How Tropes About Jews Do the Grunt Work for Anti-Israel Activists
What too many people do not understand is that historical associations of Jews with blood are among the most ancient and pernicious ideas in Western civilization.
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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Did you see the protests in Washington last week during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. capital?
Anti-Israel activists hardly need a visit from Israel’s prime minister as an excuse to trot out the grisliest hate imagery. But it sure seems to help.
People carry ideas about Jews that we do not even know we have. These ideas come out in weird ways. For example, after U.S. Congressmember Ilhan Omar said, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby” — implying that Jewish money controls American politics. She claimed she had no idea that “Jews and money” is a foundational antisemitic trope.
Almost nobody believed her. But I do. And that’s by far the scarier idea: That this person, one of the leading figures in American politics, did not consciously know that Jews = $$$ = ubiquitous meme.
And yet, despite not knowing this trope, she somehow intuited it and got in hot water by expressing it publicly. That’s how inherent biases work.
Inherent biases about Jews do half the grunt work for the anti-Israel movement. The relationship between antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” — I repeat this for the oblivious in the back — is not, “You hate Israel, so you must hate Jews (or vice-versa).” That’s not how any of this works.
No, it is far more subtle. This is why it is so infuriating when erstwhile antiracist, introspective people spout the knee-jerk, reactionary statement: “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” It disregards the core obligation we have as people fighting racism to stop for even a second to interrogate our motivations. It is disgraceful.
It also denies the fact that antisemitism shows up in “anti-Zionism” mostly as confirmation bias. If we believe (or, rather, if we carry barely conscious stereotypes) that Jews are greedy and grasping, and then when we hear allegations that Israelis are stealing Palestinian land, we believe the latter uncritically because the former is embedded in our civilizational DNA.
Here is another example. And I will call this the “Omar Effect.”
Blood-soaked imagery is everywhere in the anti-Israel movement. (Let’s not kid ourselves that this is a “pro-Palestinian” movement. It does nothing for Palestinians except celebrate their dead and declare them moral victors.)
During the protests around Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week, posters, social posts, and memes everywhere had images of him (and Israeli flags and anything Israel-related) covered in blood. Fair enough, you might say. There has been far too much blood spilled in the nine month war with Hamas.
But let’s take a second.
We do not see images of mass-murdering Syrian President Bashar al-Assad covered in blood. Neither Mad Vlad Putin. Not even Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian terrorist who is ultimately responsible for every drop of Palestinian, Israeli, and all other blood spilled in the region on and since October 7th.
None of the world leaders (or terrorists) who are figuratively soaked in blood are given the red paint treatment like Netanyahu and Israel.
Why?
What too many people do not understand is that historical associations of Jews with blood — Jews as vampires, Jews using the blood of Gentiles in cannibalistic rituals, Jews undermining the racial “blood purity” of other nations — are among the most ancient and pernicious ideas in Western civilization.
Then there is the little detail of a core ritual of Western civilization, the eating of a Jew’s body and drinking of a Jew’s blood. This happens daily or weekly just down the street from your house during the Christian eucharist, a ritual so foundational and so taken for granted by many that we may not even understand how these ideas of Jews, of guilt and forgiveness, of drinking blood, can get jumbled up in our too-human minds and come out in the most perverted ways.
Note, of course, that this example is inverted. It is Christians drinking the blood of a Jew, not the other way around, which may disprove or prove my point. Maybe I am wrong about this, but is it not just as likely that, over 2,000 years, the various ideas of Jews, Christians, and blood got a little mixed up?
I mean, the whole thing is a tad weird to begin with, this drinking of blood and eating of flesh, so how big a leap is it to think things got weirder still through the ages? But anyways.
The perps have plausible deniability when a party that is involved in a brutal war (not of its own making, we should add) is subjected to bloody imagery of this sort. But that plausible deniability comes up short when other countries and leaders are not subjected to this, either to the same extent or at all.
Syria, right next door to Israel, has been engaged in a civil war in which the government is mass murdering its own people — and not only do we not see anything remotely similar to this blood-soaked imagery against Bashar al-Assad, we do not even see an infinitesimal fraction of the number of people marching in the streets, posting on social media or prioritizing the deaths of Syrians, exponentially more of whom have died in that conflict than have died on both sides combined in the current Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war.
The fact that people will defend themselves by saying that they were unaware of this long history of blood libels against Jews does not diminish their guilt, but proves my point.
It shows precisely how integral these ideas are to our civilization that young Western activists would somehow intuit that, alone among all possible perpetrators of violence in the world, it is Israelis (that is, Jews) who are uniquely singled out for bloodlust.
There is a parallel here with Nazi imagery. Notice that Israel is routinely being compared with Hitler and the Nazis. It is never the other exemplars of inhumanity that activists choose to employ when attacking Israel. It is never Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot. It is always Hitler and the Nazis, swastikas and SS officers.
Note, too, that Syria, Russia, and China are almost never subjected to accusations of Nazism. No, it is the Jewish state, the very people who were Hitler’s victims are accused of exemplifying his essence. We reserve that despicable salt for Jewish wounds.
Hell, in what could be a brilliant twofer of political cross-branding, why not accuse Netanyahu of being Bashar al-Assad? If you want to make hysterically inappropriate comparisons, why not that one?
Because it wouldn’t work.
Despite the fact that Assad’s brutal civil war has killed somewhere around 600,000 people — 600,000!! — the world pays precious little attention because, you know: “Palestine! Palestine! Palestine!”
Ask any of the oh-so-dedicated activists condemning Netanyahu who Bashar al-Assad is, let alone how many Syrians (and Palestinians!) he has killed, and they will almost certainly come up blank.
But give them a crayon and some poster board and they will almost instinctively draw a Jew dripping blood.
The “Omar Effect” allows people who do not even know they carry a stereotype of Jews to exhibit precisely that stereotype in textbook fashion. Does Netanyahu have blood on his hands? Any wartime leader has blood on their hands, including those who we (or at least those of us who do not subscribe to loony historical revisionism) acknowledge as war heroes, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
And yet we do not haul out Bram Stoker imagery or spray-paint fake blood on the flags of other countries with far worse records than anything Israel has done. Nope, that we save for the Jewish state.
Why? Because, whether we know it or not, accusing Jews of being bloodthirsty, inhuman monsters has a long history in our civilization.
The people brandishing these images will reply (with some legitimacy) that, these historical tropes notwithstanding, too much blood has been shed.
But this is the key: That blood has been shed because of a war started by Palestinian terrorists and perpetuated by Palestinian terrorists. The war could end today if Hamas surrendered.
The world, though, does not accuse Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Hamas, or Palestinians broadly (as they do Israelis broadly) of bloodlust. This is how inherent bias works.
Hamas started a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians (some innocent, some not). And the world, overwhelmingly, blames Israel. Because that is what centuries of blood libels do to our ability to interpret current events rationally. We see Jews attacked, we see Jews fight back, we see blood and we blame Jews.
Not because Jews are to blame. But because almost anyone who has been raised in the context of Western civilization, religion and culture carries atavistic residue that associates Jews with blood.
This is exactly what I mean when I say the connections between our ideas about Israel and our ideas about Jews are just a tad more complicated than the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” crowd would have us believe.
 | A guest post by
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So true !!!....so horrific all these ani Israel protests !.....I cannot believe this happening in the USA!
Absolutely right!! It’s anathema that there is silence of these bloodthirsty criminals. Unbelievable that Israel is always worse. Let’s see the evidence presented and compared. It’s a chosen blindness and it is wickedly unfair!