The Antizionist Pseudo-Consensus
Adam Louis-Klein
The central objective of the contemporary academy and much of the political left has been to manufacture a pseudo-consensus — not through evidence or critical reasoning, but through the relentless repetition of rumor. This pseudo-consensus simulated the appearance of objective fact: Israel’s alleged “genocide” against Palestinians was presented as a horror so self-evident that to question it was to reveal oneself as evil. The goal was not to argue or persuade, but to create a condemnation without appeal — a system where defense of Israel, or even hesitation before judgment, instantly marked one as a “racist,” a “right-wing extremist,” a “Zionist.” In this way, Jewishness itself was racialized into an image of absolute political and moral depravity.
What emerged was not a series of individual prejudices, but a totalizing system of hate — a structure that fused rumor with moral certainty and presented demonization as objective reality. Much like the era when racism against African Americans was normalized through the pseudo-objectivity of “racial science,” anti-Jewish hatred today has been cloaked in the language of “justice,” “decolonization,” and “anti-racism,” even as it reproduces the oldest structures of exclusion.
Only when an external power — such as the Trump administration — challenged the dominance of this moral system did we see the academy begin to waver. But it was not truth that moved it; it was fear of losing power. The academy, which postured as a bastion of critical thought, revealed itself as an institution whose “truths” were sustained by political power, not intellectual integrity. Its anti-Zionist pseudo-consensus had always been less about Palestinian well-being than about solidifying its own authority — with Jews, once again, sacrificed as the scapegoat.
As Natan Sharansky has rightly observed, there is no Israeli policy of extermination — just as Jews historically knew they did not kill Christian children for ritual purposes. But the pseudo-consensus does not permit such truths to surface. It is built to entrench hate beneath a veneer of objectivity, shielding itself from scrutiny and punishing those who question, exactly as past racial regimes once did.
What we are witnessing is not a spontaneous expression of conscience, but the construction of a moral regime—one that recycles old antisemitic patterns under new progressive codes. Its power lies not in its arguments, but in its ability to make argument impossible. And its greatest violence is not rhetorical but structural: the exclusion of Jews from the space of reason itself.
Adam Louis-Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and musician, currently completing a PhD in Anthropology at McGill University. His work explores Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and contemporary antisemitism, drawing connections between civilizational identity, recursive ethnography, and the politics of indigeneity.