Antisemitism isn't ignorance. Our enemies use it for control.

Too many people think antisemitism is a kind of social illness. In reality, both today and historically, it's an instrument of power — and Diaspora Jewry’s only real response is to reclaim it.

“Anti-Zionism” (an outgrowth of traditional antisemitism) starts with marches and ends in bloodshed. (photo: حسن/Unsplash)

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Editor’s Note: This essay contains a graphic image. Reader discretion is advised.

For years, Jews have been encouraged to believe that antisemitism is primarily a problem of ignorance, like many bigotries and hatreds. If only we explain ourselves better — if we educate more clearly, contextualize more patiently, empathize more generously — the hostility will soften.

This framing is comforting. It suggests that hatred is fringe rather than mainstream, emotional rather than strategic. It allows governments, institutions, and polite society to treat antisemitism as an anomaly instead of what it increasingly is: a sociopolitical weapon, an instrument of control.

Much of what we are witnessing today is not ignorance at all. It is power. When New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani makes “anti-Zionism” a core part of his political platform (even though he is not Palestinian and Gaza has nothing to do with New York City), that is not confusion or youthful radicalism; it is a calculated move to mobilize a constituency, to signal ideological allegiance, and to convert resentment into votes.

When protesters organize themselves outside Jewish-owned restaurants, synagogues, cultural events, or community gatherings, that is not activism gone astray; it is intimidation, a deliberate assertion of dominance over public space.

When people tear down posters of kidnapped Jews — human beings stolen from their homes, their beds, a music festival — that is not moral nuance; it is the erasure of Jewish suffering as an act of political force.

These are not accidents, misunderstandings, or ignorance; they are power grabs.

Power does not yield to education alone; it yields to consequences. For all the talk of dialogue, empathy, and multiculturalism, history is unambiguous on this point: Power must be confronted by power. You do not stop arsonists with workshops on fire safety. You do not deter predators by asking them to reflect on their biases. Sometimes you respond reactively, and sometimes you act preemptively, because deterrence only works when it is visible and credible.

Israel understands this because it has no luxury of abstraction. When, for example, the IDF recently struck a building near the Syrian presidential palace, it was not an act of escalation for its own sake; it was a warning, delivered in the only language authoritarian regimes and terror-aligned actors reliably understand: Think twice about your actions, because there will be consequences if you make the wrong decision.

This clarity is why antisemitism feels different in Israel than it does abroad. Israelis are often accused of lacking sensitivity when discussing Gaza, as if moral concern must be evenly distributed across strangers and neighbors to count as legitimate. The truth is more human and far less sinister. Israelis (Jews, really) care deeply about morality; we argue about it relentlessly. We scrutinize our army, our government, our leaders, and our institutions in ways few societies do under constant threat. But people naturally care most about those they know. That instinct is universal everywhere except — when Jews express it.

When I see a photo of my Australian-Israeli colleague Arsen Ostrovsky’s entire head bloodied at Bondi Beach on Sunday, this is no longer an abstract headline. I know him personally. I know he has an American wife and young children who live in Israel and were in Australia visiting.

Arsen Ostrovsky thankfully survived the Bondi Beach pogrom on Sunday.

A few months before the recent Israel-Hamas war exploded, I went on a date with an Israeli woman from Herzliya. On October 7th, she and her sister were murdered at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border. And I know the father of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the Israeli-American hostage who was murdered in Gaza; his father and I had a business meeting in Tel Aviv not long before October 7th.

Israel is so small that the degrees of separation are rarely more than two or three. Tragedy is never distant; it is almost always personal. In the Diaspora, where Jews are scattered across dozens of countries, antisemitic attacks can register as horrifying yet obscure: events that happen to “someone else, somewhere else.” Israelis do not have that luxury. And even if we did, we would not mistake false symmetry for moral clarity. We live next to regimes that openly weaponize antisemitism (often repackaged as “anti-Zionism”), not as rhetoric, but as tools of power — used to mobilize populations, justify violence, and mask their own failures.

Such regimes cultivate a fictional caricature of the Jew or the Israeli as the ultimate enemy in order to distract from corruption, suppress dissent, and unify populations through resentment (similar to past regimes like Nazi Germany, among many others). When these narratives migrate, they do not dissolve. They are imported, translated, and amplified, often with the help of Western activists who provide ideological cover and moral language. This is not ignorance. It is an instrument of control.

The idea that today’s antisemitism is spontaneous or accidental collapses the moment one examines its sources. In Australia, Muslims make up roughly 3.2 percent of the population, many having migrated from countries with some of the highest levels of antisemitism in the world: Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan.

The same dynamic plays out at the state level in the West. Governments have learned that hostility toward Israel is politically useful. It allows them to court radical Left-wing activists, signal “moral seriousness” to international audiences, and deflect attention from domestic failures.

Australia’s current government has a long record of disproportionate hostility toward Israel, and that posture inevitably translates into hostility toward Australian Jews. “Globalize the Intifada” was never “free speech” or some harmless metaphor. Intifada has a meaning, and in practice it has always meant anti-Jewish violence. To globalize it purely means to expand that violence beyond Israel and Israelis.

The response of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after the Bondi Beach massacre was both predictable and revealing. In the immediate aftermath of a modern-day pogrom, he issued a statement that mentioned neither Jews, nor antisemitism, nor Hanukkah, nor Islamic extremism, nor terrorism. He described the attack as “shocking” and “distressing” and offered his thoughts to “every person affected.”

Then Albanese pivoted to the need for “tougher gun laws,” despite Australia already having some of the strictest gun control in the world. The sociopolitical logic was transparent: Respond with something that looks responsible but commits to nothing, especially nothing explicitly Jewish. Because if the response is explicitly Jewish, then (for sociopolitical reasons) there must be a counter-response that is explicitly Muslim, even though the perpetrators of Sunday’s terror attack at the Bondi Beach Hanukkah event were Muslim. So, for Albanese and the other deranged Australian politicians, it makes the most sociopolitical sense to do something general that looks like a responsible response but actually means nothing at all, and certainly does nothing to protect Jews in Australia moving forward.

This is antisemitism dressed up as “complexity.”

As for us Jews, we must acknowledge: The war has not ended, it has only migrated. This is a war without declarations or front lines. It doesn’t move with armies or negotiate through treaties. It travels through ideas, grievance ecosystems, social media feeds, and narratives imported from elsewhere and laundered into moral language. Its foot soldiers are recruited not only from mosques, but from social media feeds and messaging apps, activist collectives, and crowds willing to menace rather than think.

In London recently, a mob assembled outside a restaurant for no other reason than that it is owned by Israeli chef Eyal Shani. In California over the weekend, a home decorated for Hanukkah was sprayed with 20 bullets as the shooter screamed, “F*ck the Jews!” After the Bondi Beach terror attack, Britain’s prime minister responded by posting a photo of himself lighting Hanukkah candles — hours later, after months of tolerating antisemitic hate marches through British streets, and only weeks after a lethal Islamic terror attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. Illumination in place of enforcement, gesture in place of defense.

The only rational conclusion for Diaspora Jews is not frenzy; it’s reality, no matter how painful it may be to confront. Many are making plans, quietly and deliberately, because Jewish memory is not superstition; it is pattern recognition. Preparing an exit when your position has been abandoned from above is not cowardice; it is prudence.

Jews are being targeted not in isolation, but as the first line of a broader assault on Western civilization. Islamists supply the theological engine, the Far-Left provides ideological cover, foreign regimes exploit the chaos, and mainstream institutions manage decline while refusing to confront causes. Jews represent continuity, limits, and memory, values the West claims to cherish but no longer knows how to defend. That is why hatred of Jews is never only about Jews.

“Future of Jewish” is often labeled as overly negative, and I understand why. But pessimism is not surrender. We try to wield it deliberately, as a blunt instrument to cut through the anesthetic fog that has settled over Western societies while their institutions quietly rot. Not to breed hopelessness, but to restore vision. To make one thing unmistakably clear: No one outside of the Jewish world is quietly working in the background to secure the Jewish future. No external system is instinctively guarding our children. There is no higher authority left to whom we can safely outsource judgment, vigilance, or security.

That burden has returned to us — and in accepting it, in taking responsibility for it, we recover something far better than comfort. We recover real hope.

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