Blaming Jews for the crimes of our enemies never gets old.

Because blaming Jews has always been easier than facing reality.

AI-generated image for illustrative purposes

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

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

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I spend more time than any sane person should lurking in “pro-Palestine” social media spaces, or locked in comment section skirmishes.

Some of it is research. Most of it is because you can’t scroll five seconds without being reminded that “Palestine” is the great moral cause of our time and Israel the catch-all culprit for every crime and catastrophe. The louder the blame gets, the less anyone sees the real dangers closing in — and maybe that’s been the point all along.

What strikes me again and again in conversations about Israel is how completely Hamas vanishes from the moral universe that these activists inhabit. Their worldview depends on one rule: Palestinians are eternal victims and Israel the only actor with agency. Hamas is not treated as a real organisation at all; it becomes a narrative prop, a placeholder stripped of intention or responsibility so that all moral weight can be shifted onto Israel.

Under this fixed narrative, Hamas never uses hospitals as interrogation centres, weapon depots, and shields; the narrative is that “Israel bombs hospitals.” Hamas never hides behind children; it is “Israel kills children.” Hamas never steals aid; it is “Israel starves Gaza.”

What we’ve been seeing about Israel isn’t reasonable criticism, but a reflexive reassignment of guilt, no matter who actually committed the act. A few recent revelations capture the pattern with uncomfortable clarity.

The Associated Press reported that women in Gaza were being forced to trade sex for aid, a system run by Hamas officials who controlled the distribution networks. Yet within hours, videos were circulating blaming Israel. Hamas vanished from the story as if by muscle memory, and Israel absorbed the outrage that belonged to the perpetrators. Then came another development: vast stockpiles of infant formula hidden by Hamas, even as the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and the United Nations accused Israel of starving children with virtually no mention of the terror group.

This misdirection worked so effectively during the war that Hamas stopped even pretending. They hijacked aid trucks in broad daylight while the world scolded Israel for blocking aid. They ate lavish meals in stocked tunnels while Western crowds insisted Israel was starving Gaza. They showed off bunkers full of supplies ordinary Gazans never saw, knowing the free world was on their side.

And now the evidence reveals how deliberately the focus was diverted: Internal Hamas documents confirm that Gaza’s humanitarian system was never separate from the group at all. NGOs were not independent; they operated inside a parallel structure designed to control aid and deflect blame onto Israel. Western governments treated NGO reports as neutral even though appointed liaisons sat inside the very organisations producing them. By the time any of this became public, the narrative had already taken on a life of its own. The conditions were engineered, NGOs reported the fallout, and the world drew exactly the conclusion intended.

Should we not have known better? We’re an educated society with instant access to history, yet whenever antisemitism resurfaces in public life, common sense is usually the first casualty. At present, the air is thick with its absence. If Israel wanted to kill civilians indiscriminately, Gaza would already be empty of human beings. At least 97 percent of Gazans survived a war fought in one of the most militarised civilian environments on earth. That alone is the rebuttal. But evidence means nothing when a moral worldview depends on archetypes: one people assigned the world’s sins, while its enemies are absolved of theirs.

This mirrors the dynamics of complementary narcissism and parentification in dysfunctional relationships, where one partner becomes the perpetual adult responsible for everything, and the other becomes the perpetual child responsible for nothing. One carries the entire moral load; the other is exempt from accountability. Scale that psychology up, and you get modern “anti-Israel” (really, antisemitic) activism.

We are living in a moment where political identity overrides moral reasoning. Palestinians are viewed solely as victims, and in this framework, victims cannot be perpetrators. Hamas vanishes because acknowledging its agency would shatter the moral architecture of the narrative. Israel becomes the only moral actor in the story, held responsible not only for its own actions, but for those of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and even ISIS.

This is splitting on a societal scale: Palestinians must be innocent, Israel must be evil, and anything that complicates that binary is rejected. Israel becomes the perfect villain in a culture that no longer tolerates moral ambiguity: too competent to be a victim, too Western to be indigenous, too Jewish to be forgiven.

History shows what happens when societies fixate on Jews instead of the forces actually dismantling them. Europe’s worst collapses began when fear and frustration were redirected onto Jews while real threats gathered unchecked. That fixation has simply migrated from Jewish communities to the only Jewish state. Antisemitism doesn’t just endanger Jews; it blinds societies to the dangers eroding them.

Some of those forces are explicit about their aims. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have long articulated strategies for undermining Western societies from within, while states like Russia describe information warfare as a tool to fracture liberal democracies. Yet these actors are drowned out by the ritual fixation on Israel.

French philosopher René Girard’s work on scapegoating explains this perfectly: When a society is overwhelmed by chaos, instability or guilt, it unconsciously unifies itself by projecting its anxieties onto a single group. That group becomes responsible for everything. Every conflict and injustice is traced back to them.

Today, that scapegoat is Israel and anyone associated with it.

It is an impossible and irrational burden, one that reappears every century no matter how enlightened we claim to be. In this moral universe, Jews are not the targets of hatred, but its source. Every attack is dismissed as a hoax. Every atrocity is laundered into a false flag. Evil can come from only one place. And right on cue, a handful of “anti‑Zionist Jews,” cocooned in Western comfort, step in to provide the moral alibi. Their distance from danger becomes everyone else’s shield.

This is where another psychological dynamic emerges: the double bind, the original “heads you win, tails I lose” structure that English anthropologist Gregory Bateson described. Israel exists inside a system where any action, whether restraint or force, success or failure, survival or loss, becomes proof of guilt. Any comment even mildly sympathetic to Israel gets the same tired “$7,000 coming your way.” When Israel’s contestant placed second in the Eurovision Song Contest, it was declared proof of a “Zionist plot.” Had she placed lower, that too would have been paraded as evidence the world hates Israel.

When the conclusion is predetermined, every outcome — high score, low score, or simply thinking for yourself — gets recycled to prop up the same story. It is all so predictable.

Zionists seem to be behind everything these days. Charlie Kirk gets assassinated? The Mossad did it. A school shooter posts neo-Nazi manifestos? Clearly a Zionist false flag. A natural disaster? Probably Israel, somehow. They sure are busy.

AIPAC (a pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S.) advocates its policies to the legislative and executive branches of the United States, and is routinely cast as the shadowy puppet-master of Washington, yet the country running one of the most aggressive and well-funded foreign-influence operations in the United States is Qatar. It pours money into universities, think tanks, and media outlets at a scale no Jewish organisation could match.

Nowhere is this inversion clearer than in accusations of media control. Israel is portrayed as manipulating Western information, while the single most influential media empire shaping the global narrative on this conflict is Qatar’s Al Jazeera, a state-owned outlet with more congressional press credentials than the New York Times. It broadcasts one ideological line for Western liberals and another for regional Islamists, openly functioning as an arm of Qatari foreign policy. The mythology of “Jewish control” persists only because few bother to look at who is actually pulling the levers.

This is the oldest defence mechanism in the book: projection. The aggressor disowns their violence by attributing it to the target. Antisemites attack Jews and then insist Jews have attacked themselves, recasting themselves as victims of “Zionist oppression” the moment they are challenged. It is psychologically easier to accuse the victim than to confront the violence of your own side.

These mechanisms converge into a worldview in which Jews, and anyone associated with Israel, carry total moral responsibility, while everyone else is rendered passive, helpless, and exempt from accountability.

Psychologists call this asymmetric agency bias: Full agency is assigned to those perceived as powerful, and none to those framed as weak. Identity politics intensifies the effect. Regimes like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or states like China barely register because they sit outside Western moral hierarchies. Actors openly hostile to the West are recast as victims, while Israel, a fully democratic ally, becomes the designated oppressor onto which Western guilt is projected.

Viewed from the safety of Western comfort, stripped of regional context, the Gaza war appears uniquely monstrous. It does so only if one ignores the far bloodier wars surrounding Israel, in Yemen, Syria, and Sudan, where civilian death on a vastly greater scale barely punctures the news cycle. No one floods the streets when Muslims massacre Muslims in greater numbers. Suffering registers only when it can be laid at Israel’s door or, failing that, America’s.

A society that cannot correctly identify threats will not survive them.

This is why a gunman can scrawl antisemitic slogans on his rifle before opening fire — and the internet insists Zionists added the slogans. Why a shooting at a Hanukkah party in Australia or at a D.C. Jewish Museum is dismissed as “staged by Israel.” Why conspiracy networks claim Israel enacted a “Hannibal Directive” on October 7th to deliberately murder its own citizens. The inversion is structural.

After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: Separate (the inseparable) Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”

Even the historical accusations fall victim to the same dynamic. Israel is condemned as a colonial project, yet the longest-running imperial enterprise in the region was the 1,300-year Arab-Muslim empire built on conquest, forced conversion, and enslavement. That history is quietly ignored while Jews are cast as the architects of racial domination. The accusation does not describe Jewish history; it describes the history of the accusers.

ISIS publishes maps of a global caliphate. Iran boasts of its “Shia Crescent” from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Turkey flirts openly with neo-Ottoman borders. Yet the only map that reliably triggers global fury is Israel, a country that has repeatedly offered partition and given away land. The real empires are ignored while an imagined Jewish one is treated as the world’s great menace.

A society that scapegoats a tiny minority for the world’s chaos prepares for darkness. The danger is not only to Jews, but to any civilisation that abandons reality for myth. Once you decide that one people is the source of all evil, you will never see real evil coming.

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