How Israel was turned into the fount of all evil

Since 7 October and the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, Western ‘progressives’ have rounded on the Jewish State. On the streets and in the media, the volume and intensity of the loathing towards Israel, and invariably towards Jews, has often been overwhelming.

This has sometimes made it difficult to comprehend the nature of today’s Jew hatred. It is just so widespread and all-encompassing. Nevertheless, it is still possible to delineate the main elements of the ‘progressive’ attack on Israel – indeed, the main elements of what I elsewhere call ‘woke anti-Semitism’.

At its core is the conviction that Israel is the epitome of evil. That it is a supremely malevolent state. You can see this in the way Israel’s opponents no longer criticise Israel by normal standards. They don’t just condemn Israel’s government, its policies or its operation in Gaza. They don’t criticise Israel as other states might be criticised. No, Israel’s critics also portray it as the fount of all evil in the world.

This can be seen in a diagram that was circulated last summer in anti-Israel circles. ‘Palestine is the issue’, reads the title, the issue that supposedly ‘connects it all’ – the ‘it’ being all that so-called progressives believe is wrong with the world. The diagram illustrates the point by putting Palestine at the centre of overlapping circles, each one representing various woke bêtes noires, from ‘environmental terrorism’ (ie, fossil-fuel companies), ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ to ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘white supremacy’.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, is an arch exponent of this tendency to find Israel guilty of all the sins of the modern world. Speaking last September, Albanese accused Israel of committing ‘domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide’. That is, Israel is not waging a war, according to Albanese – it is engaged in the wanton destruction of homes, cities, education, medical infrastructure, culture and the environment.

Portraying the Jewish State as fundamentally evil lies at the heart of contemporary anti-Israel activism. One of its most sinister products is Holocaust inversion. This is the attempt to portray Jews as perpetrators of a new holocaust, rather than the victims of the Holocaust. Holocaust inversion can be seen on the placards held aloft at nominally pro-Palestine protests, where the Jewish Star of David is depicted alongside or connected to the Nazi swastika.

In the wider public debate, Holocaust inversion is implicit in the now routine accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The message is clear: Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.

There are many reasons to reject this obscene charge. After all, it was Hamas that started the war. This is an organisation whose founding 1988 covenant openly commits itself to slaughtering Jews. It launched the pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. This was not a conflict Israel wanted, but one that Hamas started with the biggest murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. Yet it is Israel, rather than Hamas or any of its sister organisations who have also attacked Israel, that is being accused of genocide.

Moreover, Israel’s actions in Gaza simply do not meet the criteria of genocide, as defined by the UN in its 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention refers to ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. Even if the highly dubious official Hamas casualty figures are accepted, Israel has come nowhere near to showing an intent to ‘destroy’ Palestinians ‘in whole or in part’. According to Hamas, at least 62,000 Palestinians have been killed, with another 14,000 missing since October 2023. Out of a total population of about 2.1million, the total figure would make up about 3.5 per cent of Gaza’s population. Every human death is a tragedy. But these numbers, even on the extremely questionable assumption that they are accurate, do not constitute a genocide.

In reality, the Gaza conflict is a war between the Jewish State and an Islamist movement bent on its destruction. A substantial proportion of those killed were Hamas fighters and other Islamist terrorists. Israel puts the number of enemy combatants killed at 17,000.

Clearly many civilians have been tragically killed during the conflict so far. But then Hamas is literally hiding among and even under Gaza’s civilian population. It has spent the 17 years it controlled Gaza building an extensive system of tunnels in which its terrorist forces could hide. Rather than promoting economic development, it was literally preparing the battlefield for a conflict with Israel. Hamas was well aware that the 7 October pogrom was likely to prompt an Israeli counter-offensive.

This now dominant mode of Holocaust inversion – namely, the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, goes back to the 1960s. Yet the population of Gaza has increased from 350,000 when Israel first took it over in 1967 to the current 2.1million. That is a six-fold increase in just under 60 years. The huge surge in the Palestinian population is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if Israel was carrying out a genocide. (By contrast, in 1930s Europe, there were approximately 9.5million Jews living there. The Nazis killed two out of three European Jews during the Holocaust. Today, just over one million Jews live in Europe.)

Holocaust inversion is a prominent tactic in the demonisation of Israel. But it’s not the only one. Israel’s woke critics have also worked hard to paint Jews as the ultimate benefactors of ‘white privilege’. And, connected to the presentation of Israel as the embodiment of sinful whiteness, the Jewish State has also been turned into an arch perpetrator of colonialism.

It’s worth picking apart the identity-politics critique of Israel in some detail. Identity politics rests on two core assumptions. The first is that the key divisions in society are between identity groups rather than between social classes. These can be based on skin colour, religion, gender, sexuality or some other characteristic. There is little emphasis on individuals or the rights attached to them.

The second assumption is that the identities are organised into a hierarchy of oppression. In this view, white people in particular are deemed as oppressors whereas people of colour are cast as the oppressed. Towards the bottom are Muslims and non-heterosexuals.

This identitarian framework is generally considered left-wing nowadays. But this wouldn’t have always been the case. In the past, the left sought to transcend the divisions it now celebrates. American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King famously said in his 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech that people should ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. This came to be known as the ‘colourblind’ approach to racial identity. The idea was that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity. Ultimately the aim was to abolish racial distinctions.

Today, the supporters of identity politics see racial divisions as immutable. In their view, the gaps between identity groups can be narrowed (usually by taking from one group and giving to another), but they cannot be abolished. The goal of colourblindness, once seen as the mark of anti-racism, is now viewed by the woke as racist.

The new ‘anti-racism’ is essentially a revival of right-wing racial thinking in a modified form. Old-school racists used to define social divisions in biological terms, whereas the contemporary left frames its racialism in cultural terms. But both assume that society is fundamentally and inexorably divided along racial lines.

It has required various intellectual contortions to fit Jews into the identity-politics framework. Anti-Israel thinkers now claim that Jews somehow ‘became white’ after the Second World War. This allows identitarians to concede that Jews were the victims of discrimination up to 1945, while maintaining that they are privileged today.

This view of Jews was spelt out comprehensively in How Jews Became White Folk, a 1998 book by Karen Brodkin, a social anthropologist. She claimed that Jews have used their economic success and connections with the state to acquire a privileged role. Brodkin argues that the economic boom following the Second World War allowed America to expand its middle class to include Jews. She goes on to contend that black Americans did not normally have access to these advantages as they still faced systematic racism.

More recently, the idea of Jews as privileged whites was spelt out by Rachel Shabi, a British writer and leftist activist who was born in Israel. In her book, Off White, she argues that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, ‘Jews in the West were by and large absorbed into whiteness and its corresponding power structures’. She then goes on to claim that ‘the price of whiteness was to opt into anti-black racism’. In other words, she argues that mainstream Jews had to accept a racist outlook to be accepted as white.

Which brings us to another key argument in the woke demonisation of Jews. Namely that Jews and Israel are white colonialists. Shabi argues that European powers backed Israel as a way of furthering their colonial domination over indigenous people. There is no nuance to this argument. Woke anti-Israel activists reduce Israel’s history to a one-dimensional story in which it has become a prime agent of white supremacy. Complexities, such as the fact that most Jews who ended up in Israel fled persecution, are either downplayed or ignored.

The combination of these two assumptions lends itself to simplistic comparisons between Israel and the West. For instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a black American journalist and activist, spent a large portion of his new book, The Message, comparing the situation in Israel to the racist Jim Crow laws of the American South. His conclusions were apparently based on a 10-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, where he only spoke to people who broadly shared his outlook. It was an all too familiar case of a Western activist projecting his loathing of his home country on to a fundamentally different situation.

Tellingly, Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in Gaza, played to this Western activist tendency in an interview three years ago. In it, he directly compared the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis to what he called Israel’s racist ideology.

Naturally, it is possible to cherry pick quotes from the vast literature on Zionism to portray it crudely as a land grab. But such a view overlooks many other factors. These include the forces driving Jews to flee the diaspora, the Arab regimes’ virulent hostility to Israel and the often changing and contradictory positions of the Western powers on Israel.

The conviction that Israel is evil, then, is sustained by several, prominent overlapping arguments: that it is perpetrating a holocaust, that Jews are the bearers of white privilege, and that Israel is no more than an expression of white colonial domination.

These arguments have been germinating in universities and other elite educational institutions for a while. Ideas such as white privilege and Israel being a colonial-settler state have long been taught under the rubric of critical race theory and post-colonial studies. So when students organise anti-Israel protests at universities, they are not ‘rebelling’, as they seem to imagine – they are conforming to what their professors have taught them.

What happens in the university clearly does not stay in the university. Over the past two decades or so, a cadre of graduates has joined our political and cultural elites. They have taken up roles in government, non-governmental organisations, the media and the broader culture industry. Many are all too happy to promote the idea of the Jewish State as exemplifying a malevolent spirit.

That Israel is evil has become the ‘right’ thing to think. Celebrities have been desperate to get in on the act, and proclaim their virtue in opposition to Israel. Superstar environmentalist Greta Thunberg is a prime example. Too old to continue posing as a schoolgirl campaigner against climate change, she can now be found on assorted anti-Israel protests and ventures, including this month’s so-called aid ship to Gaza. Last October she appeared at an anti-Israel rally in Milan, where she proclaimed: ‘If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist.’ Obviously she wore a keffiyeh, an Arab headscarf, as an ostentatious symbol of her virtue.

It seems that hatred towards Israel has become a cornerstone of the woke elites’ worldview. No doubt they believe that it is the virtuous pose to strike. That they are on the right side of history. But they’re not. By casting the Jewish State as the epitome of evil, they are perpetuating racial animosity towards Jews in a 21st-century form.

Daniel Ben-Ami is an author and journalist. He runs Radicalism of Fools, a website dedicated to rethinking anti-Semitism. Follow him on X: @danielbenami