The West is spending billions combating antisemitism. Is it working?

The loudest voices attacking Jews are not ignorant of Jewish history. They are fluent in citing it, distorting it, and weaponizing it. Our strategies must reflect that.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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

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Since the October 7th massacre in 2023, Western governments have pledged and spent vast sums to combat the accompanying surge in antisemitism.

Taken together across the United States, UK, Europe, Australia, and Canada, this expenditure runs into the low billions of dollars, somewhere between $1.5 and $3 billion, depending on accounting standards.

These billions fund Holocaust education initiatives galore, special antisemitism envoys, new laws, new police units, task forces, and expanding bureaucracies — so why is antisemitism not receding, and in some places, why is it intensifying?

Much of this money is being spent on the wrong diagnosis — specifically, that a lack of Holocaust education in the problem. The instinct to lean into this idea is understandable. It is morally necessary, historically vital, and long overdue in many societies.

Yet, does it work?

The assumption that ignorance of the Holocaust is the primary driver of today’s anti-Jewish hostility — particularly hostility expressed through obsession with Israel — has little evidence behind it. The loudest voices attacking Israel are not ignorant of Jewish history. They are fluent in citing it, distorting it, and weaponizing it.

Other approaches are needed and, given the significant resources available, are worth trying. What might those approaches be?

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Holocaust education is sorely missing in many places, and the idea that addressing this is key to stemming resurgent antisemitism is appealing. It is also probably wrong. Such education is necessary, but changing attitudes towards Israel needs a different approach.

It is true that Holocaust education is lacking. One in five Americans between 18 and 29 years old believe the Holocaust is a myth. More than a quarter of British and Australians do not know that it happened. The data is not significantly different elsewhere.

Understanding history’s greatest horror is essential if humanity is to learn from its dark past (which we are not), but many of those at anti-Israel rallies, in academia, in newsrooms, and in parliamentary corridors do know about the Holocaust. It is evident in many of their claims. They have even weaponized it. Consider:

• “Palestinians should not be paying for Europe’s sins.”

• “Jews’ experience of the Holocaust makes Israel’s actions even worse.”

• “Jews deserved it because of the social role they played in Europe.”

• “What does the Holocaust have to do with what is going on now?”

• “We need another Holocaust.”

• “Israel is worse than Hitler.”

• “Jews play the Holocaust card to gain victim status.”

• Antisemites deface Holocaust memorials in Europe and the United States, showing they fully understand their significance.

Israel’s legitimacy does not come from the Holocaust, but the focus on Holocaust education as a tool to combat anti-Israel sentiment links the two in people’s minds.

To change attitudes towards Israel, we must identify and address the problematic narrative. Younger generations’ anger at Israel is based not on Holocaust denialism or ignorance (though both are real), but on false beliefs about how, why, and under what circumstances the Jewish commonwealth was recreated. These people are not just chanting slogans; they believe their portrayal of Israel as an “aggressor,” “occupier,” and “colonizer” is historically accurate and continuing today.

These lies and fictions are the narrative hurdles, which is a great challenge. Whereas Holocaust education is clearly important to all humanity, it is hard to argue that Israel’s nationalist story should be included in the world’s school syllabuses. Many countries fail to teach their own country’s history properly, let alone Israel’s history or that of other countries.

This is not something that can be solved with overseas education campaigns. Israel, despite its military prowess, is outgunned in the propaganda wars. There is no short-term fix, especially as Israel’s foes are pathological lying sociopaths who play a multigenerational game. What is needed is what media strategists call a Trojan horse, which means sneaking a narrative in on the back of other narratives and programs.

The key for Israel is to show, not tell. It takes about 10 minutes in Israel to realize that there is no apartheid. The country is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious, and full of people living their lives like people everywhere, struggling to pay bills and find time to exercise. That is Israel’s most powerful communications tool. Once people realize this, that is when their minds may open to hearing Israel’s real liberation story. Israel’s status as a state needs to be normalized, yet most pro-Israel PR efforts focus on Israel being special. That is dead-wrong.

So, a better question is how to get people to come to Israel (and/or experience it more engagingly from abroad) and how to impart some factual history into them when they do so. There are no better advocates for Israel than those who know the truth first hand.

The first step should be ensuring that those who visit Israel get some modern political history while they are there. Pilgrims are by far the biggest group. Before COVID-19, about 2.5 million of the 4.5 million foreign visitors to Israel annually were Christian pilgrims, according to Israel’s Ministry of Tourism. Many devout Christians see Israel’s recreation as important for religious reasons, but many of them could not care less about politics. They come to Israel for the Christian holy sites, and they would do so regardless of what the country was called or who held sovereignty. After all, pilgrims have been going there since before the Crusades.

However, this group is a captive audience. Work could be done with tour operators and Christian organizations to ensure that political history — the modern nationalist forces that drove Israeli independence — is taught alongside religious history. There is no need to sanitize this. It can be a warts and all history. Contrary to what many think, Israel’s history is better than many places. No country has a clean history.

Given that getting foreign visitors is a key to changing attitudes towards Israel, getting more should be a priority. Tourism is a good place to start. Israeli tourism has been lazily dependent on the pilgrimage trade for too long. Admittedly, this is because many in the tourism industry believe the pilgrimage business can more than double, and this should be pursued. But the country’s history and archeological does not need religion to make it worth visiting. No one goes to Athens to pray to Zeus; they go for the ancient history. Proper modern history can be imbedded into itineraries of Israel’s historical sites. A major tourism campaign would bring economic benefits, as well as help with attitudes.

Israel should resist the urge to market solely to the noisy Western street. They might dominate the news headlines, but Israel is beside Arab countries. It is Arabs and Jews who must live side-by-side, so this is where a tourism campaign should initially be targeted. Since the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, about half a million Israelis have visited Dubai. By contrast, the number of Emiratis who have visited Israel is just a few thousand. In 2022 about, 20,000 Israelis visited Egypt, while the return number is about 5,000 a year. These are paltry figures. Reasons include security concerns, the belief that visiting Israel would undermine support for Palestinians, and the fact generations of Arabs have been raised to hate Jews and feast on lies about Israel.

The United Arab Emirates has begun teaching Holocaust education in its government schools, while Saudi Arabia has recently quietly removed much of the antisemitism and “Zionism is racist” material from its education curriculum. This shows how these Arab states are viewing the future. To be sure, these governments are ahead of their populations’ attitudes, but change is afoot in a great generational realignment, meaning now is the time to capitalize on it, and to contribute to it.

Besides tourism, Israel must sponsor far more Arab journalists to visit. Israel has sponsored journalist trips over the years, mainly Western ones. Targeting Western journalists is pointless. Far too many of them are morally lost and supine to “the narrative,” which is why the Palestinians have had enormous success giving them free trips and tours around disputed territories. The anti-Israel lobby will invariably weaponize genuine education efforts and criticize these Western reporters as being on Israel’s payroll, thus defeating the point. In any case, legacy Western media is discrediting itself daily. It is better to target influencers and some of the better voices emerging from the alternative media space.

There is a great opportunity for Israeli Arabs to spearhead these initiatives, because they play a vital role in the country’s health system, and they could play a valuable role in tourism, too. Israel’s long-term success requires the participation of all Israelis — of all faiths and none — and could be a win for Israel and a boon for the Arab sector in terms of jobs and incomes. As Arabic-speaking Muslims who know the truth and reality of Israel (the good and the bad), they have a credibility that purely Jewish hosts do not have. They can also make visiting Arab tourists feel comfortable in what, for them, might feel like an alien land.

Government-funded student exchange programs could be implemented, too, with students required to blog or vlog about their experiences, and these should be promoted to get eyeballs. Influencers could be offered exchange trips.

Joint tourism initiatives are another area worth exploring. It is a long way from the U.S. or Europe to Dubai or Tel Aviv. There is scope to create tours that take in both places; for example, the glitz of Dubai and ancient Israel’s history. This would help bind the countries’ business interests. There are already tours to Egypt for foreigners visiting Israel. European tours with multiple destinations are normal, as are trips that take in Japan and Korea.

It might seem implausible now, with war on many fronts, but Israel is not going anywhere, and neither are its neighbors. Long-term thinking beyond the war and current crisis are needed. All these ideas, once refined and added to, could serve as a model for Western countries down the line.

Lest I be misunderstood, Holocaust education is vital and something that must have a place in the world’s school syllabuses as part of human history, but it is not going to combat antisemitism as many imagine it will. In the long term, improved attitudes towards Israel will need to be built on people-to-people communications and relationships, as much as between governments and states.

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