David Haskell
Editor-in-Chief
New York Magazine

Dear Mr. Haskell and the editorial leadership of New York Magazine,

Antizionism is a racist ideology that harasses, abuses, and dehumanizes Israelis and those marked as “Zionists,” and produces measurable harm against Jews in the West through rising violence and intimidation, while advancing genocidal eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.

On or about August 10, 2026, New York Magazine published its multi-article package titled “Habibi City” (also framed under the broader heading “SWANA, New York”). The package presented the recent cultural visibility of New Yorkers with roots in Southwest Asia and North Africa as a vibrant and affirmative development. That celebration, however, was constructed through a series of narrative choices rooted in antizionist racism that systematically erase Jewish history, invert the genocide of October 7, and demand public accountability.

The article explicitly framed this cultural flowering as emerging from “the pain of the genocide in Gaza” and as something that “bloomed” out of post-October 7 resistance. In doing so, it performed a textbook instance of genocide inversion, as documented by Adam Louis-Klein in “Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’” (The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2026). The October 7 genocide—the deliberate massacre, sexual violence, and hostage-taking by antizionist militias—was actively erased.

The article defined belonging to the “SWANA community” by positioning “Zionism” as a form of oppression to be “faced” alongside xenophobia and Islamophobia. One accompanying piece reduced the State of Israel to “the land mass currently called Israel.” These antizionist formulations suggest that eliminating Israelis, a protected national group under the Genocide Convention, would be legitimate.

Jews have been a continuous indigenous presence across those lands for millennia, including those racialized as “white” in antizionist discourse. Their mass expulsion and flight from Arab and Muslim-majority countries in the mid-twentieth century (the MENA Jewish exodus) remains one of the largest forced displacements of the modern era, directly resulting from antizionism. By erasing Jews from the region, the package reproduces the same logic of anti-Jewish purging that emptied those communities from the region itself.

When readers and organizations rightly raised objections to the use of genocide inversion, New York Magazine did not engage the substance of their concern. Instead, in its Comments section dated approximately August 24, 2026, the editors stated that “after an extensive review of genocide scholarship and multiple interviews with experts in genocide studies, the magazine’s editors determined that the term was an accurate description of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza” and that accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry “obfuscated an overwhelming scholarly consensus.”

This claim of scholarly consensus is straightforwardly false. Hundreds of scholars, legal analysts, and educators have demonstrated that the claim fails core elements of the 1948 Genocide Convention and subsequent case law: scholarsfortruthaboutgenocide.com. Major Holocaust and genocide scholars such as Jeffrey Herf, Norman Goda, Verena Buser, Phillip Spencer, John Strawson and many others, have rejected the claim. The antizionist scholars who have promoted the genocide libel uniformly rely on stereotypes of Israelis as inherently genocidal “white colonizers,” tropes which were used to justify the October 7 genocide itself.

We are less concerned with “antisemitic intent,” than with antizionism as an ideology with a documented trail of harm, including the MENA expulsions, the Soviet cultural genocide of Jews under antizionism, and anti-Jewish discrimination, purging, and violence in the West today.

A democracy cannot function when civic institutions treat a racist ideology as established fact, invoke a manufactured consensus to shield it from scrutiny, and then refuse correction of basic errors. We therefore request a meeting with you, Mr. Haskell, and relevant senior editorial staff at the earliest practicable date. We demand a retraction of the claim that the genocide libel constitutes a scholarly consensus, since it is false. Further, we call upon New York Magazine to institute mandatory training for its editorial and reporting staff on antizionism and its history, including its roots in Nazi, Islamist, and Soviet propaganda, and Western pseudoscience, and on the history of Middle Eastern and North African Jews.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

The Movement Against Antizionism

But no such consensus as claimed by New York Magazine exists. As a PhD candidate in anthropology, I have extensively studied the intellectuals and intellectual frameworks used by the antizionist academics who have made the claim.

Five hundred scholars and educators rejected the claim and explained the complete failure of the genocide libel to meet international legal standards. As Elliot Malin and others have shown, neither the passing of the only reasonable inference test to establish genocidal intent nor the criterion of substantiality (the intent to annihilate a substantial part of the protected group under one’s control) is even remotely plausible in the case of Gaza. What is clear, however, is that antizionist militias committed genocide on October 7.

My article in the Wall Street Journal explained the genocide libel as a function of genocide inversion, based on casting Israelis as inherently genocidal settler-colonizers. The article compares antizionist ideology in this respect to the propaganda of the Hutu regime that committed genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

As I wrote: “The genocide accusation against Israel has traveled far and wide since Oct. 7, but its intellectual sources have rarely been scrutinized. Every major iteration of the accusation, I learned, flows from an academic framework that presents the accusation of genocide in Gaza as a consequence of Israel being a “settler colonial” state founded by Europeans who don’t belong in the Middle East. The network of academics behind this framing—whose ideas inform nonprofit organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem—is especially conspicuous in the Journal of Genocide Research. That publication has been a proponent for changing, extending or rejecting the legal definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, formulated by Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin.”

Passing off antizionist libels as fact and as false consensus is not acceptable. Antizionism’s ongoing infiltration of Western institutions deserves scrutiny—so do the intellectual frameworks that serve to grant it legitimacy.

It simply states without argument that the journal does not incite violence. These are supposed to be scholars of comparative genocide studies, yet they have nothing to say—nothing—on my comparison between genocide inversion in Rwanda and Israel?

They also claim that they aren’t part of an “antisemitic conspiracy,” whatever that means. The article never mentions antisemitism. It mentions antizionism and locates the genocide libel within a broader pattern of propaganda and violence.

Has the “debate”—which was never one, but simply a flood of propaganda, abuse, disinformation and noise—over the genocide libel ended? If they and the parts of the liberal media who laundered the libel now walk it back, when will they apologize for the harms and distortions that they intentionally caused?

We write out of concern for the challenges facing Jewish communities since October 7 and the rapid rise of antizionist abuse across many institutions.

For decades, Jewish organizations have built strong programs and frameworks to combat classical antisemitism and its familiar tropes. Yet many Jews today are being targeted, excluded, or professionally harmed after being labeled “Zionists” and cast as “white colonizers,” “Jewish supremacists,” or “genocide supporters.”

In the face of this abuse, individuals and institutions often lack clear policies, precedents, or consistent support. American campuses, employers, newsrooms, and politicians are looking to the Jewish community’s major institutions for clarity on what antizionism is, where it comes from, and how it operates.

We respectfully call on American Jewish organizations to:

1. ⁠Name and address antizionism directly alongside classical antisemitism in all public communications.

2. Speak consistently and publicly about the impact antizionism is having on Jewish communities.

3. Proactively educate the public on antizionism’s origins, history, narratives, and real-world effects.

4. ⁠Advance concrete solutions in policy, media, and law for individuals facing discrimination, exclusion, harassment, or professional retaliation connected to antizionist abuse.

We call on American Jewish organizations to provide the same clarity, education, and leadership that previous generations offered in response to other forms of anti-Jewish hostility. Many Jews and their allies are seeking institutional support and should not have to navigate these challenges alone.

We urge American Jewish organizations to meet this moment with clarity, courage, and sustained leadership.

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