I once had an idea for a coffee table book: A solemn academic cover, styled like a serious scholarly tome, titled How to Fight Antisemitism: The Experts Speak. But inside, there would be no text at all – just glossy, full-page photos of IDF fighters in battle dress, striking heroic poses as they stand between Israel’s eight million Jews and the swarms of jihadists who have been trying to kill them.
It was Woody Allen who put it best in his movie Manhattan. At a literary soiree, Allen suggests going to New Jersey with baseball bats and bricks to “really explain things” to a group of neo-Nazis planning a rally. An interlocutor praises a New York Times op-ed that had satirised the neo-Nazis, but Allen’s character retorts that satire and op-eds are useless against men “with the shiny boots…” Jews will never persuade their haters to stop hating them.
The reason why helps explain the so-called “antisemitic horseshoe”. Why do the far-left and far-right – who agree on almost nothing else – unite in their hatred of Jews? What connects the “Jews will not replace us” clowns with the “From the River to the Sea” campaigners? Why do both demand lands cleared of Jews – their own and those of others? Is there anywhere they can agree that Jews should be? Why do both groups see “too many Jews” in various places and industries, when clearly, for them, the ideal number is zero? Why do both salivate at the prospect of Iranian nukes? What could possibly link the tiki-torch crowd with the terrorist-cosplaying “watermelon people” who have paraded through Western cities week after week, for years now?
Notice what else they have in common: Both groups want to overthrow the current order, to flip the board and start again. Like a child losing at Monopoly, they want to upend the board, perhaps they will have better luck in a second round. Indeed, that revolutionary impulse is why both get the “far” prefix.
Their recruitment pool is the same: societal rejects, the “losers” of modernity – socially awkward, basement-dwelling, unattractive, ordinary, disaffected. People with little left to lose, who convince themselves that “all is lost”.
Conveniently, they have nothing better to do on a weekend, so they are available to march. The far-right attracts the “losers” of globalisation, eager to explain away their failures by blaming “globalists.” The far-left attract the lost souls, seeking to externalise their personal inadequacies into geopolitics: "Power structures" are their enemy, oppressing them, pushing them down.
Deep down, they know their only chance of not dying as losers is if the world is remade – through chaos, revolution, collapse. Maybe, just maybe, after the conflagration, they’ll be at the top of the pile.
Any alliance, no matter how grotesque, will do, hence the Queers for Palestine is not a hilarious contradiction, but part of a sinister plan. But Jewish success gnaws at them. Nothing insults a loser more than meritocracy, since it exposes the true reason for their failure. If Jews – despite centuries of persecution – can succeed while they cannot, then perhaps the fault lies not with “the system” but with themselves. That cannot stand. So the world must not be a meritocracy – it must be a Jewish conspiracy. Scratch a meritocracy-hater and find a Jew-hater.
The same logic applies on the geopolitical plane. Russia, having lost the Cold War, seeks to sow chaos in hopes of clinging to influence. Radical Islam, in decline for centuries, sees destruction as its only hope. The Western far-left should have soured on Russia after its slide from communism into klepto-capitalism, yet mysteriously, the bond remains unbroken. Why?
Because the true enemy has always been Western hegemony. For the chance of a “new world,” they will excuse Putin, ignore China’s million Muslims in concentration camps, and ally with butchers, including with those in Iran. Whatever it takes.
Thus, the campaign against Jews becomes a natural alliance between global losers and local losers. Old antisemitic tropes are dusted off: Jews secretly run the world; they control the banks; politicians are their puppets; they cause all wars; they grow rich by setting gentiles against each other; they relish the death of children, and so much more.
Jews, too, symbolise Western civilisation. Guaranteeing the rights of even “heretics” and dissenters was the Enlightenment’s hallmark. The ability of Jews to live freely in a society is like the ability of women to walk dressed as they wish without fear – both mark a mature society that values freedom and merit. If the losers’ revolution is to succeed, merit must be suppressed and this must be destroyed.
That is why there is an entire subspecies of the far right dedicated to “counting Jews” in various industries, attributing success to scheming and nepotism. If they want to flip the board, they must deal with Jews first. But all this is being turbocharged by every foreign bad actor, who amplify via funding and technology all these threads in Western society. They want nothing less than to weaponise the West’s disaffected youth against itself.
If Western civilisation is to fall, Israel – seen as the “weakest block” in the Western Jenga tower – must be pulled out first. If even Israel stands, the tower cannot topple. So when Jews or Israel suffer, the extremists see their day of victory drawing closer. When those who murder Jews are killed, their victory slips further away.
The bloodlust may seem insane – especially from the far-left, which at least claims virtue – but remember: they are losers. If Jews don’t suffer, they themselves remain losers. Deep inside, unconsciously, they believe that Jewish suffering is the price of their own redemption.
They want a new world order, and if it must be built on the banks of a river of Jewish blood, so be it. When Jews are murdered, they cry for joy. When the murderers are killed, they cry tears.That is why you cannot “fight antisemitism. It is as perennial as misery, jealousy, and inequality. You can’t persuade a loser not to be a loser, just as you can’t persuade a Jew-hater not to hate Jews. You can’t fix them, you can’t convince them.
You cannot fight antisemitism. You can only fight antisemites. The IDF in Gaza is fighting antisemites – one Mein Kampf-brainwashed terrorist at a time. When, on the 20th anniversary of the BDS movement, its leading light Francesca Albanese was herself “BDS’ed”, that too is fighting antisemites. Warfare and lawfare, those are the ways. Pleading to be liked will never work.
Saul Sadka is a geopolitical analyst and author of “The Intertextual Tanakh.” On X: @Saul_Sadka
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