Zionism isn't the issue. Your obsession with Jews is.

Israel isn’t judged because it’s uniquely brutal. It’s judged because it’s uniquely Jewish.

This poor woman has been seriously brainwashed. (photo: Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written 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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Say the word Israel, and you’ll hear the loudest moral accusations of our time: occupation, apartheid, genocide, settler colonialism, war crimes.

What strikes me isn’t just the venom or how far these accusations have spread; it’s that the same charges apply far more clearly, and often far more grotesquely, to regimes the world quietly tolerates.

I’m not obsessed with Israel. The world is. Only one country is routinely told it shouldn’t exist, its legitimacy debated, its every action met with global marches. That selective outrage and moral hysteria feel less like humanitarian concern and more like an omen. History shows that when societies turn on the Jews, it signals an underlying moral rot and a civilisation unravelling from within. That’s why I write.

Antisemitism is the only explanation that makes sense. And if it’s not, someone should offer a better one, because I’m tired of feeling like I’m living among people who’ve lost the plot.

Let me be clear: I’m not claiming Israel is blameless or beyond criticism. But no other nation is judged with this level of righteous fury, and that’s worth asking why.

And yes, this is whataboutery. Unapologetic whataboutery. As philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris put it, recognising bias requires comparison. It’s how we test whether outrage is principled or just selectively deployed. If we care about justice, we should care about it everywhere, not only when it involves the Jewish state.

So let’s take a closer look at where the loudest accusations against Israel actually belong.

Occupation?

China has occupied Tibet since 1950, killing over a million Tibetans through violence, famine, and imprisonment. Monasteries destroyed, religious freedom crushed, language erased. Children placed in Chinese-run schools, Han Chinese settlers moved in to dilute the population. What began as military occupation became full-scale colonisation.

Turkey invaded Northern Cyprus in 1974, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and waged a brutal war in Donbas. Morocco seized Western Sahara, crushed resistance, and flooded the area with settlers. These are ongoing occupations, clear-cut cases of one nation invading another and dismantling its sovereignty.

Yet the word “occupation” is almost exclusively reserved for Israel. Never mind that Gaza hasn’t been occupied since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Or that the West Bank was never part of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Genocide?

In Xinjiang, China has detained over one million Uyghurs in a vast network of camps, subjecting them to forced labour, ideological indoctrination, religious repression, sterilisation, and cultural erasure. Birth rates in key regions have dropped by over 60 percent, with some areas seeing near-total population suppression. Reports of torture, medical neglect, and suicides in custody are widespread. The scale and intent have led many experts and governments to label it a slow, calculated genocide.

In 2017, Myanmar’s military killed at least 24,000 Rohingya, raped thousands, and drove over 700,000 into refugee camps. In 2014, ISIS massacred 5,000 Yazidis, enslaved thousands more, and destroyed their sacred sites.

These are recognised genocides, acknowledged by governments and human rights groups. Israel’s war in Gaza, while tragic and deserving scrutiny, is far more complex, and whether it meets the legal definition of genocide remains hotly contested.

But even if it were clear cut, it still wouldn’t explain why the term “genocide” is hurled with such singular intensity at the Jewish state while conspicuously absent elsewhere.

Civilian casualties?

In Syria, over 500,000 people have been killed since 2011, including tens of thousands of civilians bombed by their own government, often with Russian support. Cities like Aleppo, Homs, and Raqqa were flattened with barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and siege warfare.

In Sudan, brutal conflicts have killed hundreds of thousands since 2023. The Darfur genocide killed up to 300,000 and displaced millions, and today a new war between rival generals has forced over 10 million from their homes.

In Ethiopia’s Tigray War from 2020 to 2022, up to 600,000 civilians died through violence, famine, and ethnic cleansing — one of the deadliest conflicts in recent memory.”

In Yemen, a proxy war between Iran-backed Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition has killed an estimated 377,000 people (many through starvation and preventable disease) while airstrikes routinely target civilian infrastructure like hospitals, markets, and schools.

None of this is to deny the real anguish in Gaza, where innocent lives have been lost and the suffering is undeniable. And yet we’re told the outrage over Israel is simply about the killing of innocents. If that’s true, why do far deadlier horrors spark no marches, no boycotts, no student encampments? There are no flags for Syria, no bios for the Yazidis, no “Queers for Sudan.”

Famine?

In Sudan, over 25 million people face extreme hunger and more than 500,000 children have died of malnutrition since 2023. In Nigeria, 30 million go hungry. In Haiti, famine looms for over five million. In Somalia, 6.6 million need urgent food aid. Afghanistan faces mass starvation under Taliban rule, with 15 million at risk.

In Ethiopia, civil war has left nearly six million starving. In Syria, years of war and economic collapse have pushed over 12 million into food insecurity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, another 25 million endure crisis-level hunger.

And yet the only famine anyone seems to talk about is the one they can blame on Israel. No student encampments for Sudan. No viral fundraisers for Haiti. And Greta’s flotilla isn’t sailing to Somalia anytime soon.

War crimes?

Every war in history has involved acts that violate the basic laws of war: targeting civilians, torture, or the use of prohibited weapons. From the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II to U.S. bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Iraq, to the Balkan atrocities of the 1990s, the list is long.

Today, Russia faces overwhelming evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, including the bombing of civilian infrastructure and mass executions. The Assad regime in Syria has used chemical weapons against its own people. In Sudan, both sides of the current civil war have committed massacres, rape, and ethnic violence. Iran, through proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, fuels regional wars while deliberately targeting civilians.

Meanwhile, the entire strategy of jihadist militias like ISIS, Boko Haram, and Hamas is built on war crimes: embedding among civilians and glorifying the killing of non-combatants as divine duty.

And yet war crimes are discussed with singular intensity only when Israel is involved. The world reacts to every Israeli airstrike as though it were the first crime of its kind in history, while remaining strangely silent when worse is carried out elsewhere.

Apartheid?

When people accuse Israel of apartheid, they usually mean the checkpoints, security barriers, and travel restrictions in the West Bank; measures driven by security concerns after decades of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and failed peace talks. These policies are not about racial segregation but about the grim realities of terrorism.

Inside Israel proper, over 20 percent of the population are Arab citizens with full legal rights. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others live side by side.

The West Bank is not part of sovereign Israel, nor do most Palestinians there seek Israeli citizenship. They are governed by the Palestinian Authority. And in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas and Hamas-run Gaza, Jews are banned entirely.

In Gaza’s Al-Abeed neighbourhood (literally “the slave quarters”), over 11,000 Black Afro-Palestinians face systemic racism, barred from many jobs, excluded from marriage, and treated as social outcasts.

In Jordan, Palestinians (especially those from Gaza) face legal discrimination; many are denied citizenship, barred from certain jobs, and excluded from full participation in public life. In Lebanon, Palestinians are barred from owning property, excluded from dozens of professions, and denied access to basic public services (a status that has persisted for generations).

Across the region, gender apartheid is the norm. In Iran, Afghanistan, and Gaza, women are veiled, silenced, and stripped of basic rights, their legal testimony often worth half that of a man’s. In Pakistan, religious minorities face persecution, sham trials, and execution. In Sudan, before partition, racial apartheid divided Arab north from Black African south.

And yet, somehow, it is Israel that gets branded an apartheid state.

Colonialism?

Look at how the Americas were taken: Indigenous populations were enslaved or displaced. Australia was declared terra nullius (“nobody’s land”) despite Aboriginal cultures existing for tens of thousands of years. In North Africa, European powers drew borders, plundered resources, and ruled by force.

Arab empires also colonised large parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, imposing language, religion, erasing local identities. Berbers, Copts, and Assyrians were all indigenous peoples marginalised under Arab rule.

Yet no one calls Canadians settler-colonialists every time they vote. No one demands France return Mayotte. No one questions the legitimacy of Arab states born from conquest.

But Jews, indigenous to the Levant, with unbroken ties to the land for over 3,000 years, returning after centuries of exile and persecution? That’s “settler colonialism.”

This rests on a crude distortion: Jews are not foreigners to Israel. There has never been a time without a Jewish presence, and Jerusalem has never been the capital of any nation but a Jewish one. Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries was not conquest but return, often violently opposed by those who didn’t want Jews there at all.

Colonialism involves a distant empire settling foreign land for extraction and control. Jews had no empire. No motherland. No metropole.

If this is colonialism, it’s the only case where the “colonisers” revived their ancestral language, built their own schools, absorbed refugees from genocide, and granted citizenship to those already living there, including some who tried to destroy them.

Forced displacement?

After World War II, more than 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. These were civilians, many poor, elderly, or children, forced to leave homes their families had lived in for generations. No one calls for their “right of return.” No one questions the legitimacy of Poland or the Czech Republic because of it.

After World War I, around 1.5 million Greeks and 500,000 Turks were uprooted in a harsh population exchange between Greece and the new Republic of Turkey. Entire communities vanished. Yet neither side today demands restoration. They rebuilt. And the world moved on.

Following Israel’s independence, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from countries across the Middle East and North Africa, including Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Tripoli. They were stripped of property, citizenship, and in many cases, their lives. Most arrived in Israel with nothing but trauma and rebuilt without international sympathy or support from United Nations agencies.

Forced displacement is not unique to the Palestinian experience. It has been a common outcome of collapsing empires, redrawn borders, and postwar upheaval. The global norm has never been to preserve refugee status indefinitely or demand the undoing of history. Yet Palestinians remain the only refugee population whose status is passed down for generations, frozen for political purposes.

Grief over lost homes is understandable. But many nations have endured displacement and moved forward. The question is not whether displacement happened. It is why, more than 75 years later, only one people is still encouraged to define itself entirely by it.

Ethnostate?

Pakistan is a Muslim state, created as a homeland for South Asian Muslims. Armenia is a Christian state, with a cross on its flag and an official national church. Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation with one dominant language and culture. No one calls them “ethnostates.” They are simply nations.

Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, is also the only non-Arab country in the region with such a large and politically integrated Arab minority. No European nation comes close to the size or representation of Israel’s Arab population. Yet Israel alone is branded exclusionary for having a national identity tied to Jewish peoplehood, while functioning as one of the most pluralistic democracies in the region.

If that makes Israel an “ethnostate,” so is half the world.

Critics often point to Israel’s Law of Return, calling it racially exclusive. But this law exists because Israel was founded as a refuge for Jews after centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. Many countries have similar laws for their diasporas. Germany allows ethnic Germans to return. Ireland and Italy grant citizenship to descendants of nationals.

Some critics blur the lines between Israel’s internal democracy and its military presence in the West Bank, wrongly framing security-driven policies as evidence of ethnic exclusion. But national identity and territorial disputes are not the same thing. The conflict remains unresolved because of failed negotiations and ongoing violence, not because Israel is an ethnostate.

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If you’ve stuck with me this far, here’s the bottom line: None of the accusations hurled at Israel apply to it any more than they do to dozens of other states. So why do they only stick to the Jewish one?

If we’re being honest, we know the answer. It isn’t about consistent principles. It isn’t about civilian suffering. It isn’t about justice.

Some claim Israel deserves special outrage because it pretends to be good, as if making genuine efforts toward democracy, civil rights, and rule of law is a reason for harsher condemnation. Apparently, brutal regimes that don’t even attempt to uphold human rights get a free pass to behave as terribly as they want.

Others point to U.S. support, as though Israel is uniquely bankrolled by Washington. But the U.S. has armed jihadist militias in Syria, funded Egypt’s military dictatorship, and helped Saudi Arabia wage a devastating war in Yemen, complete with war crimes, a blockade and widespread famine. Israel receives a fraction of U.S. foreign aid (less than one percent of the federal budget) and unlike most recipients, it’s required to spend most of it in the American economy.

Israel isn’t judged because it’s uniquely brutal. It’s judged because it’s uniquely Jewish.

People insist it’s not about Jews but it’s the government, the IDF, the policies, the Zionism. But antisemitism rarely announces itself by name. It shape-shifts. Once it was “Christ-killers.” Then it was “cosmopolitans,” “bankers,” “Bolsheviks,” “traitors within.”

Today, it’s “Zionists.”

The labels evolve, but the instinct remains: Collective blame and righteous fury are always reserved for the Jews.

Call it what you want, but the double standards are obvious. And that, whether we’re ready to admit it or not, is a truth worth facing.

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