In 2010, the British charity
Community Security Trust (CST) said that "Zionist" was increasingly used as an antisemitic pejorative term in mainstream British discourse. The CST also alleged that the conflation of "Zionist" with "Jew" was becoming more common and could obscure antisemitic intent. In 2016, the
British Labour Party released the results of
an inquiry into
antisemitism in the party, which stated that "Epithets such as [...] 'Zio' and others should have no place in Labour party discourse going forward." Speaking at the inquiry's launch, party leader
Jeremy Corbyn stated that Zio' is a vile epithet that follows in a long line of earlier such terms that have no place whatsoever in our party." The Philologos columnist in Jewish magazine
Mosaic, writing in 2016, associated the term with
white-supremacists and said that it was popularized by antisemite
David Duke, whose
Ku Klux Klan website WikiZio uses
Zio as a hyphenated prefix in terms such as "Zio-Communism," "Zio-economics," "Zio-history," "Zio-supremacism," or "Zio-occupied America." In 2017, the organizers of the Chicago
Dyke March faced accusations of antisemitism after their Twitter account used the term "Zio tears", later apologizing for the term's "violent history" while maintaining their anti-Zionist stance.
Tony Greenstein, then a Jewish member of the Labour Party, was accused of antisemitism and expelled from the party in 2018 for using the term "Zios" among other allegations. Ben Samuels of
Haaretz said that the term was popularized first by
David Duke and then later by
leftists and members of the UK Labour Party. In 2021, when a South African media outlet used the term "
Zio-Nazi" for South African Jewish groups, Czech-Israeli
Holocaust historian
Yehuda Bauer and author
Matthias Küntzel called the term "
hate speech".
Use during the Gaza war Contested meanings of Zionism In April 2024, Jonathan Guyer noted in
The Guardian that the term
Zionism means different things to different people, citing a 2022 survey of American Jews' views on Zionism conducted by Mira Sucharov of
Carleton University. The survey showed that a majority of American Jews identified as Zionist when it was viewed as supporting a "
Jewish and democratic state", but would reject the label if it was defined as "privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish
rights in Israel". Guyer writes that, particularly during the
Gaza war, what it means to be a
Zionist has been contested, as "arguably for the first time, a Palestinian perspective on Zionism is taking center stage in mainstream discourse." While some pro-Israel organizations including the
American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the London Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, have said the term
Zionist is being used as an antisemitic pejorative, for many
Palestinians,
Zionist is an "ugly" term because of how they experience Zionism. According to
Saree Makdisi, "when people think of Zionism now, they look at Gaza ... This is what it means: that you want to have an ethnically exclusive state," and, according to him, "it’s ugly." There had been discussions at Facebook over the moderation of the term 'Zionist' in 2021 amid pressure from various organizations for the company to adopt the
IHRA definition of antisemitism.
+972 Magazine reported that
Jordana Cutler, Facebook's director of public policy for Israel and the Jewish diaspora and former advisor to
Benjamin Netanyahu, was a key figure in these discussions at Facebook. moderators were only to remove content using the term
Zionist it was deemed to be used as a proxy for
Israeli or
Jewish.Yasmine Taeb of
MPower Change noted that the ADL and the
American Jewish Committee—both pro-Israel, Zionist advocacy groups based in the US—had been lobbying Meta to restrict usage of
Zionist on its platforms, though the Meta spokesperson said the policy change was not made "at the behest of any outside group." sent to Meta by 73 organizations, including
7amleh,
Jewish Voice for Peace, the
Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others, stated that the policy change would "too easily mischaracterize conversations about Zionists – and by extension, Zionism – as inherently antisemitic" and "encourage the incorrect and harmful conflation of criticism of the acts of the state of Israel with antisemitism." In response, the
Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom sent NYU a public letter expressing concern, describing the new classification as "rooted in the improper conflation of criticism of Israel and of Zionism – a political ideology – with antisemitism."
Palestine Legal described NYU's policy change as "draconian" and criticized the claim "that Zionist is an identity meriting protection under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rather than a political ideology used to justify apartheid and genocide."
Columbia University In September 2024,
Columbia University updated its anti-discrimination policy to classify the use of "Zionist" as a pejorative as potential harassment when directed at individuals based on religion or national origin. The policy cited examples where "Zionist" was used as a coded term to target Jewish or Israeli students and emphasized the distinction between political speech and discriminatory conduct. The update followed a critical report on campus antisemitism and mirrored similar actions by other universities, including
NYU. In 2024, David Bernstein reported that support for Zionism had become a political 'litmus test' leading to social exclusion of Jewish students on many American college campuses following the
Hamas-led
October 7 attacks on Israel. In 2024, following many harassment complaints, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign banned the ostracizing of Jewish students from school clubs for identifying as Zionist. According to David Seymour, antizionism's claim that it is only 'Zionists' and not 'the Jews' who are demonized gains its justification. The ideology of anti-Zionism portrays Zionists as freely choosing evil and its harmfulness, legitimizing the demand for exclusion and passing the responsibility for the exclusion onto the excluded themselves. In October 2025, Samuel Williams, a PPE student at the
University of Oxford, faced a
Metropolitan Police investigation after leading chants of "Gaza, Gaza make us proud, put the Zios in the ground," which he claimed to have workshopped in Oxford, with several others joining in. The University of Oxford condemned the chant "in the strongest possible terms," stating, “Oxford is unequivocal – there is no place for anti-Semitism, harassment, or discrimination within our community. We remain firmly committed to protecting the safety and dignity of all our students and staff." ==Reception==