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This is a guest essay by Vivian Baruch, a writer based in Australia.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Politics built on grievance and blame can be extraordinarily effective because it offers a simple answer to complex problems: Identify a common enemy and unite otherwise disparate groups against it.
Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University Ruth Wisse asserts that antisemitism and antizionism are unusual among modern ideologies because they are exclusively negative. Even socialism, communism, and totalitarianism promise people something in their attempt to win them over.
Pointing the finger at Jews has a long record, which historians and archaeologists date back to the Jewish Exodus from the Egypt of the pharaohs in the 13th century BCE. But here I want to focus on its modern political forms. These “anti-isms,” as Wisse calls them, turn complicated social, cultural, and political problems into a single story of blame. Their power lies not only in whom they target, but in their ability to create coalitions among groups that may otherwise have little in common.
A useful starting point is Germany in 1879, when Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Antisemites. The German Empire had been created only eight years earlier from 25 states and remained divided by regional loyalties, religious tensions, and political friction.
Marr recast classical religious prejudice against Jews as a secular, pseudo-scientific political movement. He blamed Jewish emancipation and modern capitalism for Germany’s problems and sought to reverse Jewish civil rights and remove Jews from the country. In a fractured society, blaming Jews created a common cause.
The same political mechanism appeared in different settings. In Soviet Russia, the Yevsektsia was established in 1918 by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik government as a Jewish antizionist unit tasked with bringing the Jewish working class into the Soviet system. It closed synagogues, banned the teaching of Hebrew, and prevented traditional Judaism, Zionism, and rival political movements from operating.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, developed a different Islamist political project: removing Western colonial influence from the Islamic world and building government around sharia law. Its core principle is that Islam is both a religion and a state, with social Islamisation progressing from individual piety towards political power and, ultimately, aspiring to reunite Muslim nations under a revived pan-Islamic caliphate.
In 1945, the Arab League was organised as an antizionist league in Cairo, before the creation of the State of Israel. Arab societies had oil, land and large populations, while European imperial powers were exhausted by World War II.
Yet the Arab world remained politically divided and pan-Arabism had failed to unite it. Antizionism and antisemitism became powerful unifying ideas across otherwise competing states and movements and currently remain a unifying thread underlying Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Islam.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini later popularised the language of “the Little Satan” for Israel and “the Great Satan” for the United States during the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. His stated aim was to first eliminate Israel, then the United States, and then the Western world, accusing it of deceptive and corrupting power that uses political, cultural, and economic influence to weaken Islamic societies.
Poland in 1968 offers another example. Although antisemitism was officially illegal, university protests were blamed on the “Zionists,” and the government purged 13,000 Jews and revoked their citizenship. How did authorities decide who was a Zionist? They targeted Poles with Jewish names. Political belief was not the test. The operative assumption was “Zionist unless proven innocent,” a pattern that has echoes in the treatment of doxed Jewish creatives and academics in Australia in 2024.
Today, coalition-building may be one of antizionism’s most important political functions. At Harvard University October 7, 2023, 33 grievance groups formed a coalition against Israel as it was being attacked by Hamas.
Many of the movements represented on Western campuses — antiwar, radical feminist, anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and the Occupy movements — developed over decades. The contemporary antizionist movement has brought many of them together around cliches such as “globalise the intifada,” which author Danny Burmawi states is “a slogan with a documented history of mass-casualty violence … with a specific historical blueprint for targeting civilians.”
The same dynamic can also be seen internationally. In 2026, competing and often failing Arab states remain capable of finding common ground in hostility towards Israel and the United States. In Ruth Wisse’s terms, this is a politics of deflection: Attention is shifted away from their failure to create thriving states, to build something for themselves and their people, towards an external enemy.
That raises an important question: If anti-Jewish politics has repeatedly been used as a political instrument, why has political science not treated it more systematically as a tool of power? Why have we not studied its variables, coalition-building effects, and capacity to deflect responsibility with the same seriousness applied to other political strategies?
Today’s antizionist, anti-Jewish hate is not presented in the language of classical antisemitism. Adam Louis-Klein, Dr. Naya Lekht, Dr. Andrew Pessin, and Joshua Dabelstein are educators working in the Movement Against Antizionism. As Dabelstein writes:
“Contemporary antizionism draws legitimacy from anti-racism, anti-colonialism, human-rights language, decolonial theory, humanitarian concern, and the prestige of institutions that circulate these ideas.”
The result, the Movement Against Antizionism argues, is a permission structure in which anti-Jewish hostility can be plausibly denied because it is presented as “political criticism” of Israel. It is nothing of the sort.
The Movement Against Antizionism’s research reveals that narratives blaming Jews or “Zionism” for broad social failures draw from three historical sources: the Nazi-Islamist axis (1930s-1940s), Soviet-Arab propaganda (1956-1991), and Western settler-colonial theory (1990s-present). I would add that antizionist narratives now also travel through the propaganda networks of authoritarian states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, amplified further by social media and AI.
The result is that Israel is associated with an extraordinary range of unrelated issues: colonialism, South African apartheid, police brutality in the United States, Black oppression, debates over the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. border policy, animal cruelty, pinkwashing, global warming, the climate emergency, exploitation of women, and reproductive violence.
Across very different movements, antizionism is increasingly positioned as a common thread linking otherwise separate struggles.
This pattern matters because the politics of grievance and blame does more than distort debate; they redirect moral attention. In 2025 alone, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions against Israel and 11 in total against the rest of the world, including China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.
This occurred while China continued to detain hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities; Iran was carrying out wide-scale “disappearances” and killings of protesters against the terrorist regime; Russia was targeting civilians in their revanchist war against Ukraine; North Korea maintained a large network of prison camps where arbitrary detention, torture, starvation, and ongoing atrocities persist; and thousands of Christians were being murdered in Nigeria.
Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, that imbalance illustrates how easily attention can become manipulated and concentrated on one state while other abuses receive minor, if any, scrutiny.
Defenders of the Jewish People and liberal democracy should be careful not to accept accusations on the terms set by a politics of grievance. When a charge rests on a false premise, the answer is not endless self-defence. It is to identify the premise, test it, and hold the accuser accountable for the argument being made.
This debate is also about how Western democracies understand themselves. Jewish self-confidence in Australia, America, and other liberal democracies is closely tied to democratic self-confidence.
Yet, since the 1970s, many educational institutions have become more focused on teaching the failures of Western democracies than their achievements. Those institutions educate the teachers, business and media leaders, politicians, and parents who then pass imbalanced cultural stories to the next generation. If the benefits and moral foundations of liberal democracy are not taught, it becomes harder to defend them.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that progressive liberalism, in its alliance with socialism and Islamism, often treats its own culture and national belonging with suspicion and blame. It can be reluctant to name genuinely illiberal values and behaviours outside the West, while readily describing Western societies as “oppressive and colonial.” That asymmetry makes it harder to distinguish legitimate criticism of democratic societies from ideologies that reject democratic freedoms altogether.
This is why the freedom of Jews is not a niche concern. If Jews are not free in Australia, America, and the West, then the West itself is no longer fully free. As journalist Haviv Rettig Gur claims: “What you teach the kids, is what the future is.”
Antizionism is the most destructive contemporary form of anti-Jewish hatred because it incorporates and multiplies earlier traditions of blame.
Ruth Wisse contrasts the secrecy of the Nazi death camps with the way Hamas publicised its violence on October 7th. The Nazis hid their camps from public view because they still understood that the wider Western world would condemn what it found. Hamas did the opposite on October 7th. Its attackers recorded and broadcast murders, rapes, burnings, mutilations, and executions. The violence was used as propaganda and recruitment, while parts of the Western world subsequently denied what happened or described it as an “uprising of oppressed people.”
For that reason, today’s antizionism is part of a wider struggle over the confidence and survival of liberal democratic civilisation. The Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions helped shape democratic societies, and Israel’s existential conflict with illiberal, if not barbaric, forces is therefore emblematic of the West’s broader political challenge.
Israel has been forced to defend itself since its creation on May 14, 1948, when within hours, it was attacked by five Arab states with support from three others. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and anti-Western propagandists are the continuation of 78 years of attacks.
Jewish people and defenders of liberal democracy should not internalise responsibility for the world’s problems simply because a grievance and blame movement assigns it to them. Nor should Jewish people and democratic societies surrender confidence in the freedoms — of speech, expression, belief, and association — that distinguish liberal systems from illiberal ones.
The response to grievance politics is not to follow the pointing fingers of blame. It is to challenge false premises, expose deflection, and insist that political movements be judged by what they build as well as by what they oppose.
The war of ideas matters because a society that no longer understands why its freedoms are worth defending will struggle to preserve them. The task is therefore not only to resist antizionism and antisemitism, but to recover confidence in the democratic culture those ideologies seek to undermine.
The scam works because anti-Zionism launders old Jew-hatred through modern virtue language: anti-racism, decolonization, human rights, humanitarian concern, and institutional prestige. Then Israel gets blamed for everything — colonialism, police brutality, borders, climate, gender politics, oppression, and every grievance on the activist menu. This is ideological fentanyl. It gives angry people a hit, destroys moral judgment, and leaves liberal democracy weaker. The answer is not endless apology. It is premise testing, exposure, confidence, and confrontation. The West must stop buying misery coated in hate and start defending civilization.
Excellent article. And perhaps the explanation is simpler than we think: Jews are the perfect scapegoat. I call it the four P’s — Population: we are tiny in number. Passivity: historically, we have often failed to fight back forcefully enough. Prosperity: Jews are perceived as economically successful. Prominence: despite our small numbers, Jews are highly visible in many fields. Put those four together and you have the perfect scapegoat — small enough to blame, successful enough to resent, prominent enough to notice, and too often passive enough to attack.