Andrew Pessin has launched the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, and in his introductory manifesto he writes:
“We now need entire teams of researchers — serious, methodical, interdisciplinary — to mine the full archive of genocide studies, settler-colonial theory, Middle Eastern studies, and the whole academic nexus where antizionism has taken root… a vast, largely unexamined body of antizionist hate literature, treated as scholarship but functioning as ideology.”
I am not an academic, but I can certainly critique academics on their own playing field. I’ve quoted and mocked the most egregious examples of anti-Zionist academics and academic literature a number of times. But what is required here is a more rigorous examination showing that the entire field is rotten at the core.. From what I could tell, anti-Zionist academic literature does not simply contain bias. It behaves like a sealed intellectual ecosystem, with its own canonical texts, circular logic, and selective evidentiary filters. The appearance of scholarly rigor is there - citations, peer review, footnotes - but the underlying method is adversarial rather than truth-seeking. The conclusions are rarely tested; they are assumed.
This is where AI becomes indispensable.
Taylor and Francis hosts hundreds of academic journals. While most papers there are not available in full text, they show their abstracts - and their footnotes. I realized that with a minimal effort I could have AI examine the papers and their references to see if they are following the patterns of normal academic research or if their evidence is all circular and ignoring any counter-examples.
I found that when searching for papers accusing Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” nearly all of them fail basic academic standards required in the social sciences.
The rot is very deep. Here is what I found in only a half hour of research with Grok:
The Settler-Colonialism Frame: Theory as Template
Searching Taylor & Francis for “settler colonial* + Israel” yields about 110 papers since 2015. In this cluster:
Patrick Wolfe (2006) is cited ~52%
Ilan Pappé (2006) ~48%
Lorenzo Veracini (2010) ~35%
Gershon Shafir (1996) ~28%
These four sources account for roughly 80% of the network’s intellectual gravity. Virtually every subsequent paper refers back to them.
But here is the problem: these works are rarely challenged, only repeated. Assertions like “Zionism is a settler-colonial project by definition.”are taken not as hypotheses to be investigated, but as axioms to be applied.
Primary sources, such as Ottoman-era Jewish land ownership, pre-Mandate Jewish presence, or Mizrahi Jewish indigeneity, almost never receive examination. The fact that Jews have always considered Israel their homeland and have prayed to return for two millennia? Not to be found, because that one fact by itself shows that Jews never considered themselves to be settling someone else’s land but returning to their own.
Even within the larger field of settler colonial studies, there are debates on whether Israel fits the definition the way the US or Australia do. Those dissenting opinions not only might but must be mentioned in serious academic papers - yet they are virtually absent in the context of Israel.
The Apartheid Frame: NGOs as Canon
The apartheid literature is even larger, about 230 papers. But here, the intellectual source code changes.
The top citations are no longer academics but NGOs:
B’Tselem (2021) ~75%
Human Rights Watch (2021) ~68%
Amnesty International (2022) ~62%
These are not academic papers, but advocacy documents. They are not peer-reviewed; they were created with predetermined conclusions and PR strategies behind them.
Yet in academic writing, they are treated as if they were definitive legal assessments. The logic often goes something like, “As established by HRW and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid regime.”
But the reports themselves have been directly challenged, in detail, by Eugene Kontorovich, Avi Bell, Gerald Steinberg, CAMERA, and myself. Those critiques exist. They are public and specific.
And yet, in the 230 T&F apartheid papers, they are cited in less than 2% of cases. And when they are cited, it is often dismissively, as “denialist rhetoric,” not as arguments requiring rebuttal.
This is ideological cherry-picking that excludes any contradictory evidence.. It does not reach anything close to accepted academic standards.
The “Genocide” Acceleration
Finally, the most recent wave: the “genocide” framing post-October 7. There have been so far about 150 papers since late 2023 accusing Israel of “genocide,” which is astonishing for two years.
And in these, the primary sources are:
Francesca Albanese’s UN Special Rapporteur reports (70%)
ICJ provisional ruling language (65%)
Amnesty’s December 2024 genocide report (already ~55%)
Again, the pattern holds. These sources are treated as if they constitute established legal conclusions rather than political and rhetorical framing.
Arguments rooted in genocide scholarship, like the specific standard of dolus specialis, are barely discussed. The ICJ’s own high evidentiary standards (as applied in Croatia v. Serbia) are almost never mentioned.
There are virtually no counter-interpretations, no accurate readings of the Genocide Convention, no documentation of Israeli efforts to warn civilians, no discussion of Hamas embedding military assets among civilians.
Once again, NGO reports are treated not as evidence but as authority.
In other scholarly fields, like political science, history, and sociology, academic standards require:
representing opposing views fairly
citing dissenting scholarship
acknowledging uncertainties
engaging with primary sources
and above all: practicing falsifiability
What we see instead is the construction of a self-affirming discourse where counter-arguments are not refuted. They are simply not acknowledged.
This produces an illusion of consensus where none exists. It creates the appearance of “settled scholarship” when what actually exists is selective citation and methodological exclusion.
I managed to prove, in less than an hour, what I and probably the members of ICSA have long suspected: that the field of anti-Zionism is not just dismissive but contemptuous of academic standards. It is not a field at all, but an anti-Israel propaganda initiative disguised as scholarship. It does not stand up to the slightest bit of critical scrutiny.
ICSA must adhere to rigorous academic standards to make this case airtight. But I just proved it beyond any reasonable doubt.
Ideas start in journals, get simplified into lectures, then transmitted to student activists, turned into slogans and then accepted as moral certainties which then become dogma, and dogma that cannot be questioned becomes a weapon. Entire university departments are complicit in this truly horrible hijacking of academia. Any honest researcher should be horrified and want to excise this cancer from the social sciences.
Let’s hope ICSA will be the spark to burn this entire false field of study down.
May I suggest that you make the same examination on Academia.edu. you will be surprised what you will discover in that website.
This is amazing, thank you!