and post-colonial methods I learned in graduate school decades ago. I was seeing things differently. There’s no other way to say it:

—I had a heightened sense of the magnitude and pervasiveness of antisemitism.

I saw it everywhere. I could see it in the walls. My algorithm certainly didn’t help. It was maximized with years of Jacobin and Al Jazeera repeats–and it kept reminding me of the modern apartheid state, both colonial and genocidal in behavior–none other than the cosmically sinister entity known as Israel.

What I was seeing wasn’t the white nationalist quoting the Turner Diaries, or the Nation of Islam, or any other well-known antisemitic group. This was different. The chanting and repetition came from people of every race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality–well, almost every nationality. Jarring to behold, not only had liberals found a way past the bigotry of their Palestinian organizers, but they seemed to miss (or ignore) the clearly anti-Jewish nature of the rhetoric and positioning.

Let’s put it this way: when someone says “Zionist,” nobody thinks of an Italian.

Imagine a timid new recruit approaching the protest leader, face-wrapped in a keffiyeh, mumbling, “sir, I know we’re not antisemitic, so why are we always outside of synagogues?”

The same people who condemn micro-aggressions didn’t mind macro-ones towards Jews. Unfortunately, this occurred with the feminist response–or lack thereof–to the horrific sexual violence committed against Israeli women on October 7th. It seemed to me the world was inverted.

It was all becoming a bit much.

Like many others, October 7th changed me. I wasn’t hit the way my Jewish friends were, and shamefully, I wasn’t there yet–but eventually the dissonance forced my hand. Luckily, I had some help in the matter. You know when a person reveals themselves by being too obvious? They try and trick you, but you catch it, and suddenly the spell breaks.

You see the thief has a burning hat.

To better understand what had changed in the world, I began by studying the propaganda of Hamas, Iran, and the Soviet Union. My first post was on Palestinian textbooks and how Palestinian children get taught to idolize martyrs, encouraged to one day follow their example. I had been wondering how a particular set of words and phrases–what I call the “Antizionist Lexicon”–spread so rapidly after October 7th.

I had been hearing three words ad nauseam. You know the triad of libels:

Colonizer. Genocide. Apartheid.

One idea–with the logic of a nursery–provided the insight I needed to better understand what was happening around me.

Rhythm and Repetition. I kept thinking. Rhythm and Repetition.

That’s it. That’s what was happening: the protest chants, the triad of libels, and the antizionist lexicon, were all spreading due in part to rhythm and repetition.

Following the 7th, the stock in antizionist slogans shot from baritone to falsetto. “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Occupation is a Crime” were heard in neighborhoods all over the world. They were ubiquitous. This revived vocabulary became atmospheric, quotidian. This is why hearing “Zionist colonizers” and “Apartheid State” felt like your average Tuesday.

It had accomplished its goal: the normalization of antizionism.

Regarding “Free Palestine,” Ab Boskany says that “public life has grown accustomed to the chant.” “The words sound simple, almost musical,” he notes, “yet the meaning is not benign”: “The phrase draws a clear geographic frame…and asserts a single political destiny…that excludes a Jewish state.”

I noticed the incantations as well, specifically in the rhythmic demand for a “Free, Free Palestine.” Shaul Kelner explains that protesters “do not simply shout” for a free Palestine but “often add a second ‘free” because the “(‘Free, Free’) followed by the dactyl (‘Palestine’) creates a rhythm more easily and mellifluously chanted by crowds.”

He also points to something “not benign” that followed.

Kelner mentions how the man who killed Israeli staffers in D.C. “shouted “Free, Free Palestine,” with the doubled “Free,” as he was being arrested.” Since this gunman was alone, one “free” would have been enough.” By yelling it twice, Kelner deduces, this man was “signaling that his actions were part of a larger antizionist movement.”

It turns out, antizionism doesn’t just have a lexicon–it has a hymnal as well.

What spread wasn’t just a protest: it was a liturgy. A set of melodic phrases and sayings loaded with Jew-hatred, disguised or inverted in secular garb. This linguistic sleight of hand is ingenious, for it allows even the most progressive person to publicly say slogans they would otherwise never touch. This is how the Mayor of NYC got away with not condemning “Globalize the Intifada,” because if he refused to rebuke “Suicide Bomb Jewish Buses”–he would no longer be in office.

A former member of Knesset, Einat Wilf, describes how words like occupation, apartheid, and genocide “are chosen for their current associations…either with Jews or with evil” and then “emptied of any of their original, specific meanings and imbued with new and unique interpretations that either invert the original association; or simply become removed from it.”

“Typically, this involves taking the words out of their historical context and putting them into a new decontextualized and ahistorical world,” she writes, about what she calls the “placard strategy.” “The words are then used,” Wilf says, “for the singular purpose of portraying collective Jews…as uniquely evil.”  It seems Ms. Wilf had beat me to the punch.

Interestingly enough, she notes the “nursery rhyme repetition” of these reprogrammed terms.

So, instead of the “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud, jaish Muhammad soufa ya’oud” (“Khaybar, Khaybar, O’ Jews, the army of Muhammad will return”), you may hear in Gaza, we have “Settlers Settlers go back home! Palestine is our home!”

Methods like this brought us the eternally recurrent pejoratives Zionist (Jew), Nazi State (Israel), Colonizer (Jew), and Apartheid State (Israel). This helps explain an important pivot from the antisemitism we’re used to seeing–to the more publicly accepted version of Jew-hatred we see today: antizionism.

The triad of libels isn’t enough, because single words don’t create movements: slogans do. You know who does them best? Russia. If one were to find the secrets of mass propaganda–outside of tea-time with Goebbels, Starace, and Bernays–it would be at the height of Stalinism. And that’s precisely where current protestors unknowingly inherited their vocabulary. It’s the place where Zionism and Israel became associated with every libel under the sun.

“What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda,” writes Izabella Tabarovsky, “is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7.” “Today’s left” she quips, “speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state,” comparing it with “Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.”

She notes that “the way the Soviets talked about Zionism and Israel and the way American campuses were talking about Zionism and Israel were virtually the same…those themes were repeating themselves.” She thought the same as I did: “well, you don’t just reinvent things like that from scratch. It doesn’t work that way.”

“What we are watching,” she says, “is zombie-like repetition.”

There’s that word again. Repetition.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement points out that while anti-Israel crowds “rebrand their language,” they “are not moderating their message, but rather disguising it.” Within Our Lifetime, an antizionist organization known for their support of Hamas, calling for the destruction of Israel, and posting maps of Jewish-owned businesses in NYC– put out a protest toolkit containing chants from “We don’t want two states! We want ‘48!” to “Smash the Settler Zionist State.”

Now I’m not saying anything conspiratorial: none of these turn you into a Manchurian candidate or an actual zombie.

I’m saying that with enough repetition, the psychology of rhythm, and the social dynamics of group behavior, this antizionist lexicon and liturgy provides a significant part of the explanation for what we see around us. 

Colonizer. Genocide.–

Not because you chose it.

Because you’ve heard it.

This all began as a personal reckoning, trying to understand the repeated and rhythmic phrases hypnotizing me and the world. Watching liberals march past their own principles, feminists go silent, and seeing the word “Zionist” replace the word “Jew”—I had to better understand what was happening. The Soviet propaganda machine gave antizionism its vocabulary.

The liturgy—the doubled free, the dactyl, the nursery-rhyme cadence of Colonizer, Genocide, Apartheid—gave it the one thing successful hate movements eventually need: a way to get ordinary people to say extraordinary things without thinking about it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)