Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are, in John Kiriakou’s account, routinely and deliberately conflated. He describes it as something he “struggle[s] with a lot” and raises it in terms of the “specious accusations of anti-semitism” levelled at critics of Israeli policy: “So many people all over the world conflate anti-semitism with anti-Zionism.”[1]
Kiriakou reported a conversation with a young Israeli man in the week before the interview, who told him that in the Israeli school system students “are actually taught to accuse anybody who criticizes Israel in any way … of anti-semitism.”[1][2] He put the question of how to answer the charge to Roger Waters, who pointed to an Israeli academic in Jerusalem whose central thesis is that Israeli school textbooks are structured to produce the attitudes Waters compares to 1930s Germany.[2][3]
Waters has said the pressure is not only rhetorical. He described being telephoned by a wealthy American acquaintance and handed over to an Israeli official who tried to persuade him that speaking out against Israel was a terrible mistake — one of several attempts, he said, “to try and deviate” him from his position.[4][5] His answer is to reduce the argument to a single document: “my platform’s tiny. It’s just the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Either you believe in it or you don’t."[6][7]
"A noted anti-semite”
Kiriakou has described the accusation arriving in response to the mildest possible formulation. In an interview he said — prefacing it with “slap me if this is too controversial” — that he believed both sides should respect the basic tenets of human rights.[8]
A Google alert he keeps on his own name, he says, so that he knows when he may need to defend himself, then surfaced an article in an obscure Middle Eastern journal written by the political director in the Israeli foreign minister’s office, which described “John Kiryaku, a noted anti-semite” as having said that human rights should be respected. His reaction: “People have called me a lot of things over the years. A noted anti-semite is not one of them — because I said that both sides should respect human rights.”[9]
He has also described the check he set up against himself. He has many friends who are Israeli or Israeli-American, and asked one to whom he is particularly close, who served several years in the IDF, to tell him if he ever went too far. The friend said he would be the first to do it, and that Kiriakou had not.[10]
Kiriakou reports the same reflex from friends across the American political spectrum, on both the left and the right, who respond to a call for an investigation into human rights abuses with “I didn’t know you were pro-Hamas.”[11]
Zionism as a political movement
Asked in 2026 how to explain to Greeks that the Israelis buying up their villages are not the Jewish neighbours their grandparents lived alongside, Kiriakou drew the distinction he returns to repeatedly: “there’s a huge huge disconnect between Zionism and Judaism. Zionism in my view is just a 100% political movement. You know, that’s why we have Christian Zionists, you know, evangelical Zionists. It’s not Judaism. It’s political.”[12][13]
The same distinction underpins his account of Greek history, in which “there was no difference between a Greek Jew, a Greek Christian, and a Greek Muslim. It’s the Israelis that have drawn these divisions.”[14]
’That’s the Israeli script right now’
In October 2025 Kiriakou became the subject of the conflation he describes. A piece in the Middle East Forum, written by the political adviser to the Israeli foreign minister, called him “virulently anti-semitic” — which he called “one of the most ridiculous things anybody has ever said about me. It’s just comical.”[15]
His reading of the accusation is that it is a procedural device rather than a description: “Anybody who doesn’t tow the Israeli line 100% is an anti-semite. I get that that’s the Israeli script right now.”[15]
What he objected to substantively was not the label but the list of things it was attached to — destroying the Gaza Strip, its hospitals, its electrical grid and its water treatment facilities, and killing tens of thousands of people “most of whom are women and children, almost all of whom are civilians.”[16] In the same passage he sets the permanence of the record against any attempt to move past it: “they’ve carried out this genocide. It’s in the history books now, and you can’t go back and take it back.”[17]
The perception problem
Asked how Israel’s American defenders could possibly justify the Knesset death penalty law, John Kiriakou predicted that they would attempt it and that the attempt would be disingenuous, because “there’s no upside to this. There’s no way to defend it.”[18]
He expected two shapes of defence: on the American right, the general position that capital punishment is legitimate; among the most committed Zionists in the Democratic Party, an appeal to terrorism — “we don’t want another 9/11. We don’t want another October 7th” — or silence.[19][20]
His strategic verdict is at the logic of radicalization: the movement’s central liability is the perception that it is cruel, and the law confirms it.[21]