Keyword + Microsyllabus: The Antisemitism Industrial Complex (AIC)

Editorial Collective

Every issue of the Journal of Critical Zionism Studies will contain a keyword crucial to the journal issue’s theme and its contributions. Entries will offer concise, rigorous definitions of these keywords; critical genealogies of their intellectual, political, and movement/activist trajectories; and a suggested reading list that explores these terms’ histories and their contemporary usages. We present below the first of many keywords of Critical Zionism Studies.

The Antisemitism Industrial Complex (AIC)

To identify a social structure or a system of power as an “industrial complex” exposes how that complex is incentivized to reproduce itself. An industrial complex is reproduced despite and even because of its failure to achieve its purported goals and regardless of whether it serves the functions it claims to serve. With the term “antisemitism industrial complex (AIC),” we name the ways that Zionism – understood as a coordinated, transnational movement of imperial nation-states to uphold the settler colonization of Palestine – contains a built-in incentive to ensure and perpetuate the existence of antisemitism. Sustained  by billions of dollars in government grants and philanthropic donations from the United States and countries throughout Europe, AIC actors claim they want to eliminate antisemitism by shoring up the Zionist state. And yet, shoring up the Zionist state requires the perpetual existence and ongoing threat of antisemitism, leading AIC agents to document antisemitism continually and to fabricate it where it cannot be found. 

Typically, analyses of industrial complexes identify capital as their primary incentive. So, for example, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of the development of what he called the “military-industrial complex” in his oft-cited 1961 Farewell Address, he signaled the entanglement of the United States Department of Defense with weapons manufacturers, who have a financial incentive to ensure that the United States is always at war.¹ Eisenhower’s warning cautioned against capitalist profits driving state and military policy. Although Eisenhower was one of the chief architects of the military-industrial complex, which he built on the basis of America’s “God-given” nuclear responsibility in the face of Soviet socialism, his coinage nonetheless influenced critical political commentators throughout the United States, who took it up in subsequent years.² 

Abolitionist social movements have employed “industrial complex” terminology and radicalized its critique, using it to name systems of power that must be eliminated from social life for freedom to be truly achieved. Most prominently, Critical Resistance, the influential prison abolitionist movement organization begun in 1998, has named the carceral system in the United States the “prison industrial complex (PIC).”³ By this, they mean to indicate the built-in profit mechanism at work in the increasingly vast systems of prisons and policing, a profit motive that ensures the maintenance and advancement of these very systems, while also generating overwhelming cultural propaganda to justify them (e.g., ever-rising rates of crime, fear-mongering about immigrants, and looming threats to safety and property posed by racialized, houseless, and drug-using populations, etc.) Similarly, scholar-activist Chris Barcelos has identified a “teen pregnancy prevention industrial complex (TPPIC),” through which governmental and nonprofit agencies produce racialized teen parents as an insurmountable and perennial problem, thereby guaranteeing their own agencies, jobs, and programming well into the future.⁴ Critics have also turned their attention to the movement formations that have solidified in recent decades to fight these oppressive power systems, theorizing the “nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC).”⁵ In this formulation, non-profit organizations serve as vital tools for the reproduction of neoliberalism, even as they attempt to rectify the systemic injustices it produces.

Our notion of the AIC extends the “industrial complex” terminology into the field of Critical Zionism Studies. It is partially indebted to Norman Finkelstein’s coinage “Holocaust industry.”⁶ Finkelstein names an ongoing political effort by Zionist actors to exploit the historical suffering of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, as these actors demand that European countries pay reparations to Zionist causes, including to the Israeli government, in order to avoid accusations of antisemitism and, in turn, the threat of U.S. sanctions. To identify the Nazi holocaust as an “industry” is to recognize the ways that this genocide is exploited to serve Zionist and imperialist projects. To go further and identify antisemitism as an “industrial complex,” as we propose, points to the ways that Zionism operates as a systemic form of power that perpetually reproduces the very thing it is supposed to eliminate: namely, antisemitism. 

In AIC discourses, Israel is often presented as the only refuge for Jewish people from antisemitism as well as the sole solution to antisemitism’s alleged universality. Despite this supposed solution, purveyors of AIC narratives fearmonger about antisemitism’s widespread currency, meteoric rise, ongoing tenaciousness, and renewed viciousness. These discourses are interdependent, and they frequently invoke the Nazi holocaust, insisting on its historical uniqueness and its incomparable human suffering. In other words, the solution that Zionism insists on as the remedy for antisemitism – that is, the creation of a Jewish supremacist state in Palestine – depends on reproducing a fervent belief that antisemitism is unwavering and universal and represents an ever-present danger to Jewish people globally. Zionism needs to ensure that antisemitism never goes away.  If and when there is no antisemitism to be found, the AIC manufactures it, whether via misinformation, dishonest data representation, ideological contortions, or fabrication. Millions, if not billions, of dollars are invested annually by Zionist actors to produce the threat of antisemitism, which is then mobilized to enshrine the Zionist project as inviolable and critically untouchable. Many Palestinian scholars and activists have made these same claims for decades, arguing that Zionism requires antisemitism to sustain itself and to manufacture legitimacy for the settler colonization of Palestine. As Fayez Sayegh put it more than half a century ago, “if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it!”⁷ 

Just as in other and related complexes, the industrial aspect of the AIC is never absent.  The AIC often generates profits for individuals and groups, serving as a rationale for jobs, funding campaigns, and even antisemitism celebrity culture through Israel’s hasbara [propaganda] industry. The Israeli government also receives billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in the form of U.S. government grants, which are cycled back to American arms companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Technologies.⁸ The AIC attempts to ensure that those ongoing and larger industrial complexes that are essential to the Zionist settler colonial project continue unchallenged. 

Zionism as an ideology requires capital for its sustenance, having been organized as a colonial capitalist project, and capital expansion remains part and parcel of the settler colonial project.⁹ Through the war and carceral industries undergirding the genocidal violence imposed on Palestinians, the industrial aspect of the AIC ensures the ongoing extraction of their resources and the appropriation of their land. The profit derived from the settler colonial project persists unabated, not least because the AIC acts as a gatekeeping mechanism to delegitimize anti-Zionist challenge and protest. The resources, time, money, and life of Palestinians and their allies must consistently be diverted from the necessary labor of anti-colonial movement-building in order to contest the onerous distractions fomented by the AIC. 

A final note on the “industrial complex” terminology: just as, in Marxist analysis, capitalism must be eliminated if the exploitation of labor is to be overcome, so too, in “industrial complex” analyses, must the entire system of power be done away with if we are finally to be free. Its political project is not one of reformation, but of abolition. There is no kinder, gentler carceral system, nor is there any truly benevolent agency for “saving” racialized teen parents. These systems of power are oppressive at their core and must be uprooted. 

The Antisemitism Industrial Complex as keyword, then, is offered in the spirit and tradition of abolitionist movement-building and is committed to the eradication of Zionism. Just as there is no innocent carceral project, there is also no innocent project that weaponizes antisemitism. There is no way to reform the AIC, which exists to serve repressive and oppressive agendas, particularly maintaining a Zionist entity in historic Palestine. Even if AIC actors began using fair and grounded research methods to accurately account for the reality of antisemitism, or ended their frequent assertions that the Nazi holocaust is historically incomparable to other atrocities, the AIC would still need to be abolished because its raison d’etre is Zionism, the ideology that shores up the settler colonization and ultimate genocide of Palestine.

Suggested/Further Reading

Aked, Hil. Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity. London: Verso, 2023.

Cohen, Mari. “The ADL’s Antisemitism Findings, Explained.” Jewish Currents, April 4, 2023. https://jewishcurrents.org/the-adls-antisemitism-findings-explained.

The CR10 Publications Collective. Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2008.

Dana, Tariq. “Gaza’s Genocide and Israel’s Military-Industrial Complex,” Policy paper. Journal of Palestine Studies (2024). https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655307.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Davis, Angela Y., Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket, 2022.

Elia, Nada. Greater than the Sum of our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2023.

Farraj, Basil “Columbia’s Shifting Military Ties: Moving Away from Decades of Israeli-Sponsored Violence,” Security in Context, December 21, 2023. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/colombias-shifting-military-ties-moving-away-from-decades-of-israeli-sponsored-violence.

Gelman, Emmaia. “Astroturf Antisemitism Watchdogs.” Jadaliyya, April 13, 2024. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45918.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Hajjar, Lisa, Basil Farraj, Kanwal Hameed and Jacob Mundy, eds. “Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams.” Middle East Report 312 (Fall 2024). https://merip.org/magazine/312/.

Jamshidi, Maryam. “Instruments of Dehumanization.” Boston Review, December 9, 2023. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/instruments-of-dehumanization/.

Makdisi, Saree. Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022.

Masri, Rawan and Fathi Nemer. “Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist colonialismthrough an abolitionist lens.” Scalawag, June 19, 2023. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/06/abolitionist-palestine/.

Sinnar, Shirin. “Hate Crimes, Terrorism, and the Framing of White Supremacist Violence.” California Law Review 11 (2022): 489–565.