“None of us are free until all of us are free. Free Palestine.”
— chant at Trans+ Pride, London
“The [Palestinian] people have been soldiers throughout history … to establish [an] Islamic Caliphate with Jerusalem as its capital.”
One chant waves the rainbow flag of sexual liberation, the other raises the black flag of Islamist supremacy. One demands trans visibility and queer rights, the other calls for a theocratic empire where those same people would be silenced, hunted or killed.
And yet, they all agree on a general consensus: “Free Palestine,” eliminate the Jewish state and destroy the Jewish peoplehood as a precondition for their imagined utopia.
This convergence between the far left and Islamist right is not an alliance of values but of hatred. Disturbingly, the far right is now joining them, not out of solidarity, but out of shared resentments. The common thread is antisemitism, endlessly adaptable, binding enemies of liberal, centrist society in a collective crusade against the Jews.
This is no longer a rhetorical quirk. It is a coalition. It began with progressive activists adopting Palestinian nationalism as a proxy for social justice, while the Islamists co-opted the language of “resistance” and “liberation” to mask their genocidal goals. It now includes far-right voices who blame “Zionists” or “globalists” for every development in the modern world they despise.
The irony is grotesque. LGBTQ activists chant for the “liberation” of a future Palestine that would criminalize their very existence. They embrace Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that punish homosexuality with death and treat feminism as an affront to divine order. Women, journalists and political dissenters would fare no better. But the contradiction doesn’t matter because the politics of grievance takes precedence. In their worldview, Jews are powerful, Israel is the oppressor and anyone who opposes it qualifies as part of the “resistance.”
Islamist ideologues, of course, do not return the favor. They reject pluralism, secularism and all Western liberal values. To them, progressive allies are mere tools to weaken the West until it collapses from within. As Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar explained: “What is the final goal of Islamic peoples everywhere? It is to establish an Islamic state … under a single caliphate. There is no role for a Jewish state in this.”
Dissolving Israel is not the end goal; it is the indispensable first step in a much larger project of ideological conquest, one shared by regimes like Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned dictatorship in Qatar.
The far left, meanwhile, increasingly rejects all nation-states as inherently oppressive and sees the United States as a global empire to be dismantled. Many now converge on the idea that if you cannot topple the United States directly, you start with Israel. Cast Israel as the ultimate colonial enterprise (despite how poorly it fits that mold), and its elimination becomes not only permissible but necessary while simultaneously delegitimizing liberal sovereignty everywhere.
The far right is now entering this mix. Some openly admire the Islamists’ willingness to use force and claim divine legitimacy. Others exploit the chaos to revive conspiracy theories about Jewish control, “globalist cabals” or financial domination. They often speak in code—“Zionists,” “globalists,” “cosmopolitans”—but the subtext is always the same: Diminish or destroy the Jews, and the world will be set right.
History offers grim reminders of how quickly such convergence can metastasize. In Weimar Germany, Jews were blamed simultaneously for capitalism and communism. Today, they are cast as both nationalist oppressors and borderless globalists: different eras, same scapegoat.
Meanwhile, the democratic West staggers in confusion. After Oct. 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the immediate global response was not solidarity, but equivocation. Universities and media outlets issued statements “mourning all loss of life,” calling for “context” and defending the “resistance.”
But what was the resistance? Beheading civilians? Burning families alive? Raping women? Dragging hostages through Gaza? The depravity of Oct. 7 should have been a moral breaking point. Instead, it exposed how ruptured the West’s moral compass has become.
Once again, Jews are at the center of a storm they did not create. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the only country in the region where LGBTQ people have rights, where women vote in bona fide elections and where minorities worship freely, is painted as uniquely evil by those who claim to stand for liberation. That inversion of reality is not accidental. It is strategic.
Jews are not targeted because they are oppressive, but because they are resilient. Because they survived. Because they rebuilt a sovereign nation after exile and genocide. And because that nation, despite endless assaults, still thrives. That resilience stands as a rebuke to specious utopians of every stripe—left, right or theocratic—who believe the world must burn before it can be saved.
This unholy alliance is not just a danger to Jews. It threatens everyone who values freedom. It proves that ideological extremes, no matter how opposed they appear, will always find common cause in tearing down the middle and tearing apart the people who represent it to them.
Antisemitism is never the first warning. It is the last. And when the far left, the Islamist right and the far right all converge on the same target, history tells us that catastrophe follows unless the center resists.
The question is whether the liberal world, founded to resist extremism, will recognize this warning in time.
