Nearly a decade ago, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “anti-Zionism is a reinvented form of antisemitism,” the first such statement by a European head of state.
Austria’s Sebastian Kurz soon echoed him, calling, while he was chancellor in 2018, the ideologies two “sides of the same coin,” and in 2025, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that some criticism of Israel had become “a pretext” for spreading antisemitism.
Long viewed as intuition rather than evidence, these claims now have empirical backing with the publication of a study that, for the first time, maps a measurable correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The study from Sweden, led by the University of Gothenburg’s Professor Christer Mattsson, also suggests that antisemitism indexes in the West have vastly undercounted the phenomenon, because they did not measure or factor in the racist hatred’s migration from “Jews” to “Zionists,” Mattsson told JNS last month.
His study covered about 9,000 interviewees in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Half of the interviewees indicated agreement or disagreement with common antisemitic tropes, and the other half did the same on tropes where “Jews” were swapped for “Zionists.”
In all three countries, antisemitic statements about Jews—including that they are “particularly vengeful,” deceitful or control the media—received little endorsement, of about 5% to 10% of respondents in a representative sample of the general population. However, when the same assertions about “Zionists” were presented to a different representative sample from the same country, they elicited a near-neutral response, meaning that as many people agreed with the statement as those who disagreed with it.
The findings, Mattsson said, demonstrate that contemporary antisemitism often expresses itself through anti-Zionist rhetoric, making it socially permissible while preserving the same conspiratorial content.
“The findings of the study require every leader and educator in Europe to wake up and come out firmly against this despicable phenomenon,” Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman and founder of the European Jewish Association, told JNS.
For a Jew walking the streets of cities on the continent today, the study “is not about statistics but an everyday reality, whose scope and severity are often not reflected in the media, police reports, and certainly not in the tolerance shown to extremist elements that specialize in running campaigns of defamation and delegitimization of the State of Israel,” Margolin said.
The results of Mattsson’s study contradict previous studies whose authors showed a “low correlation” between antisemitism and “attitudes critical of Israel,” as stated in one such study from 2022 led by Professors Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton of the University of Toronto and York University in Toronto, respectively.
The Canadian researchers said in the 2022 study that a “correlation exists between antisemitism and anti-Israelism, but the correlation varies widely in strength by social context.”
The Swedish study, titled “Measuring Contemporary Antisemitism: Evidence from a Survey Experiment and List Experiment,” has not yet been published, but Mattsson presented its findings before leaders of Jewish communities at the annual European Jewish Association conference in Krakow, Poland, last month.
Whereas other studies have looked at how antisemitism and hostility to Israel correlate, none has swapped “Jew” for “Zionist” as Mattsson’s study has, he said.
In addition to “revealing the nexus that connects antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Mattsson told JNS, the study casts doubt on the consistent results of indexes that measure antisemitism, which have shown low levels of Jew-hate in societies where Jews have reported experiencing elevated levels of antisemitism.
Sweden is a case in point, Mattsson said. Earlier this year, it emerged as the least antisemitic country surveyed in the Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 Global 100 poll, which is an index of the prevalence of antisemitism in society in roughly 100 countries. Sweden had a score of five, meaning that 5% of respondents expressed antisemitic views.
Norway, Canada and the Netherlands shared the second least antisemitic nation slot, with a score of 8%. Yet in internal surveys of the Jewish communities in those countries, antisemitism emerged as a major and frequent experience for Jewish respondents, Mattsson noted.
“This discrepancy gave me the idea of exploring the possibility that the traditional surveys about antisemitism may be missing the mark because they were asking the wrong questions,” he said.
The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency published in 2024 a survey of how some 8,000 Jews experienced antisemitism in 13 out of the E.U.’s 27 member states. More than 600 Swedish Jews participated, and they reported a prevalence of antisemitic hate crimes similar to the 13-country average.
More than a third (35%) of Swedish respondents and Dutch ones (39%) experienced antisemitic harassment in the year before the survey, compared to the survey average of 37%. In both countries, 6% said they were attacked in the five years before the survey because they are Jewish, compared to the survey average of 5%.
A possible explanation for the discrepancy between the low scores that Sweden and the Netherlands got in antisemitism indexes and the reported experience of Jews there could be a compartmentalization of antisemitism in society. In other words, that antisemitism is rife in pockets of the population—Muslim immigrants, for example—that perpetrate an outsized portion of hate crimes.
Yet, even accounting for that phenomenon, the indexes massively undercount antisemitic sentiment, Mattsson said. “The indexes include a breakdown of population segments, including Muslims. And they tend to display a higher animosity to Jews than the general population, but still much lower than what we got when we swapped ‘Jews’ for ‘Zionists’,” Mattsson told JNS.
“The data [from other studies] doesn’t add up, it doesn’t reflect what is happening on campuses, in the suburbs or in other surveys in Europe,” he said. “So this raises the possibility that there is something wrong with the measurement, and now we have the first scientific indication that this is the case.”
