The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism in Europe and the United States has been extensively addressed in the historiography about antisemitism. In his analysis of left-wing anti-Zionism in Germany, Gerhard Hanloser even states, ‘Israel and the Left – one might think everything has been told about this topic.’ But that's quite overstated when you look at the Netherlands, in particular with respect to postwar developments. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, dissenting voices could be heard from the early beginnings of Zionism. Before the war anti-Zionism was a common position within Dutch Jewish circles. The prevailing critique actually was a leftist rejection of Zionism based on the assumed incompatibility of nationalism with international solidarity and the improvement of the lot of the Jewish proletariat. In his comprehensive work A Lethal Obsession, Robert Wistrich (1945-2015) describes in great detail how anti-Zionism was also part of twentieth-century Soviet communism. In this tradition, anti-Zionism was a form of anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalistic social criticism, but could also serve as thinly veiled antisemitism with Jews playing the part of class enemies, cosmopolitans and imperialists.

The postwar generation claimed these different left-wing anti-Zionist traditions and made its own interpretation. In this respect David Cesarani’s statement that the ‘fundamental [postwar] pro-Zionist, pro-Israel posture [of socialists in Great Britain] was undermined by the emergence of the New Left and the generation of 1968’ can be generally applied.

In an early French critique, Jacques Givet, nom de plume of Jacques Vichniac (1917-2004), connected the views of La Gauche contre Israel [The Left against Israel] with the qualification of néo-antisémitism. In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein (leaders of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith) came up with the same term, ‘New anti-Semitism’, to coin the alleged close connections between critique of Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitic stereotyping. The term was as contested at its introduction in the early 1970s as it was at its reintroduction after 2000. On the one hand the characterisation of antisemitism was rejected because it would block any substantial debate about the conflict; according to this interpretation the charge of antisemitism should be seen as a contrived weapon to stifle protest. The argument can of course still be heard today.