We Don’t Talk Like Nazis

This week, leftists on multiple social media platforms debated whether the acronym “ZOG” is an accurate or acceptable descriptor for the United States government. The term “ZOG,” which stands for Zionist Occupied Government, was popularized by The Turner Diaries – a 1978 novel by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce. Pierce was the founder and chairman of National Alliance, a white supremacist political organization that once had an annual income of $1 million. The neo-Nazi organization The Order, which was modeled after a militant white supremacist group in The Turner Diaries, committed armed robberies and funneled the proceeds to the leaders of several neo-Nazi organizations, including Pierce. Members of The Order also assassinated talk show host Alan Berg. Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh had a copy of The Turner Diaries in his possession when he was arrested and had been known to sell and distribute copies of the book. In The Turner Diaries, white supremacists rebel against a “Zionist Occupied Government” and ultimately exterminate Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, and Jewish people. As someone with antifascist politics, I have long considered any use of the term “ZOG” to be an obvious indication that someone held fascist beliefs and likely harbored fantasies about “cleansing” society of marginalized people. So, why are some people on the left using this language? To break down what’s happening and why this issue matters, I talked with my friend Shane Burley. Shane is the author of Fascism Today and Why We Fight, and a co-author of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kelly Hayes: Some people on the left have debated the term "ZOG" this week. Can you tell us a bit about what you've seen regarding that controversy and offer some background on the term "ZOG"?

Shane Burley: So the term “ZOG” is an abbreviation for Zionist Occupation Government (sometimes Zionist Occupied Government, or other variations). This is in no way a neutral descriptive term; it comes from very explicit neo-Nazi antisemitism and has become one of the primary ways fascists understand not just Israel and Zionism but the ruling class in general as what they believe is a distinctly Jewish phenomenon.

Part of why I think this is difficult for some on the left to reckon with is that many of these terms we use regularly do not have centralized definitions. Their meanings can be heavily contested. The meaning of Zionism itself is frequently debated, meaning different things to different people. Generally, from leftist critics of Israel, we understand Zionism as a political project to colonize historic Palestine and maintain a specifically Jewish state whose existence hinges on the preferencing and hegemony of a Jewish demographic majority. The alternative to that would be some of the different proposed arrangements that help to ensure democracy, equality, and safety for all residents of the region, at least if someone from a dependably left-wing perspective is speaking.

For neo-Nazis, Israel is simply one small element of what Zionism is, which they see as the political operationalism of Jewishness itself. Zionism is the project of global Jewish control by which Jews seed themselves into dominant institutions to manipulate them and turn them towards supposedly homogenous Jewish interests. Those interests are the destruction of the white race and “traditional” societies, often through perversion and thought control, so that Jews can ultimately rule over them. Unlike supposedly natural and normal empires and states, which in this formulation emerge from the white volk and are part of a supposedly harmonious white ethnic identity, ZOG is a parasitic, diseased manifestation of an outside influence, using the best Aryan traits against Aryan interests so that they can further centralize resources, power, and hierarchies. There is a ruling class in this formulation, but it’s not the capitalists: instead, the true rulers are Jews, and the non-Jewish ruling class are either puppets of ZOG or soon to become puppets.

This term came from neo-Nazi projects in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of explaining why the federal government was a lost institution: it had been captured by an alien influence. We have to consider how white nationalism reconstituted itself after the Civil Rights Movement made gains in undoing legally sanctioned segregation and Jim Crow laws and made public and legislative expressions of open racism less acceptable. Now, racists could not just run for office or push communities towards racialist conclusions; they had to engage in a revolutionary struggle because the government was no longer run by and for the white man: ZOG was now in control. And ZOG will use non-white people, queer rights, feminism, pornography, finance capitalism, and other systems to further undermine white sovereignty, identity, and flourishing. Fascist movements have always had a revolutionary character and that only became more important during this period, but they also mix class resentments with racial ones. So, while they may play on working-class white people’s anti-immigrant xenophobia, they want to connect that xenophobia with rising mortgage rates, the epidemic of family farm foreclosures in the 1970s, and other geopolitical strife. The way you link those very different social issues is ZOG: the same forces that are telling your kids being queer is alright are also those sending troops to foreign wars and outsourcing your job. This all becomes one and the same: the forces of modernity financially exploiting you and undermining “traditional” life, and the complex political system enacting this is the shadow government that hides its true face.

So ZOG was never just meant to just be about Israel, but it also used the language of a growing anti-Zionist movement. This was also a period of time when fascists began to appropriate some of the language of the New Left, particularly amongst the European New Right and neofascist leadership. They wanted to present the racist backlash of American whites as a national liberation struggle, and they made a case that a “nationalism for all people” model can work because, they argue, all peoples have a central enemy: ZOG.

They then wanted to adapt to the changing geopolitical significance of Israel and focus on its Jewish nature, and pick up on the disenfranchisement that was growing with Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They do this by integrating anti-Zionist rhetoric into their antisemitism, thus creating a unified theory of Jewish power and control. Today, you are much, much more likely to see white nationalists writing negatively about Israel and stating (erroneously) that they support Palestine than the reverse. The mainstream right, itself often baked in antisemitism, offers ostensible support to Israel, but white nationalists mostly oppose it since they see it as a global headquarters for the Jewish conspiracy. But, as is true of neo-Nazi ideology, they see little difference between the Knesset and the Chicago synagogue; they are simply different manifestations of the same global force. And, of course, they never have any sincere care for the Palestinian people and will also oppose Palestinian refugee resettlement, Western aid, or support for anti-colonial struggles in other areas controlled by white settlers.

It was alarming to me, as someone with a background in antifascism, to see leftists saying things like, "Well, the term ZOG is accurate." Those statements reminded me of the dril tweet about how you don't ever actually have to hand it to ISIL. Leftists have been critiquing Zionism for a very long time without deploying the language of Nazi conspiracies. I was also disturbed to see some people say things like, "I acknowledge that it's a bad term, but I can't bring myself to care while people are dying horribly in Gaza." The normalization of Nazi rhetoric is always a bad thing and always evidence that the left is losing ground, but the normalization of Nazi rhetoric in the context of defending Gaza is also incredibly harmful to the movement. Can you talk a bit about why the use of this language among leftists is so damaging right now?

There are a couple of things here that I think are worth drawing out. The first is that, unfortunately, I have heard ZOG mentioned on the Left as long as I have been on the Left. Certainly not this frequently, and overwhelmingly, people understand that this is not how Israel and Zionism work and that this is fascist rhetoric. But it does happen, and the reasons are rather simple: people on the left sometimes have bad ideas, too. Sometimes, I bristle at talk of left-wing antisemitism because when antisemitism shows up on the left, it doesn’t actually look very leftist. This is actually where terms like “fascist creep” come from, whereby a sort of undifferentiated radicalism turns to any idea or argument they can find to help motivate their critique and feelings of disdain. So you will find anti-war leftists in bed with pro-Assad far-right figures or anti-interventionist paleocons because they think that anyone pushing back on the war is likely a good thing. They may then move even further to see the war itself as the center of all social strife and, therefore, construct an Overton Window that includes anyone opposed to the war as in the camp of allies. In problematic anti-imperialist circles, this can take the form of “campism,” a kind of “any enemy of my enemy must be my friend” whereby despotic, racist, and authoritarian leaders are sometimes refashioned as allies simply because they are stated enemies of the U.S. This is a problem that is in no way unique to the Palestine movement. I have seen versions of it in radical environmentalism, which has let in anti-immigrant and pro-eugenic voices; in abortion rights spaces, where TERF ideas sometimes have purchase; in the labor movement, where it’s still not uncommon to hear talk of “closing the border,” and the reason is that people often lack an intersectional and three-dimensional analysis of class, empire, and colonialism. 

Why is it happening more now? A couple of reasons. The first is just math. This is the largest the Palestine solidarity movement has ever become in the U.S. – just incredible, really – and so just by note of that increase, you probably will have an increase in the number of people who have unprincipled and problematic discourses on the subject. This is also at a moment when U.S. support for the genocide is so obvious and where talk of why is so diffuse that people are actively looking for answers. At the same time, pro-Israel groups like AIPAC literally do try to influence US policy – and brag about it – successfully unseating progressive Democrats like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, in part because of their ceasefire positions. The pro-Israel voices outpace Israel’s critics in Congress, the Senate, statehouses, the White House, corporate America, the media, etc. So, it could literally feel like Zionism has more purchase in American institutions. But there is an incredibly obvious problem here: the reason it has purchase here is because it is in the interest of the American ruling class. 

It’s not just that the rich and powerful of the U.S. have an interest in Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East; it's that they are all a part of the same Western empire. Israel’s role has always been as a way of holding American and Western interests in the region, a focus point for military Keynesianism (our aid is largely funneling tax dollars to US weapons manufacturers), and this has always been how imperial forces viewed Israel and the Zionist movement. Zionist leaders themselves knew, from the start, that they would need imperial sponsors because they were not actually a “national liberation” movement, despite what their rhetoric sounds like because Zionist settlers were not actually from the land they were now seeding a state-building project in. Instead, this rather small band of activists would have to act as agents of a larger European colonial project, and in many ways, they adapted the ideologies of the Zionist movement to fit with things like Christian Zionism, which came long before Jewish Zionism and always had more adherents. Today, the US supports Israel’s slide towards far-right, racist policies, and the invisibilization of the Occupation in the state itself – the average American knows more about Israeli history than Israelis do – because Israel continues to be not just a strategic asset for the US, but a piece of the same project. 

Antisemitism emerged from a strategy that the European monarchical, Christian ruling class had for diverting and diffusing class anger. Christian theologians introduced suspicion about Jews – particularly about why they continued to practice since it was so obvious Jesus was the messiah – often refashioning them in demonic, conspiratorial, and uniquely clannish terms. But this ideology gave way to the process of compelling some Jews into money lending, imperial collaboration, and tax collecting, so when the peasants revolted against their mistreatment, the faces they knew for this oppression were Jewish. When the peasants revolted against their conditions, they often engaged in incredibly cruel pogroms against Jews, while the systems of exploitation and the real ruling class remained largely untouched.

While we shouldn’t go too far with this analogy, Israel is itself enacting unremitting genocide from the center of a far-right ethnostate; it also is a particularly visible face of a global system that doesn’t start and stop with Zionism. Once, when I saw Norman Finklestein speak, he said that he didn’t think Zionism was the operative concept in Israel, maybe had not been for some time. In a way, I think he is partially right – though Zionism still ends up as an ideological force, particularly in its more radicalized form in the settlements – in that the operative systems there are the same as here: imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. 

So, is the U.S. a Zionist Occupied Government? I would think it’s fairer to say that historic Palestine is an imperial-occupied place. What is happening there is not just in the interest of the Israeli ruling class, but the American ruling class, and the reality is that every Zionist argument for the State of Israel is largely failing the average Jew in both the diaspora and Israel. It is not making Jews safer, it is not preserving Jewish life and identity, it is not ending antisemitism, and it is certainly not helping us move into a political system that protects the flourishing and communal partnership of all peoples.

You and I have talked at length about the weaponization of antisemitism allegations against the Palestine solidarity movement, and this has ramped up over the past year to a level that I personally did not realize would even have been possible. There is a cottage industry of alleging antisemitism from even rather mundane expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, such as chanting “from the river to the sea.” This framework is even making its way into law, where it can be used to further restrict speech, and people are losing their jobs, their positions in their communities, and their chance for an education by allegations thrown around without clear merit. For example, if I was invited to speak at the University of Arkansas, I would have to sign a pledge to not boycott the State of Israel. This is a bizarre solution to the problem of antisemitism, and antisemites have no problem pointing to these sorts of instances to suggest that Jews are simply using the claim to hide their power and control.

But when the Palestine movement actually allows real antisemitism to stand, they end up lending credence to the allegations. What pro-Israel voices want more than anything is to point to consensus examples of antisemitism and connect them to the students chanting “free Palestine” so they can prove the latter is actually just a reconstitution of the former. By allowing ZOG rhetoric to be normalized, what it ends up doing is not embedding a critique of Israel further into public discourse. It makes the entire conversation appear marginal. Now, people will literally think that discussions of AIPAC must be expressions of ZOG discourse, and it will be hard to turn back the dial on this. We already had a similar debate close to 20 years ago when the term “Israel lobby” became common, a term which sometimes flattens how we see power and influence and can lend itself to antisemitic conspiracism, but certainly not always. In this case, people talked hard about how to explain the influence of a pro-Israel lobby group like AIPAC without diving into a more conspiratorial “Israel lobby” paradigm that sees all Jewish groups as part of a supposedly homogenous transnational network of Zionist agents. But with people resorting to the ZOG analogy, there is a willful rejection of nuance, analysis, and precision. 

Part of why I think that is happening is that people are just really angry, understandably so. The genocide in Gaza is unprecedented; nothing seems able to stop it, and it has been rendered invisible by major US institutions. And when rage guides our politics, it can almost feel empowering to be transgressive, to say something fucked up because the situation is itself so fucked up. Why not accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of blood libel? Certainly he’s doing something so bad we might as well get mythological with our condemnations. But this is always the problem with letting reactionary ideas into a social movement, they don’t just hurt your enemies, they hurt the rest of us. 

I was doing a wage theft campaign at an immigrant-owned business once that had taken advantage of two undocumented woman workers, both of whom only spoke Spanish. We were on a picket line, and those workers started a chant in Spanish, which I couldn’t parse out and didn’t pay much attention to until someone ran up to me and asked if I knew what they were saying. “They’re chanting ‘Go back to China’ in Spanish,” she said, and I immediately noticed that news cameras were now pointing at the chanters. When we talked about this later, I was horrified when some people simply didn’t care: those bosses had it coming. But it’s not them we were hurting; it was other immigrant communities that have no role in this, and it’s not the boss’s ethnic ancestry that’s the issue; it’s wage theft. 

I don’t see this question as fundamentally different. I think people are resorting to ZOG rhetoric partially because of bad analysis and partially because they want to be offensive because the hurt is real and pervasive. But we will get nowhere that we want to be if we don’t have a universally liberatory vision, and I am watching as some Jews in the Palestine movement actually start backing away because of this. This doesn’t help, especially since this should be an all-hands-on-deck moment to stop the genocide.

Some leftists are wholly dismissive of the subject of antisemitism right now. Some people are taking this position because they are fed up with false allegations of antisemitism being leveled at anyone who opposes the genocide Israel is waging against Palestinians. Some people simply don't think these concerns should be front and center right now in light of the severity of what's happening. Can you say more about why we cannot afford to simply put concerns about genuine antisemitism on the back burner, as though they just aren't pressing enough to consider right now?

I think that an understandable type of cynicism has started to creep in. Allegations of antisemitism are so persistent that it is hard for many to take them seriously when they are invoked around Israel and Zionism. I have been accused of antisemitism several times myself despite being a Jew who wears a kippah, prays in the direction of Jerusalem three times a day, and literally wrote a book about antisemitism. So, I definitely understand people’s hesitancy, but the reality is that by every available metric, antisemitism has risen. I recently did a project re-analyzing the entire ADL antisemitism data for 2023. As you would expect, there were a ton of incidents they count that, when you look at them, are either overblown or simply not antisemitic, and they don’t include a lot of types of antisemitism that they probably should if you want a clear picture. But what you also find is that there have been more antisemitic white nationalist incidents that year than nearly every year since Trump took office. There were 1,000 bomb threats at synagogues and Jewish institutions and an unprecedented number of reports of street attacks and harassment, many of which have perpetrators literally yelling about ZOG. This is explainable both by the recent returning rise of the far-right, particularly open neo-Nazis, and also just Israel’s violence, which always leads to peaking moments of antisemitism because it often inflames existing antisemitic attitudes.

It’s also important to note the centrality of antisemitism to a whole host of reactionary movements right now. Christian nationalism has seen a catastrophic rise over the past few years and, while often pro-Israel, makes antisemitic ideas a centerpiece of their ideology. Right now, the ideological core of the pro-Israel Republican consensus comes from a Christian theology that supports Israel because it sees it as central to an eschatology whereby Jews will face both mass genocide and forced conversion. The unprecedented attacks on trans healthcare and youth are also built around antisemitic conspiracy theories, as are the growing anti-abortion movement and anti-immigration movements. Because conspiracy theories are overwhelmingly founded on antisemitism and because they are central to how you create a sort of intellectual scaffolding to explain what would otherwise be outlandish ideas about marginalized communities, antisemitism ends up intimately tied to all other forms of bigoted or oppressive movements. Antisemitism is a key part of how far-right sources conceive of themselves, so even beyond the threat to Jews, which is real, antisemitism is an important part of the right that systematically disenfranchises and attacks all marginalized communities.

All of this begs us to build a different model of fighting antisemitism that doesn’t take the bait when Zionists claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitism, nor does it ignore the pressing reality of growing antisemitism. That is why Ben Lorber and I wrote our recent book Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism because there was a growing gap in how the left handles the question of antisemitism. When the left refuses to grapple with this question, it cedes that ground to the right and makes the establishment narrative, which is built on right-leaning political centrism and Zionism, appear correct to people who may otherwise want to engage in a more collective and universal struggle for liberation. 

We need cross-communal alliances urgently, and we have to build them quickly. Otherwise, we won’t have the strength we need to fight the threat that is becoming more and more systemic and dangerous. That does not mean we should abandon the fight for justice in Palestine, and I would argue that it has to remain a priority if we are going to actually build the kinds of movements that have the capacity to struggle against global systems of domination rather than just treating political causes as if they are all isolated. If Palestine is being colonized by a global empire, the same empire that is further sliding us into chaos and annihilation, then we have no choice but to become internationalists who collaborate with those resisting oppression. We also have to address reactionary ideas, even when they appear at a demonstration, cast as the language of liberation.

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