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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Everyone seems to have lost their minds.
The brain rot and rabid Israel-obsession to explain absolutely everything continues to excavate new layers of stupidity I didn’t know existed — like we have crossed some invisible threshold into a place I don’t know we’ll ever be able to come back from.
I used to think, “Wow, this is starting to sound like the conspiracies of the medieval period like that Jews poisoned wells or orchestrated the plague,” but that actually seems tame in comparison to what’s acceptable in mainstream discourse now.
The humble idea that, “Hey, I don’t actually know much about Ceuta, or history, or anything, so maybe I shouldn’t weigh in” appears to be dead and buried.
The idea that Israel is behind the migrant influx into Ceuta, is a conspiracy theory; a classic, anti-Jewish, predictably insane, mass hallucination for the terminally online. And the best “evidence” for it is a tweet from seven years ago. You’d think if this was such a top secret operation, they’d have picked a better communications strategy than Twitter. But it seems to be definitive proof for the likes of Jew-haters.
No, Israel did not orchestrate the arrival of tens of thousands of North African migrants into Spanish territory. How this benefits Israel or the U.S. isn’t even explained. Minor details though.
It’s quite remarkable how Israel is now behind virtually every event on earth, while continuing to execute what these same people call a “genocide” and a “greater Israel project.” Do Zionists ever sleep?
I’m not exactly an expert on Ceuta, but from what I can tell, the reality is far more mundane and, as usual, doesn’t make for explosive social media content. In June of this year, a Spanish court ruled that migrants could not be immediately sent back and, instead, could stay while their case was processed. In other words, migrants believed Spain’s increasingly permissive migration policies offered a realistic path to legal residence and potentially onward movement through Europe.
Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, then appeared to panic when the predictable outcome of his socialist policies materialised. Beyond normal diplomatic relations that every country engages in, Israel has really little to do with the situation in Ceuta. That should be pretty clear to anyone who hasn’t drunk the anti-Zionist Kool-Aid. Unfortunately many people, with very large platforms and political influence, are swimming the Kool-Aid.
I know it’s hard to see when you are inside the conspiracy theory, but this is how they work: You start with a predetermined conclusion, in this case, that Israel is behind every crisis on earth, then work backwards to force everything into that conclusion and, eventually, the more convinced you become that the conclusion must be true, the further you’re willing to stretch and contort the facts to preserve it.
History is full of large swaths of people gripped by the same belief that they had finally found the one common root of all evil, and that by confronting this one villain they could “liberate” humanity and usher in a utopia free from oppression. It has a bloody and devastating track record.
When millions of people go along with conspiracies that require wider and wider cognitive leaps to frame a familiar villain (yes, you don’t get out of this by replacing Jews with the Jewish state), well, that is the kind of mass psychosis that can hasten the breakdown of a civilisation. I still have people tell me with a straight face that “criticism of a country can never be antisemitic.” Really? Is tracing every event on earth back to Israel within minutes “criticism”?
The frustrating part about basketcase conspiracies of this magnitude is that there’s often a tiny kernel of truth, buried under layers (and layers and layers) of fantasy. For example, it’s not completely irrational to suggest that Morocco is using the border pressure as political leverage against Spain. In fact, during the 2021 Ceuta crisis, this happened during tensions between the two countries over Western Sahara. At what point the leap to “Israel is flooding Ceuta with migrants” is made, I’m not sure.
So of course the Left does what the Left does best: They pick up their trusty “white oppressor versus brown oppressed” blueprint and plonk it onto the latest breaking news. They did this with Israel and had wildly successful results calling Jews colonisers in their ancestral homeland for the past several years, so why not? Many of these same people are comparing Morocco to Palestine, as in, Moroccans are the “indigenous” reclaiming their land, and Ceuta is Spain’s “colonial outpost.” The reasoning goes that Spain should just “give back” Ceuta.
Putting aside that Portugal captured Ceuta in 1415, and that it has remained under Iberian rule ever since, these are the kinds of people who would never, in a million years, argue that Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt should be made Christian again. Their efforts to “decolonise” only flow in one direction, and at the end of the day, they’re just exploiting the language of social justice in the service of a profoundly anti-Western worldview.
Then there’s the others, often the same people if we’re being totally honest, pushing the line that Israel engineered the crisis to “punish” Spain for challenging Israel.
So is this an anti-colonial liberation movement, or a Zionist plot to punish Spain? And if we’re going with the latter, are tens of thousands illegal border crossings now … bad? Because I thought diversity is our strength.
Maybe the prime minister of Spain and his fellow liberal acolytes across Europe should update their open borders stance. President Emmanuel Macron of France was among the European countries that moved quickly to reinforce border security following the crisis, which is a tad hypocritical. It reminds me of people who spend years loudly demanding the abolition of the police, only to be the first to beg the police to help when someone is ransacking their house. Slogans are easy, but reality has a habit of kicking them in the teeth.
We seem to be a profoundly ahistorical generation, which is quite an achievement given that we have more access to history than any generation before us. If we knew it just a little more, we’d recognise a very old pattern.
Throughout history, and particularly Europe, Jews repeatedly became the explanation for disasters that had nothing to do with them. They were accused of poisoning wells during the Black Death, causing crop failures, orchestrating economic collapses, revolutions, wars, pandemics, financial crises and, more recently, blamed for both communism and capitalism.
When societies become anxious, confused, or looking for simple explanations, conspiracy theories have a habit of converging on a familiar scapegoat.
During the 19th century, the conspiracy literature exploded, which catalogued that Jews secretly controlled banks, newspapers, governments and monarchies. The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (first published in 1903 and linked to the Tsarist secret police) claimed to expose a secret Jewish plot to manipulate governments and orchestrate world events. Though it was thoroughly discredited and disproven, it provided the framework that almost every modern global conspiracy borrows from, even if they’ve never heard of the book.
The Nazis, who persuaded ordinary Germans that Jews were sinister through industrialised propaganda, inherited these existing myths and prejudice that had already been in circulation for centuries.
The ironic part is that today’s mobs believe these conspiracy theories by replacing “Jew” with “Zionist.”
But Soviet anti-Zionism already perfected this work around. After 1967, the Soviet Union realised it could attack Jews without mentioning Jews. They promoted anti-Zionism as imperialist, colonial, racist, fascist, and Nazi-like, a Cold War propaganda campaign. Soviet disinformation reframed the world’s only Jewish state as the source of global instability, and exported this narrative globally via universities, journalism, communist parties, third world liberation movements, and humanitarian organisations.
What we are seeing today is the very same psychological structure, and you don’t even need to swap out Jews for Zionists.
Importantly, this isn’t a phenomenon that is uniquely Left or Right, but happens across the spectrum. During times of societal instability, the fringes embrace such theories to make sense of the world. Then, over time, the two extremes converge and start to move in toward the centre, ultimately engulfing the rest of society in the same conspiracy theories.
The Far-Right myths generally draw on Nazi-style propaganda and include ideas such as the shady globalists, Rothschilds, Great Replacement theory, and Mossad behind everything. The Far-Left, however, typically draws on Soviet propaganda ideas, and include claims of Zionism being behind imperialism, white supremacy, Western politics, policing, capitalism, and so forth.
Historians have highlighted that every successful conspiracy theory expands over time, and pay attention to how the Israel-is-behind-everything mutates. It started with Israel influences America; then morphed into Israel controls America, and Europe; then Israel created ISIS; then Israel caused COVID; then Israel was behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk; Israel caused the heatwave in Europe; now it’s Israel was behind the migrant crisis in Ceuta.
And I promise, whatever makes headlines next, you can bet that within seconds, people with big names and an even bigger influence, will immediately insist that Israel did it.
Another thing to notice is that, like classic conspiracy logic goes, these theories are completely unfalsifiable. Because any evidence against it becomes evidence for it. If the theory contradicts itself, that’s what they want you to think.
I always remember my first real life encounter with someone I’d known for years who became gripped by this disease of the brain. She posited, rather confidently, that Israel controls the media and our social feeds. When I pointed out how the media was, in fact, disproportionately anti-Israel, she then pivoted to, “that’s because people are starting to wake up.”
Contradictions like this are rife in the “pro-Palestine” movement. The Holocaust didn’t happen, but Gaza is a Holocaust. October 7th was carried out by Israel, but also Israel deserved it. End the genocide, but also globalise the intifada. Israel is an ethnostate, but also “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free (of Jews).”
These contradictions can only coexist in the same movement because the movement in question is organised around one of the oldest conspiracies.
There’s nothing unique about Ceuta. It’s simply the latest event in a long line that exposes the same conspiracy, and how we’ve become infected with it at a societal level. The fact that the time between an event occurring and people blaming Israel has become almost instantaneous, tells us just how deep we are, and how, with each passing day, it becomes less likely we’ll ever find our way out.
A darkness has taken hold of Western civilisation, a similar darkness that swallowed up many before ours, including Tsarist Russia, Medieval Spain, Weimar Germany, and Iran before it fell to the Islamic Republic.
I can’t stop it, and I can’t slow it down. We can try, and we should. But ideas believed at this scale, and with the historical weight they carry, have dire consequences. Once enough people believe them, they develop a momentum all of their own.
The brain rot and rabid Israel-obsession to explain absolutely everything continues to excavate new layers of stupidity I didn’t know existed - I could not agree more - 'Reality exceeds imagination'
I first read this essay on Lucy's excellent substack "Notes from the Ruins." She is one of the most intelligent and insightful voices on Substack.