Commentary
As “pro-Palestinian” protests continue to flood the streets, the Jewish community around the world is once again confronted with a disturbing resurgence of antisemitism. But this time, it wears two different faces: an ancient, familiar form of Jew-hatred known as antisemitism and the other in its progressive disguise, antizionism. Both lead to the same outcome—the vilification of Jews, a modern movement of radicalized activists.
Two faces of the same hate, antisemitism and antizionism, consistently bear a frightening resemblance to pervasive antisocial behaviour: pathological lying, deception in the media and on the streets, moral disengagement, lack of empathy, a superiority complex with little to no knowledge to support it, and being hostile or threatening to others.
Modern antisemitism has stemmed from the far right, though some argue that Nazis (which refers to Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party) were in fact far left. It has festered from conspiracy theories that Jews control the media, banks, and government, and are cunningly planning to take over the world. Scapegoating the Jewish people and sowing distrust form the very foundation of this hatred, portraying Jews as omnipotent and dangerous.
Western antizionism, by contrast, emerges from the far left: Marxists, communists, and Islamists. It is dressed up as political activism, labelling Jews as white colonizers, complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. It sells the notion that Jews are all white and they oppress people of colour, specifically Palestinians. Unlike far-right antisemitism, antizionism wraps these blood libels within their social justice coat of arms. The rhetoric is different from the far right, but it is another sociopathic rebranding of Jew-hatred, with identical goals and results: legitimizing emotional detachment from the plight of the Jewish fabric, perpetuating manipulative deception, historical revisionism, and moral inversion.
One popular falsehood is the claim that Israeli Jews are all white European colonizers and recipients of white privilege. In reality, two-thirds of Israel’s Jewish population are people of colour, many of whom are descendants of the 850,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab lands. Jewish roots in Middle Eastern and North African lands with darker skin are removed from the narrative, because they complicate the false dichotomy of “white Jew” versus “brown Palestinian.” This historical erasure is not just misleading, it’s a cold, calculated denial of Jewish suffering.
By Amir Epstein
