Moral Inversion and the Iran War

A recent poll found that among Democrats under 50, Iran is viewed more favorably than Israel—a data point that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and one that demands explanation. The Iran war has revealed that a surprising contingent on both the left and right express sympathy—or even open support—for the Iranian regime. Even professors of anthropology, such as Alireza Doostdar at the University of Chicago, have intoned that “the best and only hope for peace is the power and durability of Iranian missiles.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) harbors explicit genocidal intentions against both Israel and the United States, famously branding these allies as the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan.” It pursues nuclear weapons in service of those aims and presides over one of the world’s worst human-rights records. How is it possible that a regime defined by repression of freedoms at home—subjugating women, dissidents, LGBT, and others—and genocidal incitement abroad, could become an object of admiration among people who claim to advocate for human rights?

A recent study we carried out at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—an organization that gathers data on how malicious narratives propagate in digital contexts—in collaboration with the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab found that “participants who expressed greater agreement with anti-Israel ideology more strongly endorsed Soviet and Nazi propaganda that featured both generic antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel tropes, had more left-wing (“progressive”) authoritarian attitudes, and rated the human rights records of some of the world’s worst human rights violators more favorably than those who expressed lower levels of agreement.”

Anti-Zionism, a worldview that casts Israel as the pinnacle of injustice while presenting itself as moral resistance, predicts what we call Moral Inversion Syndrome: a pattern in which the perceived human-rights standing of Western democratic states declines relative to that of authoritarian regimes. The study asked a representative online sample of Americans to rate the human-rights records of various countries and correlated those ratings with traits measured by validated psychological scales. According to our data, the more one expresses essentialist prejudice against Israel, or Jews, the more distorted one’s moral judgment becomes in general.

That distortion may show up first as a moral equivalence that many respondents draw between liberal and authoritarian states. Those with strongly anti-Zionist attitudes (as well as traditionally antisemitic ones; the two attitudes were correlated though not identical) often place oppressive regimes such as Iran, China, or North Korea on the same moral plane as liberal-democratic states like the United States or Australia. And Israel is seen as the worst of the worst.

Since 1948, anti-Zionists have formulated their cause as an inversion of the moral and legal right of the Jewish people to self-determination, which was recognized by the United Nations at Israel’s founding. Beginning with early efforts by the Arab League to promote a Palestinian “right of return” for refugees displaced in Israel’s war of independence—not to a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, but inside of Israeli territory, so as to dismantle the Jewish state—Israel’s very essence has been cast as immoral, unjust, and opposed to the post–WWII international order.

But our data clearly shows that anti-Zionism is an ideology that violates the human-rights order it claims to defend. By turning Israel into the scapegoat for modernity’s most foundational crimes—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—it in fact undermines the very architecture that was constructed to prevent those crimes.

Moral inversion is not a new phenomenon. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah warned of those who “call evil good and good evil.” The author George Orwell described how language can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Time and again, movements proclaiming liberation have carried out terror, from the Rwandan genocide against Tutsi “colonizers” to the Cambodian genocide against urban elites and “pro-American imperialists.” Even the founding father of 19th- and 20th-century antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, defended his anti-Jewish agitation as “no more than a cry of pain from one of the oppressed.” Across the archive of mass atrocity, totalizing ideologies have inverted moral reality, recasting victims as oppressors and oppressors as righteous victims.

Recent work by scholars of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has emphasized how contemporary anti-Zionist libels often reproduce Soviet propaganda slogans—such as “Zionist colonialism” or “Zionists are Nazis”—disseminated globally after the 1967 war, when the Soviet Union sought to mobilize the third world against “international Zionism,” a canard that recast Jewish political rights as a global conspiracy against the rights of others.

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Consistent with this pattern, our study finds that when respondents were shown Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda images—depicting Israelis as Nazis or linking the Star of David with dollar signs and swastikas—those who more strongly endorsed the images were more likely to make morally inverted human-rights judgments.

In 1975, the Soviet-Arab bloc passed the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations—something the U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said “reeked of the totalitarian mind.” The resolution recast “Zionism” as the inverse of the emerging anti-racist and human rights order, a construction that, after the Cold War, reentered the Western left through the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Unsurprisingly, our study also finds that anti-Zionism and moral inversion correlate with “left-wing authoritarianism”—attitudes aimed at dismantling established hierarchies and norms in order to impose ostensibly “progressive” ends.

In the present day, the UN can hardly bring itself to condemn Iran’s targeting of Israeli civilians using cluster munitions, yet has no hesitation in establishing commissions to accuse Israel of genocide, collapsing the distinction between civilian casualties and the intentional destruction of a group.

Our study puts hard data onto this phenomenon of political and moral confusion, and its connection to anti-Zionist ideology. The study also suggests that the problem goes beyond just how Israel is perceived.

If anti-Zionism—whether in its left-wing form or in the increasingly visible right-wing variant promoted by figures such as Tucker Carlson—constructs Israel as an all-encompassing symbol of political evil in the contemporary order, then the Iran war takes on a more fundamental meaning. It begins to appear as a confrontation between the possibility of moral judgment and an ideology in which the very distinction between right and wrong has been turned upside down.

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