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This is a guest essay by Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, speaker, and social media influencer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Earlier this month, on his Twitch stream to millions of followers, American internet personality Hasan Piker said that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
He added that Jews who tie their identity to Israel are “making antisemitism worse.” He also said that Israel is the “Jewish ISIS” and that American Jews who support Israel are supporting ISIS.
Piker matters only because he stated an idea more clearly than anyone else has this year. That idea has moved from the fringe to the center of “progressive” conversation. You will hear it, if you have not already, from someone you like — the idea that Israel causes antisemitism, and the idea that Jewish support for Israel provokes it, and Jews could reduce it by supporting Israel less, or by staying quiet about their support.
I suspect that Piker and his mob are frustrated. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists, and that fact shatters the whole “we only call for violence against Zionists, not Jews” argument.
This idea, that antisemitism will stop only if Jews change, does not come only from streamers. Last July, on the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” the Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are “endangering not only the State of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but endangering the Jewish population all over the world.”
His wife, Kathryn Grody, went further. She said Netanyahu’s politics are “the worst thing for Jewish people. It’s like lighting a candle for anybody that has any antisemitic feelings.”
Patinkin is, evidently, a Zionist. He only wishes his anti-Israel circle liked him more, and he believes they would like him more if Israel changed. Piker and Patinkin stand at opposite ends of the same argument.
Israel is unpopular in America right now, and among young Americans the numbers are worse than unpopular. Some people who have attacked Jews in the past three years said Israel’s name while doing it. The man who shot two embassy staffers in Washington in May 2025 shouted about “Palestine.” That is real, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
So the claim is not stupid. It is wrong in a specific way, and history lets us test it. The reason changes. The target never does.
Here is the test: Take antisemitic violence from before there was a State of Israel and ask what reason people gave at the time.
In Damascus in 1840, a Capuchin friar disappeared, and the city’s Jews were accused of murdering him for his blood. Authorities arrested and tortured Jewish notables. The reason given was ritual murder.
In Paris in 1894, a French court convicted Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, of treason on forged evidence and sent him to Devil’s Island. Crowds outside the Ecole Militaire chanted for the death of Jews. The reason given was disloyalty to the nation.
In Kishinev in 1903, mobs killed 49 Jews over Easter after a local paper spread a blood libel. That same year, a Russian newspaper published the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The reason given was that Jews secretly controlled the world.
In Germany, between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered the most assimilated Jewish community in Europe, decorated veterans of the First World War among them, on the grounds that Jews were a racial contaminant. The reason given was blood.
In Baghdad, over two days beginning on June 1, 1941, mobs killed somewhere between 150 and 180 Jews, injured hundreds, raped an unknown number of women, and looted around 1,500 homes and businesses in what became known as the Farhud. The reason given was that the Jews had welcomed the British.
The State of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. None of the reasons above survived into the next generation. The blood libel gave way to treason, treason gave way to world control, world control gave way to race, and race gave way to collaboration with empire. The reason kept changing. The people on the receiving end did not.
When the stated cause of something changes every forty years, and the effect stays constant, the stated cause is not the cause. It is an excuse. Israel is the excuse this generation has been handed, and it works better than the earlier ones because, unlike the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Israel exists and does things, and some of what it does deserves criticism. That makes this version more durable than the last one. It does not make it a different thing.
Read Hasan Piker’s sentence again as a proposal rather than a prediction: Jews should stop saying that they are invested in Israel.
What does that mean in practice for a community in which, per Pew Research’s 2020 survey, 58 percent say they feel emotionally attached to Israel, and in which a Jewish Federations survey this February put that figure at 71 percent?
It means hiding. It means a lawyer in Bloomfield Hills takes the Israel trip photos off her office wall. It means a college sophomore learns that silence is the safest position at a dinner. It means, as a friend’s cousin found out this month, a Jewish viewer checks a Jewish actor’s social media for evidence of what he believes before deciding whether it is safe to like his show.
Jews have tried hiding before. German Jews in the 1920s were doctors and judges and Nobel laureates, more German than the Germans by their own reckoning, and they went into the same ovens as the Ostjuden (“Eastern Jews”) they had spent a generation trying to distance themselves from. Nobody has ever honored the offer of safety in exchange for erasure, and nobody extending it has ever been in a position to guarantee it.
There is also something worth noticing in the shape of the demand itself. No other minority in America is told that its physical safety depends on adopting the correct foreign policy view. Nobody tells Cuban Americans that attacks on them will stop when they soften on Havana. Nobody tells Ukrainian Americans to lower their flags for their own protection.
The condition applies only to Jews, and a condition that applies only to Jews has a name. Piker used it in the same breath, when he said Jews who identify with Israel are “making antisemitism worse.” The victim is the cause. That sentence has existed in every language Jews have ever spoken.
My grandmother Hela was born in Baghdad. The Farhud is the reason there is no Jewish Baghdad for me to visit. Seven years before Israel existed, before there was a flag to be accused of loyalty to, her city decided its Jews had picked the wrong side of a war they had no say in, and it took two days to end 2,600 years of Jewish life on the Rivers of Babylon.
I have never found anyone who can tell me which Israel caused that. The question is not rhetorical. I would like an answer, because the people making Piker’s argument owe one.
What was the reason they murdered my Jewish family members in Iraq in 1941? Was it also a little bit about what the State of Israel that didn’t exist back then did? What about the Holocaust? The Inquisition? What about the Hebron massacre of 1929? The Pittsburgh shooting?
If Jewish investment in Israel invites violence against Jews, then the Farhud, Kishinev, Dreyfus, and Damascus need some other explanation. The violence has a life of its own, and Israel is the current name it answers to.
If this conversation comes for you, and it likely will, here is what history hands you.
The first tool is a date. Pick one from before 1948 and ask the person across the table what caused that one. You are not trying to win. You are trying to move the conversation from a feeling about Gaza to a claim about causation, which anybody can check.
The second tool is the pattern. Every generation of antisemitism arrived with a reason, and every reason was replaced. Israel’s critics in 2026 did not invent a new kind of hatred. They inherited a very old and dark one and gave it a new reason.
The third tool is to name the trade. Ask what, concretely, Jews are being asked to do to be safe. The answer is always some form of becoming less visibly Jewish. At that point you are no longer discussing Israel. You are discussing whether a minority in the West should have to pass a political test to walk home from synagogue. And most decent people, asked that plainly, know the answer.
The last tool is the one I hold onto. Zionism did not cause antisemitism. Theodor Herzl was a journalist from Vienna covering the Dreyfus trial when he concluded that Europe would never let its Jews be safe as Jews.
The Jewish state came after the hatred, and as one of the answers to it.
Thank you for this. If Israel were suddenly gone, nothing would stop anti Semitism, the excuses would just be different.
Piker is DARVO incarnate.
One of the great ironies of history: The mass persecutions, ethnic cleanings and genocides of Jews over the past few centuries are what made Israel the powerhouse it is today. Jew haters like Piker are too stupid to understand that they continue to make the case for a strong Jewish state better than any Zionist ever could.