As a Jewish parent, this is what keeps me up at night.

It’s not just much of the world’s hatred of Israel I worry about. It’s that my children are being taught to doubt who they are and where they come from.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, the co-CEO of Fulwell Entertainment.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There are years when history moves loudly, announcing itself with explosions, elections and images that burn themselves into collective memory. And then there are years when something far more dangerous happens at the same time, quietly, bureaucratically, politely, disguised as opinion, reframed as nuance, and laundered through the language of culture.

2025 was both.

It was a year of noise. Of shouted slogans and marches, of explicit hatred directed at Jews, often unmasked, often celebrated, often excused. A year in which antisemitism no longer whispered, but roared, on streets, on campuses, online and in places that once prided themselves on moral clarity.

But while our attention was fixed on the volume, on the visible, the violent, the unmistakable, something else was happening almost unnoticed. Israel was being quietly cancelled. Not through war or diplomacy, but through perception, through culture, through legitimacy itself.

This week, Israel fell to the bottom of the 2025 Nation Brands Index for the second consecutive year, recording the steepest year-on-year decline since the survey’s creation nearly two decades ago. The index, compiled by Ipsos and designed by policy adviser Simon Anholt, does not measure military strength or economic output. It measures something far more revealing: how countries are felt by the global public: governance, culture, tourism, exports, people.

Across every one of those dimensions, Israel now ranks last. This isn’t about policy disagreement, it isn’t even about war. It is about delegitimisation.

Researchers noted that younger respondents increasingly frame Israel through ideological lenses, collapsing the distinction between a government and its civilians, between a state and its people, between Jews in Israel and Jews everywhere. Most strikingly, Israel’s collapse in the “exports and products” category suggests not outrage but avoidance, a growing resistance to engaging with anything associated with Israel at all.

That matters, because disengagement is how eradication begins.

Loud hatred is easier to recognise and condemn; quiet cancellation is easier to miss and far harder to reverse. And because the consequences of this shift will not be borne by abstract states or distant institutions, but by a generation growing up inside its moral fallout.

Throughout 2025, we watched this process unfold in real time. The BDS movement no longer operates on the margins; it has been normalised across cultural, academic and commercial life. Israeli products quietly disappear from shelves. Israeli academics find themselves uninvited not for what they’ve said, but for where they were born. Jewish artists are asked to renounce Israel as a condition of participation, a loyalty test no other community is expected to pass.

In creative industries, campaigns openly target Jewish and Israeli professionals under the language of “ethical curation.” In schools and universities, Jewish students are forced to justify their identity before they are allowed to speak. Entire institutions retreat behind statements about “complexity” while ensuring the outcome is always the same, exclusion.

This is not accidental brand damage; it is carefully and strategically funded and enacted brand demolition and it mirrors something much older.

2025 will also be remembered for massacres against Jews across the globe. Terror attacks in Israel, murders in the United States and UK, a massacre in Australia, violence and harassment and intimidation in places that once promised safety. These are the most visible crimes against Jews, but are they the most dangerous?

The most dangerous development of 2025 is the growing acceptance — particularly among the young, the educated, and the culturally influential — of the idea that the Jewish state itself is illegitimate. Not flawed, not in need of reform, but illegitimate. Once that idea takes hold, everything else becomes justifiable.

Indeed, October 7th was never the end goal. If the intention had been to wipe Israel off the map, the attack would have looked very different: coordinated fronts from Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in the north, the Houthis in the south, Iran from the east.

Instead, what followed was something far more effective: a drip drip, draining conflict, accompanied by hostage-taking. A prolonged, grinding conflict designed to force Israel into an impossible position, defending itself while fighting in Gaza and, in doing so, feeding a global media ecosystem all too willing to collaborate with a Qatari-funded propaganda machine in scripting a narrative of genocide and famine.

The drip-feed was the strategy and much of the world played its part willingly. Esteemed journalistic bodies rewarded a state-backed propaganda outlet like Al Jazeera with credibility and prizes, while dismissing Israeli sources as inherently suspect. Commentators who would never tolerate moral ambiguity around the Nazis suddenly discovered a taste for “nuance” when it came to Jewish survival.

By the end of 2025, the Far-Right and the Far-Left had found their common ground: hatred of the Jewish state.

At the close of the year, the signals could not have been clearer. Western governments moved to recognise a Palestinian state not as the culmination of peace, but as a political concession following the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a precedent that tells every terror organisation exactly what violence can buy.

In New York City, which features the largest Jewish population outside Israel, voters elevated Zohran Mamdani, a man whose political identity is rooted not in coexistence, but in hostility to the Jewish state, normalising a worldview that treats Jewish self-determination as a moral crime.

In Britain, Jews were banned from attending a football match in Birmingham, not because of who they were threatening, but because of who they were. Collective punishment, justified as “risk management,” quietly reintroduced segregation under the language of safety.

And across culture, academia and media, more than 6,000 members of the film and television community proudly signed letters and boycotts that did not target policies, but people, demanding ideological conformity from Jews alone, while congratulating themselves on their moral courage. These were not aberrations; they were signals and they were received.

So, the question for 2026 is not whether Israel can repair its brand. The question is whether brand repair is even the point. Do we really believe that a people who have survived exile, pogroms, genocide, and repeated attempts at annihilation should now calibrate their existence around opinion polls? That Jewish self-determination must pass a global popularity contest to remain valid?

Or is the real work ahead something far harder and far more urgent?

Perhaps the lesson of 2025 is that we cannot win this fight by chasing approval. Because the approval being withheld is conditional on our disappearance. Which leaves us with a different responsibility altogether.

I think about my children constantly when I write. Not because I want sympathy, but because they are the only honest metric that matters. The real fight now is not simply protecting them from hatred; it is protecting them from distortion — from being taught subtly and persistently to see themselves not as they are, but as others would like them to be.

I want my children to recognise the Jews they are, not the caricature that social media, activism, and increasingly mainstream culture are constructing for them: the apologetic Jew, the conditional Jew, the Jew permitted to exist only if they are quiet about who they are and detached from where they come from.

I want them to be proud and unembarrassed about their culture and heritage. Proud of a civilisation that has survived because it refused to disappear politely. Clear, unconfused, unapologetic about the inalienable connection between being Jewish and the land of Israel. Because without that connection, neither makes sense. Without Israel, Jewish history is reduced to tragedy. Without Jewish identity, Israel is reduced to geography. The two are indivisible.

To be Jewish is not simply to belong to a faith or an ethnicity; it is to belong to a people and to belong to a people is to believe that they have the same right as any other to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. In other words, to be a Jew is to be a Zionist, not as a political slogan, but as a statement of continuity, of survival, of refusal.

If 2025 taught us anything, it is that the erosion of legitimacy does not begin with violence; it begins with language, with boycotts dressed up as ethics, with exclusions justified as safety, and with the quiet insistence that Jews must redefine themselves in order to be tolerated. The danger of 2025 was not only what was shouted at Jews, not only the violence enacted against Jews, but what was decided about them while the shouting and the violence distracted us.

So, perhaps, 2026 is not the year we ask how the world sees Israel. Perhaps it is the year we decide how our children will see themselves, before others decide for them.

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