Please read this by Dave Rich, expert on antisemitism.
Antisemitism Today – Holocaust Museum Houston
17 July 2025
I want to start not here in the United States, or in my home country of the United Kingdom, but in Australia, and more specifically in Melbourne, on a Friday evening just two weeks ago, where three things of significance happened. The first was at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, where a man tried to burn the synagogue building down with 20 people, including children, inside having Shabbat dinner. Fortunately he only managed to burn the front door, because the synagogue had followed its security procedures and kept that door locked shut, potentially saving the lives of those inside. Separately, in another part of the city, a mob broke away from a pro-Palestinian demonstration and stormed a nearby Israeli-owned restaurant, shouting: “Death to the IDF”. Windows were smashed and people threatened before the police turned up and made arrests. And in yet another part of town, three cars outside a facility linked to Israel were set alight and had graffiti daubed on them.
This all happened in one night in one city in the far corner of the world, a city with a reputation for being alternative, progressive, and welcoming. Nobody even knows if the three incidents are linked, or if the perpetrators just happened to choose the same night to burn things down and smash things up, all in the name of hating Israel or hating Jews. The arson at the East Melbourne Synagogue was the tenth time in the past 12 months that an Australian Jewish premises has been firebombed. The mob attack at the Israeli restaurant used a slogan, “Death to the IDF”, that nobody had heard of until last month when a performer used it on stage at the Glastonbury music festival in England. And I’ll come back to that later. But that slogan spread from south west England to south east Australia in the blink of an eye, because this is a global movement now. Is it antisemitic to storm an Israeli-owned restaurant, or is it ‘just’ anti-Israel, and does that even make any difference to the terrified diners inside, who may or may not themselves have been Jewish or Israeli? And this kind of thing has become so commonplace now, so frequent, that the third part of this triad, the torching of cars outside an Israeli-linked building in another part of town, barely made the news.
My Jewish friends in Australia tell me they used to think of their home as an idyll, a safe haven from the tides of conflict and extremism that wash over the rest of the world. They don’t think that now. I don’t think any of us have that luxury any more, wherever we live.
In the 21 months since October 7 2023, I’ve lost count of the number of stories I’ve heard, from friends, family, my own children, and other people across the Jewish community of things that have happened to them or people they know. Stories of friends’ children being threatened on the school bus or at their university campus. Of hearing people saying things about Jews that they would never have heard people say before. And what we in the British Jewish community have experienced since October 7, American Jews have also experienced here in the U.S., as have our fellow Jews across the globe, in France and South Africa, Canada and Chile, and beyond.
In case anyone is wondering whether this is merely a question of hate speech, of people saying offensive or hurtful things about Jews, think again. This is about vicious hate leading to violent action. Here in the United States, Karen Diamond, 82 years old, was murdered in Boulder, Colorado, while taking part in a march to support Israeli hostages that was attacked by a man throwing Molotov cocktails and shouting “Free Palestine”. Eleven other people were injured, some badly; the attacker later told police he wanted to kill all “Zionist people”. That appalling crime came shortly after Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both Israeli Embassy workers, one American and one Israeli, were shot dead when leaving a Jewish community event at the Jewish museum in Washington D.C. by a man crying “Free Free Palestine” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
Further afield, Rabbi Zvi Kogan was murdered in the UAE in November last year in a terrorist plot attributed, ultimately, to Iran. This carried an extra layer of tragedy, because Rabbi Kogan’s widow Rivky, a U.S. citizen, is the niece of another Rabbi, Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, who was murdered by Islamist terrorists in Mumbai in 2008. It goes around, this murderous hatred for Jews. In fact, between October 2023 and early June of this year, there have been more than 100 terrorist attacks, disrupted terror plots and incidents of extreme violence directed against Jewish, Israeli and other targets worldwide, not including those inside Israel, taking place in over 20 countries and in multiple continents. This includes bombings, shootings and stabbings, sometimes in combination. Since October 7, synagogues have been firebombed in Australia, Germany, Tunisia, Russia, France, Canada and Armenia: five different continents, but the same hatred. While prejudice can be found anywhere, it is hard to think of any other type of bigotry that operates in synch across so many parts of the world, at the same time, as part of a single phenomenon.
Then there is the day to day hate crime, the less eye-catching, but no less debilitating, daily grind of antisemitic shouts and comments, anti-Jewish graffiti and social media posts advocating for violence and spreading hatred. It’s come to the point where most Jews now know there is a particular risk, especially if you wear a kippah or a Star of David necklace or a school uniform that marks you out as visibly Jewish, that this will be the day some random stranger tells you that you are not the good person you think you are, but you are in fact a racist, genocidal baby killer, just because you are a Jew. In a way, being an individual victim of antisemitism has always been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; but now, there are many more wrong places and wrong times than there used to be.
In the UK, the last two years have seen record levels of harassment, abuse, threats, assaults and other anti-Jewish hate crimes. Indeed, according to police figures, a Jewish person in the UK is 12 times more likely to be a victim of a religion-based hate crime than a member of any other faith community. Here in the United States, although Jews only make up around 2 percent of the U.S. population, in 2023, 15 per cent of all hate crimes of any type were against Jewish victims; and68 per cent of all religion-based hate crimes targeted Jews.
Jewish life still goes on, of course. Our communities are thriving in many ways, and I think many of us have found an inner resilience that we never previously needed. But it’s become increasingly difficult to avoid antisemitism, directly or indirectly. Even if you haven’t personally been a victim of it: you can smell it in the air. It has become part of our world in a way that was not the case before October 7.
The unique response
There is a risk that this becomes normalized, that we just shrug and live with it. And to a certain extent, that is what resilience means. But we should never accept it. We need to ask the question “why”. Why does this happen?
There is a simple answer, of course, which is that this enduring wave of anti-Jewish hatred around the world is a response to Israel’s war with Hamas. This is so familiar, this pattern, in which wars involving Israel are brought to the doorsteps of diaspora Jews, that we have come to expect it. Every time Israel is at war, especially if that war is fought in Gaza, Jews around the world get attacked, abused and threatened by strangers, or even by classmates or colleagues, on the street and online. And even if we are not personally physically threatened or verbally harassed in this way, many Jews find themselves gradually and silently excluded and demonized, as if, because we are Jewish and are therefore connected to Israel, we are morally deficient, a harmful force in society. That we do not belong.
I said it's familiar, but it isn’t normal, because this doesn’t happen for any other overseas conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there was no wave of anti-Russian hate crimes in Western countries. While the war in Yemen cost hundreds of thousands of lives, a war fought on one side by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of whom are Western allies using American and British arms, it did not cause a tsunami of anti-Arab hatred, nor did it fuel a protest movement that filled our city centres and our university campuses. The dynamic of emotion and behaviour related to Israel’s wars that we see within our own societies is only triggered by Israel – and by no other foreign country or conflict. So again, I ask the question, why? Simply saying it is because of the conflict in Israel and Palestine is not enough of an answer. It cannot explain what is going on. But I think if we dig a little deeper, we can find an explanation.
We need to start on October 7 itself, because the huge rise in antisemitism that we are experiencing across the world began as soon as news spread that thousands of Hamas fighters had invaded Israel, killing large numbers of civilians and taking many others hostage. It took a few days for the scale of the atrocity to become clear: of 1,200 people killed, over 250 taken back into Gaza to be held hostage, some of whom are still there, almost two years later; of the brutality of the attack, civilians murdered in cold blood, whole families burnt alive in their homes, of the sexual violence and torture that took place that day. But while the full details dripped out over the course of days, the anti-Jewish reaction began immediately. In the UK, the first incident directly linked to the conflict occurred at lunchtime on October 7, just after 12 o’clock, when a car drove past a synagogue on the outskirts of Greater London and the passenger, waving a large Palestinian flag, shook his fist at the Jewish congregants leaving the premises. It was the end of Shabbat morning prayers, and this was an Orthodox synagogue: the people on the receiving end of this particular unspoken threat, if they were observant Jews who did use their phones on Shabbat, may not have even known that, at that time, Hamas terrorists were still killing their fellow Jews in Israel. But the people in that car knew, and their response to the scenes of murder and terror in Israel was not horror and sympathy, but joy and celebration.
And they were not the only ones. The week with the highest ever number of antisemitic incidents in the UK reported to the Community Security Trust, was the week immediately following the October 7 attack. Not the week after the Israeli army launched its ground invasion of Gaza. Not the weeks following news reports about bombings of hospitals and schools. Not even as more time passed and the death toll in Gaza rose and the stories of the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza became common. No: the highest numbers of antisemitic attacks in the UK, and in several other countries, came right at the start, when it looked like Hamas was winning and Israel was losing. And that’s an important point. And these incidents were coming at higher numbers than any previous wave of antisemitic hate crime triggered by war in Gaza. It was as if the record number of Israelis killed by Hamas led directly to re cord levels of anti-Jewish hate around the world.
This wave of antisemitism has been sustained now for over a year and a half. Levels of antisemitic hate crimes remain higher than they were before the 7 October attacks and show no sign of going back to what we used to consider as ‘normal’. It has continued through the past 21 months as the death toll in Gaza has risen week on week, and images of Palestinian suffering filled our newspapers, TV screens and social media feeds. And in those circumstances, it is easy to forget how it began, but it is important not to make that mistake. Because at the start, the spark that began this global firestorm was not images of dead Palestinians, but pictures of dead Jews. This anti-Jewish reaction began not as anger, but as celebration and excitement about what happened that day.
What was also not normal, what doesn’t happen for any other overseas conflict and, I think, shocked Jewish communities more than anything, were the protests and demonstrations held across Western countries in those early days, not against what Hamas had done, but in their support. In London, thousands demonstrated outside the Israeli Embassy on October 9th in a gathering that had the mood of a party. People let off flares, banged drums and danced their way into central London. In the United States, National Students for Justice in Palestine called the 7 October massacre ‘a historic win for the Palestinian resistance’. In Sydney, a demonstration outside the famous Opera House was marked by shouts of ‘F--- the Jews’. One thing those protesters didn’t do, back in those days when Jews were mourning our dead, was call for a ceasefire. As one speaker at the London rally put it, in terms repeated at similar demonstrations here in the US, and across the world: “The Palestinians will continue to enact their God-given right to resist oppression and occupation by any means necessary”. There was no sign that anyone in this movement thought that Hamas had gone too far, or that Israeli civilians living within the borders of sovereign Israel had the right not to be murdered. This was an immediate, instinctive, and revealing response, and it came literally while Hamas was still killing, raping and kidnapping Israelis. This is astonishing: in the UK the Palestine Solidarity Campaign notified the police at 12.50pm on October 7 itself that they planned to hold a demonstration in response to Hamas’s attack that morning. Lunchtime on October 7: It is not too much of a stretch to say that the UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign mobilized more quickly that day than even the IDF did.
I know that since then, as the situation in Gaza has got so much worse, many of the people who have gone on these protests are motivated by more honourable, humanitarian concerns for the situation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There is much to protest about, to be sure. But the people who went out on the streets to demonstrate on the weekend of the 7th, 8th and 9th of October 2023 did not have that excuse.
Squeezing Jews Out
It led to the phenomenon of what has come to be called the 8 October Jews: people who had not previously felt strongly connected to their Jewish identity or the wider Jewish community, or felt particularly attached to Israel, but whose emotional engagement with all of those things was switched on by the realization that they live amongst and alongside people who would happily cheer the death of their fellow Jews, and – who knows – perhaps would cheer our death too. I wrote at the time, that if the Hamas attack on Israel that day revived collective, historic Jewish memories of the pogroms, then those demonstrators who went out onto the streets of New York, London and Sydney on October 8th to support Hamas in the name of “resistance” were the 21st century equivalents of the villagers who stood to the side laughing and cheering while our great-grandparents’ shtetls were burning.
It was a shocking discovery for many. It has led to a sense of isolation, a realization amongst a lot of Jews that our status and rights as Jews are not guaranteed, but might be conditional and contingent: if not our formal legal rights then our informal standing. That our world may not be so different from the world of our ancestors, after all. This sense has taken form over the past 21 months, not just because of the visible, violent actions and rhetoric I’ve described, but in more insidious, less overt ways. There are the Jewish performers who suddenly find they can’t get bookings, or whose shows are cancelled by promoters. Last year, Jewish reggae star Matisyahu had concerts cancelled in three different states, ostensibly due to security concerns, but in reality because he is Jewish, and specifically he is a Jew who refuses to denounce Israel. That is enough for him to be cancelled and boycotted, for some staff at venues hosting him to refuse to work, or for those venues to be bombarded with complaints and protests, to the point that Jewish performers simply don’t get booked because it isn’t worth the trouble. In the UK we have seen the same thing: bands with Israeli performers having their shows cancelled, not for anything they have said or done, but simply because they are Israeli, or they work with Israeli musicians and artists. The Chief Executive of the UK’s Jewish Film Festival warned last October of what he called the “erasure of British-Jewish culture form national cultural life”, because arts bodies large and small across the country were routinely excluding Jews from performance venues and funding grants. Too controversial, too much risk, even if they had never said or done anything about Israel themselves. Whether it is in the arts, at school, or in the workplace, antisemitism is no longer simply an issue of criminality and extremism; it has acquired a presence across civil society. In the UK, we have even seen it in hospitals. One Jewish patient left his hospital bed to go to the bathroom, only to return to find that somebody, presumably hospital staff, had stuck “Free Palestine” stickers to the headboard of his bed. He just walked out of the hospital and didn’t get his treatment.
It all amounts to a squeezing out, an intangible but definite sense that Jews are not welcomed amongst what sociologist David Hirsh has called “the community of the good”: the right thinking, progressive, anti-racist sensibilities that are supposed to embrace and protect minorities. Added up, it all has a chilling effect on Jewish identity. For years now, we have been told that the best, most inclusive workplaces are those that encourage staff to “bring your whole self to work”. For a lot of Jewish employees in a lot of workplaces, the lesson of the past 21 months has been: “leave your Jewish self at home”.
Again: why does this happen? There is plenty of prejudice all round, of course. Jews are not alone in that respect: racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and misogyny still blight our societies. But nothing else brings this particular combination of terrorism, hate crimes, mass protests, and social and professional shunning, all triggered by reactions to an overseas conflict thousands of miles away, and driven by people and movements who want to bring that conflict to our own towns and cities. That combination is unique. It is a reminder that there is something qualitatively different about the way that some people relate to Israel and Jews. Not just that it triggers a greater response, but a fundamentally different type of behaviour. More emotional, more visceral, more personal – and ultimately, more discriminatory and more threatening.
The Campaign to Destroy Israel
Of course, much of this is focused on Israel, or expressed and delivered through the framing of anti-Israel protests and discourse. And it’s important to explain what I mean at this point, because there is a lot of confusion over what is, or isn’t, legitimate protest, over what is anti-Israel and what is antisemitic. Different people will have different views over where the line falls between those two things, but I’ll tell you where I think it should be.
First – it’s obvious but still needs saying that Israel is a state with a government and a military that ought to be subject to the same scrutiny and critique as any other. More than that, it is a state that aspires to uphold the standards of liberal democracy and international law, and Jewish values too, and it should be held to those standards. Israel’s Declaration of Independence states, in clear terms, that the State of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It’s an admirable statement, and there is nothing antisemitic about pointing out when Israel falls short of that promise. And it will fall short at times, because it is a state like any other: human, flawed, complex, and facing multiple challenges that any government would struggle to navigate at the best of times. Clearly, there is a great deal of bloodshed and destruction and a lot of suffering in the Middle East, and people are entitled to have very strong feelings about what the various protagonists in that conflict, including Israel, are doing. And there is nothing wrong with expressing those feelings, within the bounds of ordinary political discourse and protest.
I would also say that all governments sometimes face criticism that is untrue or unfair. The American government does, the British government does, and so does the Israeli government – and that is the case whoever is in office, whichever party or President is in power, and from whichever political direction the criticism comes. Again, this is not, in itself, proof of prejudice. It’s just politics.
However: what is different, and is in my view antisemitic, is the notion that there is something uniquely illegitimate and immoral about Israel’s very existence, and that the only moral position to take is that Israel should not exist. It is found in the antisemitic idea that the State of Israel, and its people, have a uniquely criminal character and therefore anything that Israel does must have evil intent. You can spot it in the people who can never acknowledge that anything Israel does to defend itself can ever be justified, or understandable, or even just an ordinary human response; rather, that Israel actions must always be wrong, and not just wrong but done for sinister motives, a reflection of this allegedly unique inhumanity that supposedly characterizes not just Israel’s founding and its day to day policies, but its innermost nature. And that the only answer to this problem is to get rid of Israel entirely.
This an obviously racist supposition about an entire nation, and it carries with it the implication that Jewish national identity is itself uniquely malign. It suggests – and sometimes this is stated explicitly – that it is racist simply to believe that the Jews are a people who, in a world of nation states, have the same right to national self-determination in their own sovereign state as any other people. In other words, that Zionism is fundamentally, intrinsically, racist. There is nothing exceptional about the idea that the Jews are a people with the same right to a home as any other. It leaves plenty of room for debate about the constitution, borders, citizenship and policies of the State of Israel itself. But nowadays Zionism is more likely to be used as an insult, as a synonym for racism, apartheid, colonialism and even for Nazism. In some circles, there is nothing worse you can call someone than “Zionist”. It has even reached the stage where Zionism - the movement of Jewish national redemption that restored the Jewish people after the Shoah - is routinely described not as a response to Nazism and racism, but as a repeat of it.
It is this defamatory demonization of Zionism and Israel, of Jewish collective identity and its realization in the modern State of Israel, where hostility to Israel transcends ordinary politics and enters the realm of hateful bigotry. Rarely do you see an anti-Israel protest without chants like “We don’t want two states, we want Palestine ‘48”- with 48 being a reference to 1948, the year of Israel’s birth, which Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe. And for Palestinians it was indeed a catastrophe. But it’s important to remember the history of what happened at that time. There was supposed to be a Palestinian state formed at the same time as a Jewish state. This was the will of the international community, expressed through a vote of the United Nations in November 1947 to partition the land, and that choice for partition was accepted by the Zionist movement. But instead of peaceful partition there was war, and at the end of the war most of the land that was supposed to become Palestine was occupied, not by Israel, but by Jordan and Egypt – this was the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively – and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were left as refugees.
The dream of those days of the Arab side in that war to destroy the new Jewish state at birth has never disappeared, and since October 7 it has returned to centre stage once again, via the slogans and placards of the protest movement that has occupied our streets and our campuses so often over the past 21 months. The driving force that gives today’s anti-Israel movement its emotional weight and energy, is this fantasy that Israel can be eliminated entirely, wiped from history, as a way of purifying the world and opening the door to a new, and in their eyes more moral, future for humanity.
Like I said, criticism of Israeli policies and actions is normal politics; but calling for Israel to be eradicated is not criticism, because there is nothing Israel can say or do in response to this particular demand, other than to no longer exist.
When Hamas leaders state, in their official policy documents and in their speeches and interviews, that they intend to liberate Palestine ‘From the river to the sea’, this is what they mean, and that is the phrasing they use. It’s the idea that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be cleansed of the impurity of Israel. It’s an idea that is plain in the articles and open letters by tenured academics calling the kibbutzim that were devastated by Hamas on October 7 “illegal Israeli settlements”, as if they have no more legitimacy than the wildest of hilltop cabins in the West Bank. It is implied in every social media post that rails against 77 years of settler colonialism, rather than 58 years of occupation.
I know that many of the people who go on anti-Israel protests are there for honourable reasons. They see the suffering and devastation in Gaza and they want it to stop. They are motivated by humanitarian sentiments, and our world would be a much worse place if such sentiments ever disappeared. But what about the leaders of these protests, the organisers of those demonstrations on 8 October 2023, the ones who still, to this day, put out statements supporting armed resistance, denying the sexual violence of 7 October, and declaring Israel to be illegitimate? They are the weather makers of this movement, the ones who set its direction, tone, language and goals, and they are driven by an eliminationist urge to see the world’s only Jewish state destroyed and dismantled, erased entirely from history. And in pursuing that goal they are entirely, perfectly, aligned with the movements in the Middle East who are leading the campaign against Israel on the ground, in the place where the action really matters: Hamas, Hizbollah, the Houthis, and behind them the Islamic Republic of Iran, all of whom are committed to Israel’s destruction, and express that commitment and that desire using much the same language as the protestors here: From the River to the Sea, the lauding of resistance and glorifying of the martyrs, and the claim that Zionism is nothing short of a modern reincarnation of Nazism. The protestors on American or British streets marching behind these slogans may not think of themselves as the Western support movement for the Islamist campaign to destroy Israel. But in practical terms, that is the position they find themselves in.
Again, we must pause and acknowledge how unusual this is. There are many conflicts and situations of enduring, unbearable suffering around the world. There are credible allegations of genocide in Sudan and in China, to name but two such cases. We can point to the death toll in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, or the ongoing war in Ukraine where appalling abuses have occurred. But in none of these cases – not one – do campaigners in the West argue that the solution to the conflict is to simply make one of the states involved disappear. To dismantle and eradicate an entire nation state against the will of its own people. Nobody argues that the answer to the war in Ukraine is to get rid of Russia. Nobody says the way to end alleged genocide in China is to eradicate China. But where Israel is concerned, the response of many of the activists in the West who lead and organise the protest movement against Israel is to argue that Israel should never have been created and that the only just outcome is for its creation to be reversed, 77 years later, so that Israel is removed from the map and replaced in its entirety by Palestine. It’s not normal.
This fantasy that Israel can be destroyed is the vector through which centuries of ancient anti-Jewish prejudice is laundered and repackaged, and it is the fuel that, in a kind of feedback loop, generates new attacks on Jews around the world today. Since October 7, this is the type of antisemitism most likely to lead to Jews being murdered and synagogues being burnt. It is not the only form: extreme right wing antisemitism is still flourishing and deadly. American Jewry knows this only too well, and tragically so, following Pittsburgh and Poway. We cannot only look in one direction at once. But right now, the new reality for Jews around the world since October 7 is inextricably linked to this unique hatred of Israel.
For the fully committed, the true believers who are determined to get rid of Israel completely, October 7 held out the hope that their dream was about to become a reality. Hamas swept into southern Israel with such ease, facing seemingly such little resistance, that it felt like the beginning of the war to end Israel for good. Perhaps they held out hope that Iran and Hizbollah, bristling with thousands of missiles pointed at Israel, would deliver the coup de grace. This is why the protests back in those early days were so full of passionate excitement. It is why the antisemitism spread so quickly. But in the 21 months since then this fervour has curdled. Israel has proven that it is not going anywhere; Israelis have proven they are willing to fight, kill and die for their country. Instead of Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran joining forces to destroy Israel, instead Gaza lies in ruins with tens of thousands dead, and it is Hizbollah and Iran whose military threat to Israel has been exposed and degraded, their leaders either dead or humiliated in hiding. So in place of the anticipation that energized the Western solidarity movement on October 7, there is frustration and anger. Protests aren’t working, we are told, so they need to escalate. Just before Elias Rodriguez murdered Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington D.C. in May, he posted online a political manifesto under the slogan “Escalate For Gaza – Bring The War Home”. That’s the sentiment I’m talking about, and many in the pro-Palestinian world have embraced Rodriguez and re-posted his manifesto since then. This is where this anger leads: the murder of Jews in Western cities. If they can’t get rid of Israel, they can at least try to make life intolerable for anyone in our own societies who is even tenuously connected to Israel – which inevitably means Jews get targeted.
The Decolonisation Framing
It is telling that the political framing through which this campaign to eradicate Israel is currently waged is the language of decolonization. We are living in a period when there is much discussion about issues like structural racism and ideas of white supremacy, questions of colonialism and the legacy of Western conquest and domination. And there is much to debate about the role that these phenomena play in our societies and in our history. So perhaps it is no surprise that people try to force the history and the current reality of Israel and Palestine into that same political framing. Not a surprise, but it is a mistake. You can see why it would be seductive and satisfying to assume that the conflict in Israel and in Gaza is a legacy of Western colonialism and fits this familiar framing, rather than doing the hard work of actually understanding its distinctive features and coming up with an analysis that fits the facts. Satisfying but ultimately misleading.
There are lots of reasons why it is wrong to treat Israel as just another example of Western colonialism, but here are three. First, there was Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel at the time when the Jews – or Judeans – first became a people, and Israel is a place intimately connected to Jewish history, culture and religion. This alone puts it in a different category to the vast areas of the globe that were conquered by European colonisers from the 15th century onwards. Second, and connected to this, there has been a Jewish presence in the land of Israel ever since, from antiquity to the modern day. This Jewish presence dwindled at times, but never ended; and by the late 19th century the population of Jerusalem was majority Jewish. Jews have an unbroken connection to the Land of Israel in person as well as in spirit. And third, the Jewish masses who migrated to live in the land of Israel, whether this was when it was part of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century, the British Mandate in the first half of the 20th, or the State of Israel ever since, were not sent to conquer, exploit and enslave for the benefit of their mother countries in Europe. They were themselves refugees, fleeing those countries and the antisemitic persecutions they experienced, whether that was in Russia, Poland and Germany; in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Iran; or more recently, in the Soviet Union, France and Venezuela.
That is why there is a particular antisemitic thread woven into the fabric of this decolonisation theory about the conflict, because of what it implies about Jewish history and Jewish identity. The idea that Israel is nothing more than an invention of modern European colonialism inevitably involves an effort to re-write Jewish history, often with a straightforward denial that there ever was a Jewish connection to the land of Israel, either in ancient times or through to the modern period. The argument that Israel is a European implant in the Middle East implies that all Israelis are white Europeans, erasing the experiences of all the Mizrahi, Maghrebi and African Jews who live there. In short, it involves the imposition onto Jews of a false account of our own history and a restrictive, unwanted definition of Jewish identity, deployed in support of a political campaign that most Jews would consider hostile, or even dangerous.
If you think about it, colonialism, racism, genocide: these are all troubling and difficult aspects of the West's own history. They are the cause, for some people, of immense guilt; for others, of very deep and difficult divisions. Now, Jews have always served a role as a useful scapegoat for sidestepping those kind of things in history. So perhaps it is not a coincidence that Israel today is treated as the symbol of all of the things that many people consider to be the West's most egregious sins. Jews have always been blamed for society's ills, held up as the exemplar of everything that is considered immoral or inhumane and unjust. In the Middle Ages, this meant Jews were thought to be literally satanic, blood-drinking demons in human form; in modern times, the right-wing myth of Judeo-Communism and the left’s imaginings about Jewish capitalism served this purpose. This was not only about Jews being an unwanted minority; it was a more profound imagining of Jews as a representation of the evils that need to be purged to make the world pure.
This is why it is so striking that Israel, the most visible global expression of Jewish life today, is treated by some as the absolute archetype of a human rights transgressor in a world in which human rights are the highest measure of moral good. Israel does things that are deserving of censure, but Israel’s actions alone do not explain why it gets this unique treatment, different from all other states and nations. This discrepancy, this unique standard applied to Israel, is a reflection of something much deeper. Just as Jews, in history, were feared and hated as a dangerous presence in society, representing all of humanity’s worst and most harmful features, so today the same applies to the Jewish State. There was even an article in the Guardian in May blaming Israel for climate change. Anything can be made to fit.
And of course, because colonialism is seen not as a historical feature but as an unforgiveable moral sin, any product of colonialism - which in this thinking includes Zionism and the State of Israel - can never be accepted as legitimate. This is the logic that leads university professors to argue that any Israeli is a legitimate target for Palestinian resistance, even if they are peace campaigners living in kibbutzim on sovereign Israeli territory. If the old campaigns against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza implied that Israel had a basic legitimacy within its pre-1967 borders, so the switch in the narrative and rhetoric of the anti-Israel movement from opposing occupation to arguing for decolonisation implies that anything short of replacing Israel entirely with Palestine would be an injustice. You cannot compromise with racism, after all.
And here in the diaspora, redefining Zionism as a form of racist colonialism means that anyone associated with Israel and Zionism is to be condemned without qualification, as if they lose all normal rights. If Zionism is the new Nazism, so this thinking goes, then Jews who refuse to denounce Israel surely deserve to be excluded from normal society. This is the reality of how this political campaign manifests, whatever the intentions of the people making this argument. When my daughter’s friend, studying at Birmingham University in the UK, saw a sign held up by her fellow students calling for “Zionists off our campus”, that’s what she understood it to mean, whether they realised it or not: that any Jewish students who support Israel’s existence – not its government, or its policies, just its existence – ought to be forced off campus. This is the logical consequence of the pro-Palestinian movement’s drift towards a radical and absolute rejection of Israel’s legitimacy.
There is some irony in this. Less than a century ago, European Jews were told they were not truly European, not truly white, and didn’t belong in the nations they thought were their homes. So the Jews left Europe, those who survived at least, some in hope but most forced to leave in fear, and they became refugees some of whom made their new home, and their own nation, in the only place that had ever truly been a Jewish homeland. And now it turns out, we are told, that this was actually the greater crime; that far from being not white, Jews are now too white; far from being not European, Jews are now nothing other than European; and rather than being refugees, they were in fact colonisers all along. It’s a form of gaslighting, a classic inversion in which Jews are defined by others according to what matters to them, rather than what we Jews think of ourselves, or what we actually are.
Mainstreaming Antisemitism
It also, conveniently and satisfyingly for those involved, allows people to finally say what they want about the Jews, eighty years after the Holocaust. A friend of mine back home in London recently challenged a group of people who were cutting down yellow ribbons that the local Jewish community had put up to remember the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. My friend asked them why they were doing it, and even suggested they could put up pictures of Palestinians and Israelis together, alongside the ribbons, to promote peace. They laughed in her face, called her – please excuse my language – a “murdering b*tch,” said she was “complicit in genocide,” and told her that “Jews deserve to die.” “No one wants to exist with Jews”, they told her – “you are all filth”. This was in a nice, respectable neighbourhood in London, one of those middle class leafy suburbs best known for its good schools and overpriced restaurants. But there is a permissibility now, where people feel they no longer have to repress their antisemitism, instead they can say it out loud, and they can’t be Nazis for doing so because the Jews are now the new Nazis.
Increasing numbers of people, including not just random strangers on the street but high profile, public figures, feel able to say things about Jews that wouldn’t have been out of place in Nazi Germany, and they can even spout their poison to millions of people, whether via traditional media, social media, or a combination of the two. Kanye West – or Ye – has made it his mission to rehabilitate the swastika, starting with a halftime Superbowl advert and more recently by wearing it on clothing and jewellery in public. Andrew Tate repeatedly tweets that “the Jews” have tried to buy him off. Social media influencer Dan Bilzerian used his appearance on Piers Morgan’s TV show to espouse the most disgraceful anti-Jewish myths and libels, such as the lie that the Talmud teaches that non-Jews are subhuman, that Jews believe they are allowed to steal from non-Jews, or grossly offensive claims about what Jews supposedly believe about Jesus. Morgan was shocked and said he thought the interview would make Bilzerian look terrible; but Bilzerian knew better and pinned it to the top of his X account, where it has so far garnered 16 million views, because he knows that there is a vast audience for antisemitism nowadays. Open, unadulterated antisemitism, of the kind that used to be limited to neo-Nazi pamphlets and obscure web forums, are now getting a hearing on respectable, mainstream platforms and being algorithmically pushed into the consciousness of millions of people. This week, even Elmo – the beloved Sesame Street character – apparently tweeted “Kill All Jews” and got 100,000 ‘Likes’ for it, before his studio took back control of the X account from whoever had hacked or hijacked it. This isn’t a reaction to the conflict in Israel and Gaza – it’s the old-fashioned kind of Jew-hate – but the two merge together easily enough. It creates a sense that everywhere you look, it is open season for anyone who wants to defame the Jewish people.
This is not only about individuals spreading antisemitism, but also a problem of systems. Just last week, X’s in-house AI tool, Grok, itself began writing and posting neo-Nazi, antisemitic content, including that “radical leftists spewing anti-white hate… often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames”; that Israel was behind the 9/11 terror attacks; and that Adolf Hitler would know how to deal with such people. X removed these posts and changed the algorithm, but for a few hours, Grok did the bidding of antisemites and neo-Nazis to endorse and spread heinous antisemitism.
All of these disturbing, dystopian trends came together at the Glastonbury Festival last month. This is one of the biggest and most prestigious music festivals in the world, at which the world’s most famous bands perform over four days and dozens of stages. Around 200,000 people attend and much of it is broadcast live on the BBC. It has become an iconic cultural event in Britain’s summer calendar. And this year, one of the lesser-known acts, a punk rapper who nobody had heard of and who goes by the name of ‘Bob Vylan’ – not his real name – decided to grab the limelight. A lot of the acts this year displayed their support for Palestine, either through waving and wearing Palestinian flags or by encouraging the crowed to shout “Free Free Palestine”. It’s become the fashionable cause of the moment, a political identity in and of itself, and aligning with it is a way for artists and activists to show that they are both rebellious and utterly conformist. And Bob Vylan decided to go one further, not only encouraging his audience, many thousands strong, to shout “Free Free Palestine”, but also successfully getting them to join him in a chant of “Death, death to the IDF”, over and over again.
The Glastonbury Festival, I should say, has always been known for the promotion of peace and togetherness. For many years it raised money for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace, and whatever you think of those causes, they are not usually advocates of encouraging death for anyone. But where Israelis are concerned, as we have already discussed, different rules apply. At Glastonbury, you can call for “Death” for the IDF and the huge, middle class crowd, people who can afford a ticket for Glastonbury and who think of themselves as decent and right-thinking, will join in. Where Israelis are concerned, it’s not just OK to call for death; it’s positively welcomed.
It should go without saying, but a call for death is not a call for peace. It is not a call for a ceasefire. And, as part of the same set, Bob Vylan also delivered a monologue to the crowd about how disgusting it was that he once had to work for an “F-ing Zionist” boss in the music industry. So I don’t think we need to spend too much time analysing whether he is antisemitic. But what about the crowd?
Maybe they just weren’t listening properly. And if a concert audience is in the right mood you can get them to sing along to anything, as Sacha Baron Cohen proved with Borat’s infamous song “Throw the Jew Down the Well”. But whether this fits a technical definition of antisemitism or not is beside the point: they were persuaded to join in a mass chant for death, and it spread immediately around the world, heard in the storming of that restaurant in Melbourne and seen in anti-Israel graffiti and on t-shirts ever since. It is staggering and frightening how quickly a call for death can take hold, given the right circumstances. Murderous hatred is on the loose in our societies, in word and in deed, and it is directed at people like us.
When trying to decide whether something is antisemitic or not, we sometimes place too much weight on the exact, analytical meaning of words, and forget to notice the sentiment behind them. It’s a strange thing to say, from an academic perspective, but sometimes we analyse too much, and in the process we miss the wood for the trees. So we end up debating whether ‘only’ hating Israelis really counts as antisemitism. We try to give the benefit of the doubt to people who ‘only’ want to kill IDF soldiers, missing the fact that it is the word “death” at the start of the slogan that really matters, not the exact nature of who is supposed to die. We discuss whether Elias Rodriguez knew that Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky worked at the Israeli Embassy before he murdered them, as if it would make it any less of a crime. In so doing we make the mistake of over-rationalising what is essentially an emotional phenomenon.
In reality, and whatever the intentions of the people making this argument, the idea that Israel is a uniquely illegitimate, racist, colonizing entity that should never have been created and that today acts with unmatched cruelty never remains within the realm of political argument. It generates hostility towards Israelis as people, based on their nationality alone, which easily slips into hostility towards all Jews, Israeli or not. It is what leads to Israelis – and by extension Jews – being shunned and boycotted, or even attacked and killed. That might not be the intention, but in practice, we’ve seen it enough times to know that this is just how it works.
What Can We Do?
It leaves us asking the question: what can we do? We have to start, I think, by recognising the reality of where we are. The eighty-year anomaly since the Holocaust, in which antisemitism was a taboo that carried political and social costs for those who broke it, has gone. This has come as a tremendous shock to many in the Jewish world and beyond, although it has not dropped out of a clear blue sky; the signs have been there for a while, the trend lines pointing in the wrong direction for several years. But many were lucky enough not to notice until it became impossible to avoid.
And yet. This does not mean that catastrophe is inevitable. While being clear eyed about the new dangers we face, it is important not to assume all is lost. Many in our Jewish communities have found a resilience and an inner strength since October 7, a determination to stand up for our rights and our values. Perhaps they did not feel this previously, because they didn’t have to. But many have found it now. We need to build on that. There is a tradition and an ethos of campaigning and activism, of Jewish pride, that I fear we have lost sight of, and that we need to reconnect with. Any of you who remember the Soviet Jewry campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s will know how entire communities mobilized to advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews, who were at that time one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, suffering terrible oppression under Communist rule. That campaign was a tremendous success, not only in achieving its immediate goals of helping large numbers of Soviet Jews to escape persecution, but in energizing our communities in the US, the UK and other countries. That activist tradition and spirit exists in our recent history, and we would benefit from reviving it now.
And it should be done with pride. The organisation in the UK that I work for, the Community Security Trust, advises, funds and organises physical security across the UK Jewish community. We have done this for decades, because the terrorist threat to Jewish communities that we are all, now, tragically familiar with, is actually quite old. In Europe we have lived with it for many years. But importantly, we do this security work not because we are scared to be Jewish; but because we are proud to be Jewish. We are proud of our way of life, proud of the contribution that the Jewish community makes to wider society and to our nation as a whole, and we want to protect it.
Because make no mistake, protecting Jews from antisemitism also, at the same time, protects society as a whole from terrorism, from extremism and from hate. Most Jews in the world today live in democracies where the rule of law and protections for minorities are still fundamental parts of our political culture. We need to ensure this remains the case. A polity that would scapegoat and demonise one minority could do it to any minority. A society where hate and extremism are allowed to spread is one where nobody is safe.
Just as tackling antisemitism is a task that benefits all of society, so it should involve all of society. This is the part that we in the Jewish community often forget: we have many friends. Jews are not alone: there are so many people across society – I still believe they are the majority – who find anti-Jewish hatred abhorrent, who see it as an affront to their own sense of decency and their own values, and who are potential allies and partners in this struggle. We are not always good at finding them. But they are there. Perhaps many of you are here this evening. At a time when the fear and reality of antisemitism puts pressure on Jews to turn inwards, we need to resist that pressure and look outwards, to build relationships based on dialogue and communication, to reach out across communities – and to educate people about antisemitism, both the impact it has on Jewish people and the danger it poses for wider society.
Finally, and perhaps hardest of all, we need to find the self-confidence within ourselves to remain optimistic. There is a well-known, and very old, Jewish saying in Ethics of the Fathers, that reads: “It is not your duty to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” It has always struck me as a fitting description of what it means to fight antisemitism. There may not be a silver bullet that can end this blight forever, a way to erase antisemitism from our world for good, but sitting on our hands and assuming all is lost is not an option. It might seem like an impossibly daunting task: but that is no reason not to try, and there is no time other than now to start.