Scenes from an Anti-Anti-Zionist Symposium

At an event space just outside Toronto last month, the combative new Canadian pro-Israel group Tafsik hosted what it called the “World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism,” a daylong conference featuring all the biggest names in North American Zionist apologetics. Shiri Pasternak, a Toronto-based academic and writer, sat through the conference and shared her notes on the proceedings with Jewish Currents. 

Pasternak said that the mood at the conference was embattled. “They really recognize that they’re in a kind of crisis,” Paternak said. “In the war of hearts and minds, it’s clear their grasp is slipping.”

Tafsik is one of a new wave of anti-anti-Zionist groups that has  appeared in recent years as pro-Israel advocates look for new language and strategies to roll back the rapid shifts in North American public opinion on Israel. Among similar anti-anti-Zionist groups like Stop Antizionism, which co-sponsored the Toronto conference, and Movement Against Antizionism, Tafsik stands out for its particularly abrasive and crude approach. When Canada’s New Democratic Party elected the Jewish anti-Zionist Avi Lewis as its leader in March, Tafsik called Lewis a “weak, pathetic man,” a “groveling schmuck,” and a “contemptible failure.”

“Tafsik is positioning itself as a wartime organization that can pivot quickly, is grassroots, and is [ready] to fight,” said Pasternak. “They are positioning themselves as the attack dog.”

The May 17th Tafsik symposium in Woodbridge, Ontario drew more than 1,000 people. That’s a major Jewish event in Canada, a country with around 400,000 Jews, and its scale is a sign of an intensifying hard-right reaction to the growth on the Jewish left since October 7th. Panel discussions featured figures like Gad Saad, the marketing professor who has remade himself as an online anti-woke gadfly beloved by Elon Musk, and Eve Barlow, a music journalist and pro-Israel advocate. The conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, a major figure on the online American right, delivered the keynote address.

The sessions were peppered with Islamaphobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric, as well as crass attacks on anti-Zionist Jews. With Pasternak, we picked out seven moments from the conference that give a picture of what the discourse is like right now on the anti-anti-Zionist right. 

ANTI-ZIONIST JEWS ARE BUGS: At a panel on “anti-Zionism in education,” Gad Saad called Jewish anti-Zionists “the most execrable of all anti-Zionists,” to applause from the crowd, and launched into a tortured metaphor—a favorite of his—that situated Jewish anti-Zionists as suicidal insects hijacked by foreign bodies. “An actual wood cricket abhors water,” Saad said. “It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water,” killing the wood cricket. Jewish anti-Zionists, Saad said, are “wood cricket Jews.”

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR DENIAL: After establishing Jewish anti-Zionists as insects, Saad asked the audience to guess who he believed to be the “biggest of the degenerate wood crickets.” Someone in the crowd offered Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart. “Peter Beinart is a good one, I despise him,” Saad said. “But no: Gabor Maté.” Maté, an author of popular psychology books who has been a leading public critic of Israeli violence against Palestinians, was born in Budapest in 1944, in the midst of the Holocaust. Saad ridiculed characterizations of Maté, who is Jewish, as a Holocaust survivor. “Six-month-old infants are not cognizant beings,” Saad said. “If he is a Holocaust survivor, then I too am a Holocaust survivor, because in the 1940s I was swimming in my dad’s testicles as a spermatozoa.”

DARK ENERGY: On a panel about “alternative media,” pro-Israel influencer Emily Austin asked Eve Barlow to talk about “how anti-Zionism has kind of destroyed the UK.” Barlow obliged, saying that “people are still afraid to talk about what’s really going on, which is this creeping Islamism. And anti-Zionism has been the Trojan horse by which it has entered our lives.” Later, Barlow said that she had moved out of the UK in 2014. “It was dark energy there in the UK,” she said. “I could feel the creep-in. It was just dark . . . It’s eating away at everything.”

“SUICIDAL EMPATHY”: Later in the same panel on “alternative media,” Austin borrowed one of Saad’s favorite terms as she opined on immigration policy. “It’s so interesting, you see it all the time,” she said. “People leave their third-world countries to come to a phenomenal, functional first-world country that suffers from suicidal empathy, that allows them in en masse. And then they bring the values that destroyed their country into this one. But it seems deliberate. So they know exactly what they’re doing.”

NOT A JEW: Ben Shapiro baits the left for a living, and he was on his game at the symposium. In the course of defending a claim that it is “inherently anti-Jewish to oppose Zionism,” Shapiro produced an argument meant to prove, through his customary rhetorical tactic of tilting at the flimsiest of straw men, that anti-Zionist Jews are not Jewish. “Remember the real definition of modern Zionism: The proposition that the Jewish state of Israel ought not be exterminated,” he said. “Any Jew who does not believe that is not a Jew in any real sense.”

INTERNECINE STRIFE: During a fireside chat-style session after his keynote, Shapiro was asked about anti-Zionism on the right. “’I can’t even be critical of Israel” is the get-out-of-jail-free card online,” Shapiro said, referring to what he said were efforts by right-wing figures to defuse charges of antisemitism. “This is a retarded idea.” Shapiro has been locked in an internecine conservative brawl with Tucker Carlson and others on the right who have dabbled in antisemitism while growing increasingly critical of Israel. “My annoyance has grown with the people who watch this trash and treat it as though it’s somehow worthy of respect,” Shapiro said.

PAY NO ATTENTION: The former Knesset member Einat Wilf, who leads a small new Israeli political party called Oz, joined virtually to make the case that “Gazans, Arabs, [and] Muslims can and should be Zionists.” While Wilf seemed allergic to using the term “Palestinian,” she essentially argued that they should stop resisting the state that explicitly excludes and displaces them. All they have to do is “let go of the obsessive anti-Zionism,” she said.