Jewish communities around the globe have been protested against and attacked at an increasing rate since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. One recent incident took place in Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where a Jewish community that has little or nothing to do with Israel was attacked by Palestinian supporters who mobbed and assaulted them.
The question of why people around the world have chosen to protest and attack local Jews under the guise of supporting Palestinians in Gaza is mind-boggling. However, there is an underlying and distinct pattern in this modern phenomenon that relates to the deepest roots of antisemitism, and it differs fundamentally from other forms of bigotry.
Antisemitism is about Jew demonization, not Jew-hatred. Jew-hatred is just bigotry, and lots of people suffer from bigotry. Antisemitism, however, is a more complex phenomenon; it is a sociological pathology that makes groups of people paint Jews as deeply evil.
Antisemitism manifests primarily as a demonization of the Jewish collective rather than individual Jews. The modern Jewish collective is identified by most people as Israel. Many people who participate in anti-Israel protests, and often some of the most virulent attackers of Israel and Jewish communities online, would be able to pass a lie-detector test declaring that they are not antisemitic and bear no ill will toward individual Jews. This suggests that their actions stem from subconscious rather than conscious bias.
People may believe they are marching to support the Palestinian cause. Yet they didn’t march in the streets when Syria was killing hundreds of thousands of its people, including many Palestinians. They did come out in the hundreds of thousands in May 2021 after Hamas attacked Israel, Israel fought back, and fewer than 300 people were killed. They are out on the streets because Israel is involved—and anything that involves Israel becomes much bigger and is taken out of proportion.
The obsession with Israel is based on the role that Jews play in the central texts of major religions. Jews are central in the story of the New Testament, as well as the Quran. The Quran mentions Moses 136 times compared to Mohammad, who is only directly mentioned five times.
The themes in these texts are both positive and negative, and it is not easy to read either text and remain ambivalent about Jews. Anyone who reads them can be philosemitic or antisemitic, but it is almost impossible to stay indifferent.
This historical obsession has created deeply embedded psychological patterns that persist even in secular societies after religious frameworks have weakened.
The reason why so many intelligent people, even deep thinkers, have such strong emotions about the Jewish people and, today, about Israel is a byproduct of human psychology and sociology, based on these historical narratives. A person’s subconscious emotional brain tells them that something is evil or good, and what happens next is that the conscious brain tries to justify its emotional reaction and find proof to support the pre-existing narrative.
The pathological hatred that is antisemitism is very deep and needs to be recognized as such. But what do we do with it? We can’t ignore the protesters, as they are attacking Jews daily in different parts of the globe. Theodor Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state being the answer to Jew-hatred has failed. While Israel can physically protect its citizens and be a refuge for Jews endangered anywhere on earth, it has, paradoxically, become the target of demonization.
Antisemitism transforms wars of self-defense into narratives of monstrous aggression. Only within the social pathology could a difficult urban war in which 99% of the civilian population has been kept alive be accused of being a “genocide.”
So how do we deal with this pathology? We must call it out and fight it. But we can also approach it in a radically different way. We can accept that Jews will not be treated like other people and embrace that fact.
The situation is similar to a child who is constantly complaining to their parents. The child eventually gets frantic, throws a tantrum and possibly even hurts the parents. The parents need to realize that the child doesn’t hate them, but they need something that the parent isn’t giving them. We must figure out what the Jewish people aren’t giving to the world.
Israel and the Jewish Diaspora need to turn this into their mission. They need to ask: What could we be doing collectively that the international community is so desperately crying out for? If the world’s Abrahamic faiths agree that God called out to Abraham and said, “Through you shall be blessed all the nations of earth,” then Israel should see that as its mission statement.
The Jewish state—like all of Jewish society—lives with immense contradictions. They are a combination of the most religious and most secular people on earth; some of the most rooted in the past, and some of the most innovative and creative technological innovators. Right vs. left, Jews of Middle Eastern and Northern African countries vs. Jews of the West. Jews who live in the present are likely to tear themselves apart trying to work out who we are and where we stand. But those who look toward the future will find a space broad enough for the contradictions to coexist. For faith and family, innovation and technology, religion and its sacred value to the collective, and the liberal care of each individual. Where these cannot be reconciled today, they can be a part of a fast-changing tomorrow.
Israel is among both the oldest and youngest civilizations on earth. It lies at the epicenter of the stories human cultures tell themselves. If we cannot shake off the unfair criticism that entails, then let us embrace it and play our part, together with every nation on earth, in building the next chapter of the story.