When Benjamin Netanyahu accuses anyone who dares to criticise him of pouring “fuel on an antisemitic fire” or “abandoning Jews,” I know that the hyperbole hides a power grab
September 11, 2025 11:02
My guess is that nearly every reader of the JC has heard a sneering voice tell them that Jews use false allegations of antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism.
Readers with the time and patience may well have replied that antisemitism is buried deep in Christianity and Islam. It’s the world’s oldest hatred. It has inspired fascists, communists and Islamists, and remains at the root of half of the conspiracy theories that afflict humanity today.
To say that scheming Jews have invented anti-Jewish racism to advance their own interests is to twist language and excuse prejudice. The first task of the modern antisemite, it seems, is to deny that antisemitism exists.
But in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu the twisting and the excuse-making come from the other side. The Israeli right and far right are using wild accusations of antisemitism to justify their extremism.
You’d never guess it from Netanyahu’s paranoid babbling, but Israeli forces have swept the Middle East. They have decimated Hezbollah and Hamas, humiliated Iran, and created the conditions for the fall of the Assad dynasty.
Europe, the Arab world, the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on Israel’s streets, the families of the hostages, Eyal Zamir and the other dissident officers in the Israel Defence Forces, and the trapped and terrified population of Gaza want Netanyahu to bank the win and stop the suffering.
He can’t, maybe because he is a prisoner of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They have threatened many times to bring down Netanyahu’s government if he stops the war, after all. But perhaps that thought is too kind. Given that Netanyahu has never shown the smallest concern for Palestinian suffering, my guess is that, if he is their prisoner, he is their willing prisoner.
For whatever reason, the Israeli government is demeaning the honourable struggle against antisemitism. It is issuing anathemas as if Netanyahu were a Jewish pope rather than a politician on the make – and turning friends into enemies as it does it. When Emmanuel Macron asked for decent treatment for the Palestinians, Netanyahu cried, “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on this antisemitic fire.” When Germany said it also supports a two-state solution, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would be preposterous if he were not so sinister, said that “80 years after the Holocaust, Germany was once again supporting Nazis”. When Australia did the same, Netanyahu accused its PM Anthony Albanese of being “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”. I could respond to the screeching denunciations with facts – not that mere facts receive much of a welcome in Jerusalem these days.
A few weeks ago, court documents showed how the Australian security services wound up criminal gangs that Iran had paid to attack Jews. Australia’s success did not inspire Netanyahu to withdraw his insulting denunciation of Albanese.
Meanwhile, Britain, France and Germany have taken such a tough line against Iran that its foreign minister said this week that they were pursuing “a reckless course of action”. Once again Netanyahu did not withdraw his implication that Western leaders encouraged Israel-hating, blood-libelling antisemites.
If he were to tell the truth, he would have to admit that the real reasons for criticisms from liberal democracies are the unconscionable suffering of the people of Gaza and the refusal of Israel to offer a half-way decent future to the Palestinians.
His political base and coalition partners would never tolerate that.
Imagine being Yvette Cooper, starting a new job as foreign secretary this week. Labour took a big political hit for its support of Israel after October 2023. Never mind, Labour thought, it was the right thing to do. Now, after all the abuse from Netanyahu, Cooper must be wondering why on earth she bothered. As must Macron, as must Albanese, as must Carney, as must Merz.
It’s always worth asking what lies behind propaganda.
When sneering sophists tell me that antisemitism doesn’t exist, I know full well that they are looking for new ways to channel anti-Jewish hatred. When Benjamin Netanyahu accuses anyone who dares to criticise him of pouring “fuel on an antisemitic fire” or “abandoning Jews”, I know that the hyperbole hides a power grab.
The Israeli government believes it can alienate a large part of world opinion and indeed of Israeli opinion, because the Trump administration has given it a blank cheque.
While Netanyahu and his ministers condemn all other Western leaders, they flatter Trump in the most oleaginous manner and insist that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Just as Trump feels that he can alienate former friends in Europe and Asia without his country paying a price, so Netanyahu believes that the Israeli right can do as it pleases because Trump has its back.
But hubris is always followed by nemesis, and pride always comes before a fall. Trump won’t last for ever – indeed you can look at him and wonder if he will last to the end of the week. Israel is just one US election away from being alone in the world.
A true American isolationist, who regards the Middle East as a needless foreign entanglement, could take the Republican ticket, or a liberal sympathetic to the Palestinian cause could be the next Democrat leader.
If either happens, Israelis will look on the bombast of the Netanyahu era and see today’s leaders for what they are: cruel and dangerous fools. And no, I do not believe it is antisemitic to say that.
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