There are two kinds of Jews today.
Not Orthodox and non-Orthodox. Not Israeli and Diaspora. Not religious and secular. Not left-wing and right-wing. Not modern and still living in the past.
There are Jews who recognize the obsession, and Jews who internalize the accusation.
Those who recognize the obsession understand that Israel, like every country, can make mistakes. Governments can adopt bad policies. Leaders can fail. Armies operating under impossible conditions can make errors. Every Israeli policy is open to debate.
But none of that explains the extraordinary global obsession with the Jewish state. It doesn’t explain the double standards, the demonization, the historical inversions, the celebration of those who murder Jews, the indifference to Jewish suffering or the transformation of Israel into the supreme criminal of the modern world.
The second group may fully recognize that antisemitism is real, irrational and growing. They may acknowledge that many of Israel’s enemies are driven by hatred, conspiracy or fanaticism. But at some level, they have internalized part of the accusation themselves, accepting that at least some of what the accusers say legitimately explains the hatred and that Israel’s actions help create, intensify or justify part of that hostility.
They may not accept the accusation completely, and they may reject its most extreme forms. Yet they remain at least partially persuaded that the hostility is rooted in settlements, occupation, Benjamin Netanyahu, religious Zionism, the conduct of the war or Israel’s failure to make sufficient concessions to its enemies. They continue to hope that if Israel changes its behavior, at least some of the hostility will diminish.
That partial internalization is enough to matter. Once we accept that our actions are a significant cause of the obsession, we begin shaping Jewish policy, education and identity around that accusation.
This way of thinking isn’t new. The choice between recognizing antisemitism as an obsession and accepting the accusation against the Jews has played throughout our history. It has shaped how Jews responded to persecution, how Jewish leaders set policy, and how ordinary Jews understood themselves and their place in the world.
It remains the defining Jewish question of our time. And I want to state my argument plainly: Jews who internalize the accusation are being fooled. They are mistaking the language used to justify the hatred for its actual cause. They are accepting the antisemite’s explanation of antisemitism and reorganizing Jewish policy, identity and behavior around it.
This is not a minor misunderstanding. It is one of the gravest Jewish mistakes of our generation.
Tragically, I believe most Jews in the Diaspora remain caught in this illusion, as do parts of Israel’s political, intellectual and cultural establishment. Israeli society as a whole, however, has been rudely awakened in recent years. More and more Israelis now see past the accusation and recognize the deeper obsession driving it.
Whether we see the hatred clearly or internalize its explanation will influence our politics, our education, our communal leadership, our relationship with Israel, and ultimately, our ability to protect the Jewish future.
The Accusations We Never Believed
Throughout history, accusations against the Jews have generally fallen into two categories.
The first category contains claims so irrational that Jews immediately recognize them as expressions of hatred: Jews poisoned the wells and caused the Black Death. Jews murdered Christian children for their blood. Jews killed God. Jews secretly control governments, banks and the media. Jews created capitalism to exploit the poor and created communism to destroy capitalism.
When Jews heard these accusations, they did not organize committees to investigate whether they were, in fact, poisoning the wells. They understood that the accusations revealed something about the accuser, not the accused. The problem was not Jewish behavior. The problem was Jew-hatred.
The second category is far more dangerous because it arrives dressed as reasonable criticism. It doesn’t sound like a blood libel. It sounds constructive, progressive, even compassionate. It suggests that at least some of the hostility toward Jews may be an understandable response to something Jews have done.
Perhaps Jews are hated because they remain too separate. Perhaps their religion and customs keep them apart from their neighbors. Perhaps they lack a country of their own and live as permanent outsiders. Perhaps they are too nationalistic. Perhaps their state is too powerful, too aggressive or too unwilling to compromise.
A generation of Jews is being taught that the safest way to live as a Jew is to become less connected, less visible and less Jewish.
These accusations offer Jews something emotionally irresistible: agency. If they are even partially true, then perhaps changing some aspect of our behavior could reduce at least some of the hostility. Believing that our actions contribute to the problem is painful, but it is also comforting. If we are partly responsible, then perhaps we retain some power to solve it.
The alternative is far more frightening: that the hatred may not be rational, proportional or responsive to our behavior—that it belongs primarily to those who hate us. Faced with that possibility, Jews have often preferred to grant at least partial credibility to the accusation.
Better to believe that changing ourselves may reduce the hatred than to admit that the hatred may not be ours to solve. With emancipation, this hope took on a concrete form: If the Jew could be changed, then perhaps the hatred would disappear.
Three Cures We Have Already Tried
We have tried this cure three times now—on the Jew, on the Jewish condition, on the Jewish state. Each attempt was sincere. Each failed to explain, let alone cure, the obsession.
Change the Jew. With emancipation, European society told the Jews that their difference was the problem: the dress, the worship, the separate communities, the resistance to becoming ordinary Germans or Frenchmen. If Jews abandoned those differences and fully entered the surrounding culture, the barriers would fall, and the hatred would diminish. Many believed them and transformed Jewish life to prove it—adopting the surrounding language and culture; redesigning synagogues to resemble churches; abandoning or modifying traditional practice; and, in some cases, converting outright. Many became more German than the Germans, more French than the French.
It didn’t work. Nazism did not care whether a Jew attended synagogue, had converted to Christianity or had fought for Germany in the First World War. The Nazis stripped away the illusion that Jews could escape antisemitism by becoming less Jewish. Reform, assimilation and conversion may have reshaped Jewish religious and cultural life, but they failed as solutions to Jew-hatred. The promise had been false. Jews changed. The hatred remained.
Change the Jewish condition. Zionism emerged both from the failure of assimilation and as a new proposed solution to Jew-hatred. The founding father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saw that even highly assimilated Jews remained objects of suspicion—the Dreyfus Affair proved that education, patriotism and military service could not guarantee acceptance. As nationalism swept Europe and peoples defined themselves through language, territory and sovereignty, the Jews appeared to be the exception: scattered, stateless and without the normal protections of nationhood. Many Zionists concluded that this abnormal condition helped explain the persistence of antisemitism and that the answer was to reconstitute the Jewish people as a nation among nations.
Zionism succeeded spectacularly as a movement of national restoration. It gave Jews a homeland, refuge, power, dignity and the ability to defend themselves. But it failed as a solution to Jew-hatred. The creation of a Jewish state did not cause the world to treat Jews as a normal nation; the state itself became the new focus of the ancient obsession. Jews had once been condemned for being stateless. Now they were condemned for having a state. They had once been despised for being weak. Now they are despised for being powerful. Zionism transformed the Jewish condition. It did not cure the antisemite.
Change Israel’s behavior. Today, we are offered a third version of the same promise. The world does not hate Jews, we are told; it merely opposes Israeli policy. It is about the settlements. It is about Netanyahu. It is about occupation, Gaza, military conduct, the absence of a Palestinian state and Israel’s unwillingness to take one more risk for peace. Once again, many Jews have internalized the accusation, at least in part. They may recognize that antisemitism is real and that many of Israel’s enemies are driven by hatred. Yet they also conclude that Israeli actions help generate or intensify the hostility erupting across universities, international institutions, cultural life, the arts, social media and the streets of Western cities.
The scale and character of the reaction tell a different story. Criticism is not obsession. Policy disagreement is not demonization. Concern for civilians is not the celebration of terrorists. Support for Palestinian rights does not require denying Jewish history, excusing the murder of Jews or treating the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. Israel should be criticized when criticism is warranted, but Israeli mistakes do not explain the fixation. Israel’s actions may provide the vocabulary. They do not explain the obsession.
Nor is Netanyahu himself the true source of the hostility. However much some Jews would like to believe that once he is gone, a more moderate government will repair relations with the Palestinians and restore Israel’s standing in the world. A left-wing prime minister would eventually confront the same reality: No responsible Israeli leader can agree to divide Jerusalem, accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state with its own military or permit a “right of return” that would eliminate Israel’s Jewish majority. The moment that leader refuses to commit national suicide, he, too, will be denounced as an obstacle to peace or worse. The name of the prime minister will change. The accusation will simply attach itself to the next one.
If Jewish identity is presented primarily as a source of conflict, accusation and moral discomfort, many young Jews will simply opt out of it. They already are.
The underlying institutional expression of this mistake is the belief that antisemitism is fundamentally a messaging problem. Behavior matters. Messaging matters. Israel certainly needs skilled communication. But imagining that better behavior or better messaging can reverse an obsessive hatred is to confuse what the hatred uses with what causes it. The accusation adapts to whatever material is available. It does not begin with the evidence and follow it to a conclusion. It begins with the conclusion and searches for evidence to support it. Jews have changed how they speak, dress, worship, vote, integrate and defend themselves.
Antisemitism has survived every adjustment. The bigger mistake is not poor communication. It is the belief that the right Jewish tone, posture, or behavior will cause those consumed by Jew-hatred to relinquish it.
The language changed. The accusation changed. The hatred remained.
Recognizing the obsession does not mean believing that every Israeli decision is correct or that every critic is an antisemite. Israel should be criticized when criticism is warranted. The real question is whether Israeli behavior explains the extraordinary moral fury directed against it.
Is Israel judged by the same standards applied to other nations? Are Jewish victims granted the same compassion as others? Are open calls for Israel’s destruction taken seriously or endlessly explained away? Why does every conflict become a referendum on Israel’s right to exist in a way no other nation’s wars do?
The disproportion, the double standards, the demonization, the denial of Jewish history and the obsessive focus on Israel are not incidental. They reveal the nature of the hostility.
Oslo and the Illusion of Control
The peace process offered Jews another version of the same promise: If Israel withdrew, recognized Palestinian aspirations, transferred territory and demonstrated its commitment to a two-state solution, the conflict and hostility would diminish.
Israel took enormous risks in pursuit of that hope. Oslo was supposed to advance peace. The withdrawal from Gaza was supposed to demonstrate that territorial withdrawal would reduce the conflict. Instead, Gaza became a base for an assault intended to devastate Israel. And if it did not work, we were told, surely, the world would understand our need to defend ourselves. Instead, Israel was accused of genocide for defending itself.
Decades after Oslo, much of Palestinian society still denies Jewish history, glorifies terrorists and seeks to replace Israel, rather than live beside it. Yet rejection is repeatedly reframed as frustration, terrorism as desperation, opposition to Jewish sovereignty as a dispute merely over borders. Many Jews who have internalized part of the accusation still believe that one more concession, withdrawal or demonstration of good faith will solve the problem, driven less by disloyalty than by the comforting belief that we retain control. If our policies cause the hostility, we can change them. If our leader causes it, we can replace him. If settlements cause it, we can remove them.
But what if the deeper conflict isn’t over the size of the Jewish state, but its actual existence? Recognizing that possibility does not end diplomacy or debate; it allows policy to be based on reality rather than wishful thinking.
The most dangerous antisemitic accusations are not the most ridiculous ones. They are the ones that sound plausible enough for Jews to internalize, even partially.
The divide between those who recognize the obsession and those who internalize the accusation is not an abstract philosophical disagreement.
It affects Israeli foreign policy and military strategy. It affects whether Jewish leaders respond to antisemitism with confidence or apology. It determines whether Jewish schools teach children to understand Jewish history or to view Jewish identity through the accusations of others. It shapes whether young Jews arrive on campus prepared to defend themselves or already ashamed of the connection to Israel that their enemies will demand they renounce. It affects whether Jews see Zionism as an extraordinary act of national restoration or as an embarrassment requiring constant moral justification.
And, over time, it leads directly to assimilation: If Jewish identity is presented primarily as a source of conflict, accusation and moral discomfort, many young Jews will simply opt out of it. They already are.
A community that internalizes the accusation will organize its life around appeasing the accuser. It will search endlessly for the Jewish behavior that supposedly causes or intensifies the hatred. It will pressure Israel to make further concessions; pressure the United States to reduce or withdraw its support; and treat support for the Jewish state as something that must constantly be qualified or apologized for. It will assume that safety lies in becoming more acceptable, more accommodating and less troublesome.
The result is not only bad policy. It is a generation of Jews being taught that the safest way to live as a Jew is to become less connected, less visible and less Jewish.
A community that recognizes the obsession can still examine itself honestly. It can debate policies, correct mistakes and demand moral leadership. But it will not confuse self-criticism with self-indictment. It will not accept the antisemite’s explanation for antisemitism.
The Choice Before Us
The most dangerous antisemitic accusations are not the most ridiculous ones. They are the ones that sound plausible enough for Jews to internalize, even partially.
Each time, the bargain was the same: Change this and the hatred will lift.
Emancipation asked Jews to erase their distinctiveness. The promise of acceptance ended in the Holocaust, which consumed assimilated and unassimilated Jews alike. Zionism restored Jewish sovereignty. Israel became the new lightning rod.
Now we are told it is Israeli policy. After Oslo, the withdrawals, and every attempt at compromise, Israel stands accused of genocide, colonialism and being the world’s worst violator of human rights. How many times must the proposed explanation fail before we understand that it does not account for the obsession?
There are two kinds of Jews today: those who recognize the obsession and those who internalize the accusation. Recognizing the obsession does not mean withdrawing from self-examination or retreating into defensiveness. It means placing responsibility where it belongs before we decide what, if anything, needs fixing on our end. The future of Jewish policy, education, identity and self-respect may depend on which group we choose to join.
