Your rage isn't about Gaza. It's about Jews.

Today's "anti-Zionism" is just yesterday’s antisemitism — with better PR. So much of the world always finds a new excuse to despise the Jews.

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This is a guest essay written by Tobias Gisle, who has a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Stockholm University.

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

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“You can't criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism,” they say.

I could have said the same thing myself about 20 years ago.

It’s all terribly frustrating.

So, how do you separate antisemitism from “criticism of Israel”?

This is often more about emotion than reason. It’s often about how you speak rather than what you say. If you sound like a professional mourner at a mafia funeral when you talk about the conflict, if you’re breathless and speak in superlatives stacked on top of each other, if you’re burning with the conviction that the hatred you feel will do humanity good, then you are probably coming down with a touch of antisemitism.

You see it in the facial expressions. You hear it in the tone. The falsetto. The choking voice. The hysteria. The mockery. The hatred. It’s nothing new. If you imagine these people in other clothes, it becomes more familiar. You recognize the crusader, the inquisitor, the witch-burner, and the Nazi. They have wild eyes. They are convinced that their hate will achieve salvation. They want to cleanse the land (or the world) of what stands between us and redemption.

Even if they no longer wear armor, big crosses, or SS uniforms, and now just as likely appear with green hair, a keffiyeh, and are, like, anti-racist, man. I know. I was one of them. Not an “antisemite,” but a “critic of Israel.” I was convinced those things could be separated. But my story is for another time. This is a story about how it works.

Why is it like this? Because antisemitism always adapts to new times and new groups.

Saying “Israel commits war crimes” ought to be uncontroversial, since all armies in all wars throughout time have, unfortunately, committed war crimes by today’s standards. Especially in difficult environments like urban warfare against terrorist armies. There are IDF soldiers in prison in Israel as I write this for committing war crimes.

But the idea that “Israel commits war crimes” can still be antisemitic — if the context is a one-sided and unique focus on Israel, while all others go unmentioned. Especially if it’s mixed with hysteria and tears.

This subtlety, the vague and blurry line between hate and reasonable criticism, of course opens endless possibilities for hatred to flow freely. An editor-in-chief can set rules against some obvious, classic tropes like “Jews control the world,” or expressions like “Jews are a cancer.” This is strictly forbidden at The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC.

But the very fact that there are hysterical articles about “the children in Gaza” and a complete lack of hysterical articles about “the children in Sudan” raises questions. This style is both unconscious and contagious, but maybe not something many can put their finger on.

Of course, it’s terrible that children die in war. If we are actually talking about flesh-and-blood Gazan children, then yes, it is awful that they have died, both as a result of IDF munitions and as a result that Hamas does not let civilians shelter in their 300 kilometers of tunnels. That the IDF would deliberately target and murder children seems like a flat-out lie, but not just any lie.

The most diabolical part is that many who cry over “the children in Gaza” would never dream of linking that feeling with hatred of Jews. They are good people. Of course they are. They want the suffering to end. Who doesn’t? They simply have no idea where these feelings come from, or why everything related to Jews or Israel needs to result in such an emotional eruption.

I believe many who attend these demonstrations “for Palestine,” “against genocide,” “against apartheid in Palestine,” are completely unaware of what really makes this conflict so unique. These are seemingly unimpeachable slogans. Who wants genocide and apartheid?

The uniqueness comes not from the case that the war is more brutal than others, but because it has to do with Jews. The discrepancy between “the children in Sudan” and “the children in Gaza” is about more than just media coverage. This goes much deeper. Deep into Western folklore. So why? What is this?

Jew-hatred (what we now call antisemitism) is the belief that the world can be saved if only the Jews disappear. The Jews (or the Jewish state) are like the cork in the champagne bottle. That cork is what stops a perfect world from being born. Once you remove the cork, we can have a champagne party.

Without the Jews (or the Jewish state), the world (or the Middle East) will blossom. If you have this feeling, it’s easy to feel enlightened and justified while doing or saying terrible things. Like justifying the 7th of October.

Antisemitism is a completely different animal than ordinary prejudice. It is completely unlike the idea of “barbarians”, the people who didn’t speak Greek and could only say nonsense like “bar-bar” when they open their mouths. It’s completely unlike later notions like anti-Black racism connected to the transatlantic slave trade.

If you want to keep “barbarians” outside your borders or dehumanize Black people, you may not value their lives as much as your own, but no racist or colonialist believes they’re doing humanity a favor by oppressing or killing this group.

Jews, however… well, this is part of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. This is the metaphysical force behind countless newspaper articles about the special evil of Israel.

It all started, ironically enough, with Judaism. It was Judaism that came up with the idea of a Messiah who would save the Jewish People. But they wisely placed this Messiah figure in the future. If things are bad now, we can wait for Santa Claus who’s bringing the presents.

Christianity, on the other hand, said that Jesus was this Messiah. He has been here already! And what happened after Jesus came? Were the wars and diseases over?

Er… No. Not exactly. The world was about the same as before, but with some new customs and rituals. Some Christians tried to work out why that was. Why wasn’t the world perfect when the entire Roman Empire became Christian? And not just why. Whose fault was it? Lets see what the book says! Aha! It had to be those “who murdered Jesus.”

This is something one can get from the Gospel of Mark, that Pontius Pilate “washes his hands” of the judgment against Jesus, and the gathered Jews said that they gladly take the blame for this; and not only that, they pass it on to their children and so on for all eternity. That kind of thing sure sounds super credible. That people would brand their own family forever. Well, like it or hate it, that’s how the story goes.

If one chooses to interpret it in the way that Jews are standing in the way of salvation, that is what you can do. As the world’s largest religion, of course there are people who think differently; thankfully, many Christians today have left the idea of the Jews as Christ-killers to the dustbin of history. But that was definitively not the end of that.

Over time, this developed from the Jews not only having murdered Jesus, the sinless one, but that they were also after other sinless ones — namely children. The claim was that Jews wanted to take children, murder them, and use their blood to ritually make matzah bread. If we could just get rid of the Jews, the children would live. Same story: a world without dead children is a Jew-free world.

However, that’s not where we get the word antisemitism. That came later, as society had changed significantly in the new scientific era. Now people thought they could say that society was divided into races, and that these might be tied to language groups. Semites were those who spoke Semitic languages. Since this was invented in Germany, we’re not talking about those who speak Arabic or Aramaic, but Hebrew in the synagogue; that is, Jews.

It was also during the 1800s when bacteria were discovered, and that bacteria infected bodies. That’s when the antisemites came up with the brilliant idea that this was what was wrong with Jews, that they were like a cancer in the body of society. This was the Nazis’ antisemitism. But the idea is the same. If we get rid of the Jews then the Aryan race and body politic will be free and healthy.

When the modern State of Israel came into being, Stalin believed that Israel would become part of the Eastern Bloc, which is why they voted for the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947.

But no. The socialist David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) surprisingly chose to ally with the West. Then Stalin, more or less by accident, ended up on the other side. So they began opportunistically supporting the Arab side in the conflict.

In the Arab world, there was also a lot of antisemitism, both from some hadiths (Muslim commandments) and Quranic verses, but not least because so much Nazi propaganda had been spread in the Arab world. The KGB wanted to channel this popular anger.

But after the Holocaust, Stalin, who had just defeated the Nazis, couldn’t openly say he embraced the same ideology. That’s when he came up with a solution: “anti-Zionism.”

“Anti-Zionism” had existed for a long time, even among Jews. And before the State of Israel came into being, one could argue against the formation of the state, but once it had been born — after the Arab countries tried and failed to wipe out Israel — “anti-Zionism” took on a more murderous character. It was about crushing the state that existed, rather than preventing the state from being born.

Soviet “anti-Zionism” used the same tropes that were just recently used against Jews to now be used against the world’s only Jewish state. Israel is greedy, deceitful, lying, and colonial.

To separate the old antisemitism from the newfangled “anti-Zionism,” there is a bridge in understanding: Those who survived the Holocaust were to be pitied, but if the same survivors set foot in Israel, they are automatically an evil colonial oppressor. In the Middle Ages, this was called: “If she floats, she’s a witch.” The witches who drowned in the lake and the Jews who died at Auschwitz were greatly pitied — Oh, what a shame! — but those who survived, they need to be burned at the stake or chased out of the Middle East.

To where? No one cares. The epithet “colonial” was important, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s, since decolonization was the big project of that time. The heroes back then were the Viet Cong and Che Guevara. To “decolonize” was the new liberation, and describing the Jews as colonizers fit perfectly in the spirit of the time, just like child murder fit the Middle Ages and germs fit the Nazis.

Colonizers were also something like vermin that one simply had to get rid of. With the colonial and anti-colonial language, one could again get that wonderful feeling that if we just got rid of the Jew — or this time, the Jewish state — we could reach the paradisiacal level we all dream of. The witch who must be removed from the family of nations. Everyone knows, of course, that once you’ve burned the witch, everything automatically gets better.

Today, after the Cold War, it’s not primarily Che Guevara who is the hero of the time, but international organizations like Amnesty International and the United Nations. They are the moral voice of the world, just like the church once was. When Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide, we know where this leads. What do you do with genocidal states? Well, they must be defeated militarily, occupied, and abolished in their current form, like Nazi Germany was after the war.

So, the language that was supposed to help Jews understand the experience they went through during the Holocaust became the language that the “humanitarian” world wants to use to take their state away from under them. This is because the humanitarian, the international, has come up with a brand new idea: The Jews are child killers — now in Gaza, available on TikTok.

My experience tells me that it’s completely pointless to criticize people for these kinds of opinions directly for antisemitism. This is so deeply embedded in the body politic that people simply don’t know why they think what they think and act how they do.

But if you feel like this — if your face twists and you struggle to breathe when you talk about the Palestinians — then maybe, just maybe, you’ve come down with a bout of antisemitism.

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