Matthew Feinberg@thewebbie
We’ve Seen This Pattern Before
There is a moment I keep coming back to. Not dramatic. Not historic. Just ordinary. Standing in a place that should feel neutral, even safe, and hearing a conversation shift the second the word “Zionist” enters the room. The tone changes. The assumptions lock in. The nuance disappears. And suddenly, without anyone quite saying it out loud, you understand that something larger is happening. Not a debate. Not a disagreement. A pattern. And if you’ve studied enough history, you recognize the feeling immediately. You’ve heard this music before.
Everywhere antizionism has gone, Jews have paid the price.
Not always immediately. Not always in the same way. History does not repeat like a script. It repeats like a pattern. And the pattern is there. Again and again, ideas that begin as “just politics” do not stay there. They harden. They spread. They simplify. And eventually, they land somewhere very real. On people.
It starts quietly. Libels congeal into stigma. Stigma becomes suspicion. And with unsettling regularity, suspicion evolves into campaigns, and then into policies that make Jewish life contingent, suspect, or unsafe. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But often enough that it stops being coincidence.
In 1918, with the rise of the Yevsektsiya, Jewish sections of the Soviet Communist Party were tasked with dismantling Jewish religious and communal life. Synagogues were shut down, schools dismantled, Hebrew suppressed, and Zionism criminalized. All of it was justified in the name of ideological purity. But what it functionally did was attempt to sever Jews from collective identity itself. Not just religion. Not just politics. Identity.
From the 1930s through 1953, Soviet repression deepened this pattern. “Zionist” became more than a word. It became an accusation. A label that enabled fear, arrest, professional ruin, and disappearance. From the anti-cosmopolitan purges of the late 1940s to the Doctors’ Plot, Jewish identity itself became suspect. You did not have to be a Zionist. You only had to be accused of being one.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa unraveled within a single generation. In Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Morocco, Jews who had lived in these lands for centuries, in some cases millennia, found themselves facing rising hostility, legal discrimination, expulsions, and violence tied to the rejection of Jewish sovereignty. Nearly a million Jews were displaced. These were not abstract political developments. They were families leaving behind homes, businesses, and histories with little more than what they could carry.
In 1968, Poland carried out what it called an “antizionist” campaign. In practice, it was a state purge. Jews were accused of disloyalty, stripped of citizenship, dismissed from their positions, and forced into exile. Tens of thousands left, not because they chose to, but because they were told, unmistakably, that they did not belong.
In 1972, the Munich Olympics became a global stage for murder. Jewish athletes were taken hostage and killed. The perpetrators framed their actions as political struggle, but the victims were not policymakers or soldiers. They were Jews. The distinction collapsed in real time.
In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. Jewish self-determination was singled out as uniquely illegitimate among national movements. This was not fringe rhetoric or street-level agitation. It was international doctrine. Although the resolution was revoked in 1991, the stigma it introduced did not disappear with it.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet Jews who sought to emigrate became known as Refuseniks. They were denied exit visas, fired from their jobs, harassed, and in some cases imprisoned. The accusation was consistent. Zionism. The punishment was equally consistent. Isolation and pressure designed to break identity and aspiration alike.
From the 1980s into the 2000s, terror campaigns targeting Jewish civilians unfolded across Western Europe. Synagogues were bombed. Jewish institutions attacked. Incidents in cities like Paris, Brussels, and Toulouse made clear that geography offered no real protection. These were not conflict zones. Yet Jews were targeted as if they were participants in a war they did not control.
During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, violence surged in Israel, but its effects were not contained there. Across Europe and Latin America, Jewish institutions were attacked, and Jewish individuals were targeted. The line between Israeli policy and Jewish identity blurred, then effectively disappeared. Jews became proxies for a conflict happening thousands of miles away.
Beginning in 2005, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement emerged, framed as a human rights campaign. In practice, it often translated into academic boycotts, cultural exclusion, and increasing pressure on Jewish participation in public life. The issue was no longer limited to policy critique. It extended into determining where Jews could speak, study, perform, or belong without first disavowing parts of their identity.
By the 2010s, this dynamic became more normalized and less overt. There were fewer formal policies and fewer headlines, but more social conditioning. Litmus tests emerged. Boundaries, often unspoken, became clear. Jews were welcome, but conditionally. Only if they renounced. Only if they distanced themselves. Only if they explained themselves before being allowed to participate.
We have seen this before. There is already a word for it. Exile. Not always geographic. Sometimes social. Sometimes intellectual. But exile nonetheless.
In the 2020s, harassment moved increasingly into the open. It appeared in public squares, on campuses, and in everyday spaces. Synagogues were vandalized. Jews were assaulted. Symbols were defaced. The assumption that distance could provide safety began to erode. Hostility, once localized, proved highly portable.
Following October 7, 2023, there was a marked global surge in intimidation and violence directed at Jewish communities. Alongside this came rhetoric that collapsed distinctions entirely. Jew, Israeli, and “Zionist” were no longer treated as separate categories. They were merged into a single, undifferentiated target.
By 2025, in places like Bondi Beach, this climate turned lethal. Jews gathered for Hanukkah were murdered in an antisemitic terror attack. This did not occur in a war zone or along a contested border. It happened in a civilian space, far removed geographically from the conflict itself. Distance, once assumed to provide insulation, did not.
The pattern is not identical in every time or place. But the trajectory recurs with striking consistency. It begins with ideas, moves into stigma, then exclusion, then coercion, and at times, violence.
History does not move in straight lines, but it leaves tracks. And those tracks are visible.
When antizionism becomes a totalizing framework, when it stops functioning as a critique and instead becomes a lens through which all Jews are judged, Jewish communities have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of its consequences.
Jews do not fear criticism. Debate is embedded in Jewish culture. It is part of how we think, argue, and refine truth.
What we fear are patterns.
Because we have seen where they lead.
And we have buried too many people at the end of them.
