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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in 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.
Killing children. Controlling foreign governments. Manipulating the press. Engineering wars. Profiting from others’ suffering. Seeking world domination.
Am I describing the accusations against Israel today, or those levelled at Jews throughout history?
Frankly, who can tell?
An astonishing number of people recycle centuries-old accusations against Jews, now aimed at Israel, sometimes word for word, while insisting with a straight face that none of it has anything to do with historical Jew-hatred.
Just an extraordinary series of coincidences, then.
Oh, but this time the accusations are true? It’s not Jews you hate, just “Zionists”? Just “the Israeli government”? Or perhaps you’ve finally uncovered the real villains: impostors posing as Jews and giving the real ones a bad name?
Funny. History is full of people insisting they didn’t hate Jews, just the financiers, Christ killers, Bolsheviks, rootless cosmopolitans, racial infiltrators and enemies within. Every generation had its own perfectly valid justification. They weren’t persecuting Jews, merely protecting society, sometimes even saving Jews from themselves.
Anti-Judaism, racial antisemitism, and antizionism are different branches of the same poisonous tree. Each adapts to the moral values of its time, accumulating old prejudices and giving each new incarnation an ever-expanding arsenal of reasons to vilify Jews.
The Contradictions
One of the clearest giveaways that we’re dealing with prejudice is how blatantly these accusations contradict one another, and how utterly unbothered their proponents seem to be. Within the space of 80 years, Jews have been told to “go back to Palestine” and “go back to Poland,” which should be quite the geographical conundrum.
Nazi racial ideology cast Jews as alien, non-Aryan “Semites” infiltrating Europe. Today, antizionists portray them as “white Europeans” masquerading as indigenous Middle Easterners, colonising the very region from which their ancestors came. Israel is both a weak, artificial state entirely dependent on Western support and an almost omnipotent force secretly controlling the very governments supposedly keeping it afloat.
To anti-capitalists, Jews were the financiers exploiting the masses. To anti-communists, the revolutionaries plotting to overthrow society. To racial supremacists, an inferior people who nevertheless possessed the extraordinary power to manipulate governments and world affairs.
Religious Jews were accused of refusing to integrate; assimilated Jews of infiltrating society. Too rich, too poor. Too powerful, too inferior. Too foreign, too integrated. Condemned for not having a state, condemned for having one. Not European enough, white European colonisers. Whatever Jews are, whatever they believe, whatever they do, the logic bends to make them the problem.
Jew-hatred, after all, is not a phenomenon explained by the behaviour of 0.2 per cent of humanity, let alone the 0.1 per cent that live in Israel. It exposes the moral failures of societies that have spent centuries inventing reasons to hate them.
The Moral Disguises
One of Jew-hatred’s most extraordinary achievements is convincing generation after generation that persecuting them is an act of social justice. Defending the faith. Defending the nation. Defending the oppressed. Defending Christianity from “Jewish influence.” Defending the “Aryan race” from “racial contamination.” Defending Palestinians from the “genocidal state.”
Some accusations are centuries old, like the blood libel that Jews murder non-Jewish children, famously associated with William of Norwich in 1144, and echoed today in portrayals of Israelis as bloodthirsty child-killers.
Yes, children have been killed in Gaza. They’ve also been killed in staggering numbers in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. Yet the imagery of bloodthirsty child-killers is, curiously enough, reserved for the Jewish state.
Other accusations have evolved with the times, but you hardly need a degree in history to recognise the family resemblance. Age-old tropes of Jewish control over finance and governments resurface today in claims of sinister “Zionist” control over Western institutions.
In today’s antiracist society, Jews, or Israelis, are cast as white supremacists, colonisers and genocidaires.
Then there’s Holocaust inversion. After centuries of persecuting Jews, European societies came to regard Nazism as the embodiment of ultimate evil. And what happened? Within less than a century, Jews went from victims of Nazism to being portrayed as its modern-day successors. Holocaust survivors and their descendants now find themselves accused of perpetuating the very ideology that sought to annihilate them.
Beginning in the postwar decades, Soviet propaganda helped popularise comparisons between Zionism and Nazism. Today, Israelis are often depicted as the “new Nazis,” with the Holocaust invoked as an indictment of the Jewish state. The Soviet Union collapsed. Its propaganda, apparently, did not.
Since 1945, the world has witnessed no shortage of atrocities that might invite comparisons with Nazism, yet few perpetrators seem to attract that comparison with quite the same gusto as the Jewish state. This adaptability is what makes Jew-hatred so enduring and dangerous: Jews are repeatedly cast as the embodiment of whatever a society most fears or despises, until hostility towards them feels like a moral obligation.
It’s also why we shouldn’t be so confident we’d have had the courage to hide Anne Frank. Defying a prejudice endorsed by the prevailing culture is far harder than condemning it eighty years later.
And while today’s antizionist movement fancies itself a brave, countercultural rebellion, its rhetoric is practically mainstream across academia, the arts, and cultural institutions. Defending Israel, on the other hand, won’t land you in prison, at least not in the West. Not yet. But it might cost you your reputation, your career, your friendships, or your place in polite society.
Collective Guilt
For centuries, Jews have been treated not as individuals, but as members of a collective whose sins belong to them all. Add to this the old accusation of dual loyalty, the suspicion that Jews can never be fully trusted as citizens of their own countries.
Today, Israel provides the perfect cover for both. Jewish artists, academics, students, and ordinary citizens find themselves subjected to political litmus tests, demands to denounce Israel, and exclusion from spaces supposedly dedicated to equality and inclusion.
We don’t demand that Chinese Australians denounce the Chinese Communist Party, or Sudanese abroad disavow their government, before allowing them to participate in public life. We recognise them as individuals. Unless they’re Jews. Then it’s “Netanyahu and the Israeli government are endangering Jews worldwide.” One wonders what the excuse for the collective punishment of Jews was before Netanyahu, before Israel existed?
Yet Jews are expected to prove their innocence as a condition of acceptance, and even then, it’s often not enough. Recently, Israeli filmmaker Moshe Rosenthal was asked to clarify his position on Israel’s government before a Swiss film festival would screen his work. His producers explained they did not represent the government and they opposed the war. The festival cancelled the screenings anyway.
Quite how intimidating Jews and cancelling Israeli filmmakers advances Palestinian liberation remains one of life’s great mysteries. Almost like it’s not about Palestinians, but about repackaging the collective punishment of Jews as something virtuous.
History offers a grim reminder of the limits of appeasement, as I’ve explored here. The Yevsektsiya (Jewish Communists who suppressed Judaism and Zionism) were later caught in Stalin’s purges, with many dying in Soviet prisons and labour camps. In Iraq, Jewish businessman Shafiq Ades, with no known Zionist affiliations, was accused of aiding Israel and publicly hanged in 1948.
You can renounce Zionism, shun your own people and demonstrate your loyalty, and you might even earn a place in polite society. Until, one day, you don’t. Such is the cruelty of collective guilt: you can never prove yourself innocent of someone else’s sins.
If your solidarity with Palestinians requires Jews to answer collectively for Israel’s government, or makes their safety and acceptance conditional on renouncing Israel, you might want to consider why your idea of justice bears such an uncanny resemblance to centuries of anti-Jewish persecution.
Double Standards
Consider how countries responsible for the very atrocities Israel stands accused of, often on a far greater scale, face no comparable global movement demanding their dismantling. China’s persecution of Uyghurs. Iran’s brutal repression of dissent. Atrocities in Sudan and Syria. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet while these crimes may prompt demands for accountability, Israel faces something altogether different: a global movement that treats the state’s existence as the crime.
Where better to witness this extraordinary double standard than at the United Nations, the world’s self-appointed guardian of international morality?
In 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 condemnatory resolutions concerning Israel, compared with just 11 concerning every other country combined. Over the previous decade: 173 against Israel, 80 against everyone else combined. The UN Human Rights Council even has a permanent agenda item dedicated specifically to Israel. Not Iran. Not North Korea. Not Russia. Israel. The rank double standards could hardly be on more spectacular display.
You’ll notice that none of what I’m saying suggests Israel should be immune from criticism. But legitimate criticism, as opposed to prejudice, requires at least some semblance of proportionality and consistency.
Conspiracy Thinking
In 1945, George Orwell put his finger on one of the most enduring features of Jew-hatred, observing something that should be painfully obvious: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”
He recalled how, after a deadly stampede at a London Underground station during the war, rumours spread that Jews were responsible. There was no evidence or rational explanation. Yet people believed it. What baffled Orwell was how otherwise sensible, educated people could abandon their critical faculties when the subject turned to Jews.
Accusations against Jews have long operated under suspended evidentiary standards. For centuries, respected institutions, clergy, newspapers, and political authorities accused Jews of poisoning wells, spreading plague, ritually murdering Christian children, manipulating economies, and secretly controlling governments.
Jew-hatred creates a kind of collective contagion in which otherwise intelligent people accept increasingly fantastical accusations as self-evidently true.
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious antisemitic forgery published in the early 20th century, purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. Thoroughly debunked, its accusations nevertheless proved remarkably resilient, with many surviving to this day.
Variations of these conspiracies became staples of antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world, reinforced by Nazi Arabic-language broadcasts during the Second World War and subsequently circulated through political speeches, television and state-controlled media.
Eighty years after Orwell’s observation, consider the accusations circulating about Israel: training dogs to rape prisoners, harvesting organs in the middle of a war zone, claims that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours from Israel’s starvation campaign, or that Israel possesses secret weapons capable of vaporising Palestinians.
Claims that would ordinarily invite intense scrutiny are instead granted instant credibility and spread like wildfire when Israel is the accused.
Most insidiously, these conspiracies have found legitimacy within prestigious Western institutions. As Israel becomes the supposed root cause of virtually every global injustice, the same narratives have spread through academia, NGOs, activist movements, and cultural institutions, often with little more than “Zionists” substituted for Jews.
Apparently, blaming Israel for the weather is no longer the exclusive preserve of Iran’s fundamentalist mullahs or a baker in some remote Jordanian village. These days, you can do it with an Ivy League degree.
It’s worth remembering that Jew-hatred predates the modern Left-Right political spectrum by centuries. It has never belonged exclusively to one political camp, and there’s some fascinating research into why.
A 2023 British study led by Dr Daniel Allington found that belief in malevolent global conspiracies was among the strongest predictors of anti-Jewish attitudes, alongside authoritarian tendencies.
In other words, someone’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories may tell us more about their inclination towards Jew-hatred than their political allegiance. Which helps explain the exquisite irony of left-wing antizionists championing “Zio”, an antisemitic slur popularised by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
But good luck convincing someone in the grip of such beliefs otherwise. The genius of conspiracy thinking is that contradictory evidence is dismissed as propaganda. A lack of evidence becomes proof of just how sophisticated the conspiracy must be. Anyone challenging the narrative has simply been bought, brainwashed or compromised.
I think this helps explain the pervasive influence of antizionism as an international movement. At its core, it draws on one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring conspiracy narratives, with centuries of accumulated prejudice ready to be repackaged as revelation.
Scapegoating
Notice how the patterns of Jew-hatred outlined above tend to flourish in societies already gripped by crisis, decline or impending collapse. Rather than confront their own political failures, economic decay, or institutional corruption, they discover a convenient culprit.
As the Black Death ravaged medieval Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and spreading the plague, triggering massacres. As the Russian Empire descended into revolutionary turmoil, Jews were scapegoated for the unrest, becoming targets of violent pogroms. When Germany’s empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War, military leaders helped popularise the myth that the nation had been stabbed in the back, with Jews blamed for a defeat its leaders refused to own.
The modern West is grappling with a profound crisis of identity. Decades of globalisation, demographic change and fragmented cultural identities have transformed the social fabric, while preoccupations with historical guilt have further complicated questions of national identity and belonging.
Add economic insecurity, political polarisation, and collapsing trust in institutions, and the conditions for scapegoating are ripe. And once again, Israel, Zionists, and supposed Jewish influence over world affairs provide the go-to explanation for everything that’s gone wrong.
It’s all so … predictable.
The psychological appeal is obvious. Why wrestle with complex economic, political, or social problems when you can identify a single enemy responsible for everything?
It’s certainly easier than doing the hard work of examining your own institutions, leaders, or the choices your society has made. But societies consumed by blaming Jews for their misfortunes don’t solve their problems. It’s a familiar symptom of a society in trouble, and a dangerous distraction from the failures driving its decline.
We should have learned from history. Instead, we’re marching towards the same abyss, led by friends, colleagues, and trusted institutions, all convinced they’re acting in the name of compassion and justice.
Excellent article. One thing recently that has puzzled me, and ties into the 'blame Jews regardless' history cited in this article is the current obsession with 'settler violence,' especially when, analysing the data, it appears this is a third of the violence of Palestinians against settlers and other Jews/Israelis.
Fact is, that ratio used to be a fifth prior to October 7th, so, yes, there has been an unwelcome surge in that activity - but why has that far larger contingent of Palestinian violence against settlers/Israelis/Jews been either sidelined or ignored? It seems there was a push many years ago within the Palestinian leadership that they wanted all the Jews out of the West Bank/Judea/Samaria. But then they suddenly realized that this struck an abhorrent chord with their European supporters. 'You can't aim to kick a people out purely because they're Jewish. That's what the Nazis did!'
'Ah,' Palestinian leaders thought, 'Let's make out they're troublesome and violent. That will do it!' And, sadly, the media and many European leaders have fallen for this without even a second's examination that the violence the other way is far worse, by a factor of 3-5 to 1.
In the most recent incident in which an American journalist was injured, now that the background facts have been examined, it appears that 200 Palestinians, mainly youth, started throwing rocks and firing fireworks at 60-70 settlers. When the predictable retaliation came, only that was reported on and filmed by the journalistic crew.
It appears this radical, violent element amongst the settlers numbers anything from 80 to 180. But still a minute contingent among almost 390,000 settlers (excluding East Jerusalem). But, yes, still not a nice picture and, again, yes, actions and security are being increased against this. Something is being done about it. Far different to the other side, where Palestinian violence against Jews is encouraged, with still an active 'pay for slay' policy in place, rewarding terrorists and their families for killing Jews.
If the media is so obsessed with violence in the West Bank/Judea/Samaria, then why not more focus on the far larger problem of Palestinian violence against Jews and this continuing and wholly abhorrent 'Pay for Slay' policy.