The idea that one can demonise and dehumanise Israel and Zionism – both central to modern Jewish identity – without targeting Jews defies reality and rests on a linguistic sleight of hand
May 28, 2025 13:37
If sanity ever returns to the West, people will look back on this moment with the same bewilderment we now reserve for those less enlightened times when Jews were murdered for allegedly killing God. How did so many in a civilisation that prides itself on Holocaust remembrance and slogans of “Never Again” fall, once again, for a campaign of hatred?
Two Israeli diplomats were assassinated last week outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington by a far-left activist who shouted “Free Palestine” after his arrest. This was not the first incident of murderous violence. Barely remembered is the Passover arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home. The suspect, charged with attempted murder, told 911 he targeted Shapiro for his presumed views on Gaza. Shapiro is a centrist Democrat. There are far more strident gentile defenders of Israel in US politics. But it was Shapiro, a Jew, who was targeted.
Across the West, the pattern repeats. Synagogues firebombed in Canada. A Belgian author acquitted after writing in a magazine that Gaza made him want to “ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew”. Gangs hunting Jews in Amsterdam. In London, teenagers hurling abuse and projectiles at a Jewish school bus. These are not spontaneous acts of hate or violence – they are the product of a climate, carefully cultivated.
A worldview has taken root: that Israel is uniquely evil, and Jews, by association, are complicit. If Israel is committing genocide, then most Jews – who support or identify with the state – are, logically, accessories. And if they’re accessories, then attacking them becomes not merely understandable, but righteous in the minds of the indoctrinated.
The idea that one can demonise and dehumanise Israel and Zionism – both central to modern Jewish identity – without targeting Jews defies reality and rests on a linguistic sleight of hand. As an ancient people, we’ve been known by many names: Hebrews, Israel, Jews. Our national movement is named after one of Jerusalem’s hills. And a 19th-century German Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, introduced the term “antisemitism”, yet another name, into politics. This linguistic variety makes it easier to argue that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Jews. It’s the equivalent of denying Ireland’s right to exist while insisting you aren’t “anti-Irish” – so long as they don’t live in Ireland or support its statehood. Would such an argument be taken seriously?
This is no passing storm. It is the new climate. The assassinations, the arson attacks, the blood libels rebranded as humanitarian concern – these did not emerge from nowhere. They are the consequence of years of intellectual and institutional decay. Western universities have trained a generation to see Israel as irredeemably guilty.
That worldview has metastasised. NGOs, once thought impartial, now act as ideological enforcers. Major unions echo anti-Israel slogans. Church groups issue one-sided condemnations of the Jewish state.
The minds were primed. So when Hamas broadcast live the most barbaric mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, it didn’t prompt moral clarity. Instead, it intensified the hatred. Instead of revulsion, there was rationalisation. Instead of solidarity, blame. The idea had already taken root: Israel is the villain of the story.
Media malpractice has only deepened the rot. Hamas-supplied casualty figures were reported as facts. Context disappeared. Nuance was discarded. Human rights groups and UN agencies made increasingly wild allegations – genocide foremost among them – and the media relayed them with little scrutiny. In a welcome departure from this pattern, the BBC hesitated when confronted with the UN claim that 14,000 Palestinian babies were about to die within 48 hours. To its credit, the corporation investigated and debunked it. But then it buried its own reporting.
Meanwhile, calls for violence have been mainstreamed. “Globalise the intifada” is chanted freely on Western campuses and in the streets. Never mind that the last intifada claimed thousands of Israeli casualties – thus making calls for its globalisation a threat to Jews everywhere.
Though the movement was seeded by the far left and Islamist networks, the right has eagerly joined in. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson give airtime to revisionists who recast Churchill as the villain of the Second World War – thereby softening Hitler by implication. And further to the right, antisemitism has moved from dog whistle to bullhorn. Kanye West praises Hitler in song. Candace Owens peddles conspiracy theories.
Most Western governments have had no answer to the ideological challenge now unfolding. Their failure to act decisively against foreign threats to Jewish communities only compounded the problem. In both Europe and the UK, repeated Iranian plots to murder Jews have still not led to the proscription of the IRGC. Whatever the calculations, the refusal to act risks sending a message to Jewish communities – and their enemies – that their security is not the priority it should be.
A ceasefire or a new Israeli government may cool the temperature. But the ideological fire will not be extinguished so easily. The anti-Zionist worldview is now embedded in our institutions. Reversing it will take courage in politics, integrity in journalism and zero tolerance in our schools and public squares.
