The World's Obsession With Blaming Israel for Everything

The fixation on the Jewish state has become a distraction from the far more consequential challenges reshaping societies from within.

photo: Leonardo Basso/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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

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There is a remarkably simple way for Western politicians to talk about Israel.

Most of them refuse to do it.

Instead, they speak about Israel as though it were the central cause of instability, division, extremism, polarization, and social unrest in their own countries. They treat a nation of 10 million people on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean as though it were somehow responsible for problems that were created entirely by their own sociopolitical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic failures.

The reality is much simpler: Israel isn’t the reason people’s lives suck. Israel isn’t the reason housing costs are out of control in Paris. Israel isn’t the reason young people can’t afford gas in California. Israel isn’t the reason crime is rising in Brussels. Israel isn’t the reason public services are deteriorating while taxes continue to rise. Israel isn’t the reason social trust has collapsed across much of the West.

People’s lives are difficult because their own politicians have spent decades making poor decisions and refusing to accept responsibility for the consequences. Israel is simply a stable democratic ally in an unstable but strategically vital region. That is the beginning and the end of the story.

Israel is one of the world’s leading centers of innovation. Israelis produce a staggering amount of technology relative to their per-capita size. Israeli breakthroughs influence cybersecurity, medicine, agriculture, water management, artificial intelligence, communications, and countless other fields.

Billions of people worldwide benefit from Israeli innovation every day without realizing it. I was in Europe recently, taking an Uber whose driver was using Waze, when he told me how much he despises “Zionists.”

The irony of relying on Israeli technology to navigate his route while condemning the people who created it seemed entirely lost on him; of using an Israeli invention to earn a living while attacking the very society that produced it; of every turn he made being guided by Israeli ingenuity, helping him get me to my destination faster so he could spend more time complaining about Israelis.

Meanwhile, Israelis do not spend their time blaming Emmanuel Macron for the cost of living in Tel Aviv. Israelis do not look at their housing market and conclude that the real culprit is Venezuela. Israelis do not watch political dysfunction in Jerusalem and decide that Canada’s Mark Carney is somehow responsible.

Only in the West has it become normal for politicians to use Israel as a convenient distraction from failures closer to home. And that distraction is becoming increasingly absurd.

Consider the European Union. Recently, European leaders announced sanctions against several Israelis, including Daniella Weiss, an 80-year-old former mayor of a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria. Around the same time, European officials engaged diplomatically with representatives of the Taliban.

Think about what that means. On one hand, European leaders lecture Israelis about extremism and violence. On the other hand, they engage with a regime that bars girls from receiving higher education, severely restricts women from public life, and governs Afghanistan through a harsh interpretation of Islamic law.

The contradiction is difficult to ignore: A Jewish grandmother in Samaria receives sanctions, while the Taliban receives meetings.

Western politicians frequently tell their citizens that extremism has consequences. Apparently those consequences depend entirely on who is committing the extremism.

For years, Western governments have treated anti-Western ideological movements with remarkable patience while scrutinizing democratic allies like Israel under a microscope. Groups that openly reject liberal values are granted endless explanations and excuses. The world’s only Jewish state is granted endless condemnation.

The contradiction would be laughable if it were not so consequential — because, while politicians obsess over Israel, genuinely significant threats continue expanding beneath their noses.

One of the most important stories of the past decade has received almost no attention. A recent report documented how Qatar spent tens of millions of dollars helping shape educational programs throughout the United States. The scope is remarkable: educational materials focused on Qatar distributed to young students, teacher training programs connected to Qatari institutions, university partnerships influencing future educators, journalists, and policymakers, and curriculum development projects reaching classrooms far removed from the Middle East.

Think about that for a moment. Americans are constantly told that foreign interference represents one of the greatest threats to democracy. We are told to be vigilant about misinformation, propaganda, and influence campaigns. We are warned that hostile actors seek to shape how we think, vote, and understand the world.

Yet when a wealthy Gulf monarchy spends years investing in educational institutions, developing classroom materials, cultivating relationships with teachers and universities, and helping shape the intellectual environment in which future generations will be educated, the story barely registers.

Imagine the reaction if Israel had spent decades placing Israel-focused educational materials into American schools. Imagine the headlines if Israeli organizations were found funding teacher-training initiatives designed to build admiration for Israel among first graders. Imagine the outrage if American students were routinely exposed to curricula developed through partnerships with Israeli government-backed institutions.

Congressional hearings would be convened overnight. Editorial boards would demand investigations. Activists would describe it as foreign manipulation of American education.

Yet when Qatar does it, many of the same people suddenly discover nuance.

The larger point is not even about Qatar. It is about priorities.

Western politicians, journalists, academics, and activists devote extraordinary amounts of time to scrutinizing Israel. Every “settlement” becomes international news. Every military operation becomes a global controversy. Every statement by an Israeli official is dissected, analyzed, and condemned.

Meanwhile, genuinely consequential efforts by authoritarian regimes to shape Western institutions often receive only a fraction of the attention.

Why does Israel receive an endless microscope while authoritarian regimes, extremist movements, and foreign influence operations receive a magnifying glass at best? Why are politicians eager to lecture Israelis while showing so little curiosity about the ways authoritarian governments are actively attempting to shape democratic societies? Why is the public taught to see Israel as one of the great moral problems of our age while far more significant challenges often escape serious examination?

Because Israel has become a convenient obsession. It is easier to talk about Israel than to confront educational failure in your own country. It is easier to condemn Israel than to investigate foreign influence in your own institutions. It is easier to blame Israel than to explain why citizens are losing faith in their leaders.

And as long as Israel remains the focus of attention, the people and institutions actually reshaping Western societies can continue operating largely unnoticed. That is not a coincidence. It is one of the defining political blind spots of our time.

Of course, China provides perhaps the clearest example.

While Beijing races to dominate artificial intelligence, subsidizes domestic AI development, and openly competes with the United States for technological supremacy, Chinese state media simultaneously amplifies narratives portraying American AI infrastructure as environmentally destructive, economically harmful, and socially dangerous.

The objective is not difficult to understand: China wants more Chinese technological leadership, and China wants more Chinese data centers. This is not complicated geopolitics. It is great-power competition.

Yet many Western politicians seem far more interested in condemning Israeli apartment construction than investigating the influence campaigns operating inside their own countries.

Think about the absurdity of that. Foreign governments are spending years shaping educational systems. Foreign governments are funding activist ecosystems. Foreign governments are influencing media narratives. Foreign governments are seeking to weaken Western confidence and cohesion. And politicians respond by issuing another statement about Israel.

Because Israel is useful. Israel serves as a distraction. Israel absorbs outrage that might otherwise be directed toward authoritarian regimes, extremist movements, foreign influence operations, corruption, or domestic political failures.

And as long as public attention remains fixed on Israel, the people genuinely working to reshape Western societies can continue operating largely unnoticed.

There is another reality that Western politicians should acknowledge: Israel is not merely fighting for itself. Israel frequently serves as the first line of defense against movements that openly oppose the values upon which Western democracies are built.

For decades, Israel has often encountered threats long before they reached Western shores. Time and again, tactics, ideologies, and movements that were initially dismissed as “Israel’s problem” eventually became everyone’s problem.

When the world watched the attacks of September 11, 2001, many understandably viewed the use of civilian aircraft as instruments of terror as a shocking and unprecedented development. It was shocking. But it was not unprecedented.

For decades before 9/11, Israeli aircraft had been prime targets for Islamist and Palestinian terrorist organizations. During the late 1960s and 1970s, hijackings became a favored tactic of groups seeking to terrorize civilians, gain publicity, and advance political objectives through fear. Israeli airlines, Israeli passengers, and Jewish travelers were often at the center of those attacks.

One of the most famous examples occurred in 1976. An Air France flight traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and ultimately diverted to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Once there, the hijackers separated the passengers.

Jewish passengers and Israelis were isolated from the rest. The scene was chillingly familiar to Jewish history: armed extremists conducting a selection process based on Jewish identity while much of the world watched from a distance.

For a week, the hostages remained captive as governments debated, negotiated, and deliberated. Israel chose a different course. In one of the most daring counterterrorism operations in modern history, Israeli commandos flew more than 2,500 miles into hostile territory, stormed the airport, killed the hijackers, and rescued more than 100 hostages.

The operation became legendary not simply because of its military success, but because it demonstrated something the world was still struggling to understand: Terrorism was not merely a law-enforcement problem or a regional political dispute. It was a strategic threat capable of crossing borders, targeting civilians, and holding entire societies hostage.

Many Western leaders viewed hijackings in the 1970s as an Israeli problem. Israel understood that they represented something much larger. The tactics tested against Israelis in the 1970s would eventually be deployed against Americans, Europeans, and countless others. The ideology that justified murdering civilians aboard airliners did not disappear after Entebbe. It evolved, spread, adapted, and ultimately culminated in attacks that transformed global security policy for an entire generation.

Israel was not confronting a uniquely Israeli threat. Israel was confronting a threat that happened to reach Israel first. What began with attacks against Israelis eventually evolved into attacks against much of the world.

When Israelis identify a threat, many Western observers dismiss it as paranoia. When Israelis build defenses against that threat, they are accused of overreacting. When the threat eventually reaches other parts of the world, everyone suddenly realizes the problem was real all along.

The pattern is so consistent that it is difficult to ignore.

Israel is frequently treated as though it exists outside the Western democratic family. Yet again and again, it encounters the same forces that challenge liberal democracies elsewhere — only sooner, more intensely, and in a more concentrated form.

That does not mean Israel is always right, but it does mean that Western leaders should approach Israeli security concerns with far more humility than they often do. Because history suggests that when Israel is fighting a movement dedicated to undermining democracy, pluralism, and Western values, it is rarely fighting that movement for long by itself.

Yet somehow Western leaders often reserve their harshest criticism not for these bad actors, but for the democracy confronting them. That inversion has become one of the defining moral confusions of our age.

A sane Western politician would speak differently. They would say: Israel is an ally. Israel is a democracy. Israel is imperfect, as every democracy is imperfect. Israel makes mistakes, as every nation makes mistakes. But Israel is not responsible for our housing crisis. Israel is not responsible for our immigration challenges. Israel is not responsible for our crime problems. Israel is not responsible for our educational failures. Israel is not responsible for our declining social trust. Israel is not responsible for our political dysfunction.

Our citizens deserve leaders who focus on solving the problems that actually affect their daily lives. And while we debate foreign policy, we should pay equal attention to the foreign actors influencing our schools, universities, media ecosystems, activist networks, and public discourse.

That would be an honest conversation. More importantly, it would be a useful one.

The greatest threat to Western societies is not a democratic ally thousands of miles away. The greatest threat is the growing inability of Western leaders to distinguish between friends and adversaries, between democracies and dictatorships, between those who share their values and those who seek to undermine them.

Israel did not create that confusion, but increasingly, it reveals it. And the way politicians talk about Israel often tells us far more about the condition of the West than it does about Israel itself.

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