COMMENTARY / OPINION
The Disturbing Logic Of The Left | Melanie Phillips [5:55]
Mar 11, 2025 – Melanie Phillips discusses the cognitive dissonance progressive liberals use to defend Hamas.
Melanie Phillips is a British public commentator with a distinguished career in journalism. She began her professional journey writing for The Guardian and New Statesman and currently contributes to The Times, The Jerusalem Post, and The Jewish Chronicle, focusing on political and social issues. Phillips has also appeared as a panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and BBC One’s Question Time. In recognition of her journalistic contributions, she was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996 while writing for The Observer. Her other published works include the memoir Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.
You can watch the full interview here: [1:44:42] • Fighting Anti-Semitism and Cultural Decay …
F*ck around with Israel and find out. JOSHUA HOFFMAN
History shows what happens when Israel’s patience is mistaken for weakness.
AUG 24, 2025
“F*ck around and find out,” often abbreviated to FAFO, is modern internet slang for an ancient truth: Reckless or provocative behavior brings painful consequences.
It’s the edgier cousin of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” and “You reap what you sow.”
For Israel, FAFO isn’t just slang; it’s a survival principle, forged in war, blood, and necessity.
The world saw this principle in action again on Sunday, when the Israeli Air Force launched strikes deep into Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa. The targets were strategic: the presidential palace, a fuel depot, and two power stations. The strikes came just days after the Houthis escalated their campaign, firing a ballistic missile tipped with a cluster bomb warhead — the first of its kind — that struck central Israel and damaged a civilian home.
The message was immediate and unmistakable: You escalate, we escalate harder. You terrorize Israeli civilians, you’ll wake up to the sound of F-35s screaming over your capital. That is FAFO diplomacy at its purest — swift, unambiguous, and unforgettable.
The clearest example of FAFO in modern memory, though, came on October 7, 2023. Hamas didn’t just poke the bear; it unleashed a savagery so grotesque, so depraved, that the response was always going to be cataclysmic.
In a single morning, thousands of terrorists stormed across the border, massacring 1,200 innocent people: men and women, children and grandparents, babies in their cribs and teenagers at a music festival. Families were burned alive in their homes. Women were raped in front of their children. More than 250 hostages were dragged back into Gaza’s tunnels like war trophies. And all of it — every last bit — was gleefully filmed and shared, as if to dare Israel to respond.
And then — somehow — Hamas and its enablers expected Israel to do nothing.
What followed should be studied in war colleges for decades: the methodical dismantling of Hamas’ military, political, and financial infrastructure. Entire neighborhoods that hid tunnels or weapons caches were reduced to rubble. Senior Hamas leaders were hunted down, one by one. Tens of thousands of terrorists were killed.
The rocket factories? Gone. The command centers? Dust. The tunnel network once called “the Metro”? Collapsing by the day.
Western critics call it “collective punishment.” Israelis call it collective consequence. Gaza is not being destroyed for no reason. It is paying the price for decades of choices — for embracing terror over coexistence, for turning schools into arsenals, for electing leaders who vowed to wipe Israel off the map.
This is what “found out” looks like.
October 7th and the strikes on Sanaa aren’t anomalies. They’re just the latest chapters in a 77-year saga in which Israel’s enemies misread its patience as weakness — and paid dearly for it.
- 1948: Five Arab armies invaded the newborn State of Israel, promising to drive the Jews into the sea. Instead, Israel expanded its territory and humiliated its attackers.
- 1967: Egypt, Syria, and Jordan mobilized for war, blockaded Israeli shipping lanes, and promised annihilation. Six days later, the IDF controlled the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
- 1973: On Yom Kippur, Arab armies launched a surprise attack. Israel bled, but it didn’t break. Within weeks, the IDF had crossed the Suez Canal and surrounded the Egyptian Third Army.
- 2006: Hezbollah kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers on the northern border. In response, southern Lebanon was torn apart, and Hezbollah has lived with that summer’s memory ever since.
- 2012, 2014, 2021: Hamas rained rockets on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Each time, Gaza paid a steeper price than before.
This is the immutable law of Israel’s neighborhood: Attack the Jewish state, and you will face overwhelming force.
And still, Israel doesn’t live by FAFO out of choice; it lives by it out of necessity. When you’re surrounded by enemies, deterrence is your first and last line of defense.
That’s why Israel strikes weapons convoys in Syria, why it sabotages Iran’s nuclear program, and why terrorist masterminds like Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrallah met their ends without warning.
This isn’t vengeance; it’s survival. When your existence is non-negotiable, clarity of consequence becomes your greatest insurance policy.
Of course, every time Israel acts, the world erupts in outrage. United Nations resolutions fly. Western journalists wring their hands. College campuses seethe. And yet, when Israelis are massacred, when Palestinians are arrested in Tel Aviv for alleged ties to a planned terror attack in the city (which happened today), when children grow up running to bomb shelters, the world shrugs.
The hypocrisy is staggering, but irrelevant. Israel learned long ago that no one else will defend the Jewish state. The IDF doesn’t wait for permission slips from the UN or lectures from pundits. It acts because it must.
And every time the world underestimates Israel’s resolve, they “find out” just how far the Jewish state is willing to go to protect its people.
Ironically, FAFO doesn’t just lead to war; it sometimes leads to peace. Egypt made peace with Israel not because it fell in love with Zionism, but because it understood, after 1967 and 1973, that Israel could not be defeated. Jordan reached the same conclusion. And the Abraham Accords — starting with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco — are built on the same foundation: respect earned through strength. In the Middle East, deterrence is the currency of survival — and, sometimes, the down payment for coexistence.
Perhaps the most tragic part of the FAFO equation is that it didn’t have to be this way for the Palestinians.
They had opportunities — after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, after billions in international aid poured in — to build a functioning state, to embrace coexistence, to write a different story. Instead, their leaders chose terror and antisemitism. They chose rockets and tunnels over schools and hospitals. They chose martyrdom over modernity.
Now, Gaza is in ruins. And while the world rushes to paint Palestinians as eternal victims, the harsh truth is this: The bill came due.
The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the regime in Tehran would do well to take note. Israel has already shown it can reach into Iranian territory to establish immediate air supremacy, assassinate nuclear scientists, hack critical infrastructure, disrupt weapons programs.
FAFO also carries a deeper meaning in the Jewish story. From Masada to the Warsaw Ghetto to the birth of Israel in 1948, Jewish survival has always depended on a simple truth: Strength is the only guarantee of safety. The world may lecture. The world may condemn. But the Jewish state will never again wait for others to come to its rescue.
Finally, FAFO isn’t just a message for Israel’s enemies; it’s a message for Jews everywhere. When we stand unapologetically with Israel, when we reject the temptation to bow to fashionable lies or to soften our voice to appease others, we send the same message: Weakness invites danger, but strength ensures survival.
In a world where antisemitism is resurgent, there is no room for timidity. There is only one path forward: Be strong, be proud, and make it clear — to everyone — that the Jewish People will not be victimized again.
For 77 years, Israel’s enemies have deluded themselves into thinking that if they just hit harder, if they just terrorize civilians enough, Israel will fold. They confuse Israeli patience with fragility. They mistake democratic debate for existential fatigue.
And every time, they learn the same hard lesson: Israel may bend, but it never breaks. “F*ck around and find out” isn’t a slogan here. It’s statecraft, born of necessity and sharpened by survival. For those who still don’t understand, the message couldn’t be clearer: If you come for the Jewish state, be prepared to find out — the hard way.
[Ed.:
Justice, Justice You Shall Automate? BY MORDECHAI SONES
How Artificial Intelligence is subverting the pursuit of justice in Israel
AUGUST 24, 2025 Jewish Home News
The Torah portion of Shoftim contains one of the most foundational injunctions in Jewish jurisprudence: “צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף” – “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” Rashi explains the repetition of the word “justice” as a profound command: one must pursue justice relentlessly, through just and righteous means. The method of pursuit is as crucial as the outcome.
Contents
A Deliberate Gamble on Innovation Over Precaution
The Machine in the Courtroom: A Record of Missteps and Rebuke
Corrosion of Trust
Beit Din and the Algorithm: Halachic Impasse
Are We Just Machines Now?
Pursuing True Justice
This command by the Creator poses a direct and urgent challenge to the modern State of Israel as it navigates the integration of Artificial Intelligence into its legal sphere. The premature and inadequately regulated adoption of AI, a tool that is inherently opaque, prone to error, and devoid of human conscience, represents not merely a new method, but a fundamental subversion of this holy pursuit. It threatens to replace the nuanced, human striving towards righteousness with the cold, and often flawed, logic of the machine.
Prevailing policy prioritizes economic innovation over essential legal safeguards, leading to demonstrable failures in the administration of justice. Currently, there is still a stark contrast between the secular court system, which is grappling with the tangible consequences of AI misuse, and the Rabbinical Batei Din, which largely reject AI’s role in judicial reasoning on deeply-rooted theological grounds. Current AI adoption subverts the pursuit of true justice by introducing systemic bias, eroding human discretion and public trust, and creating a profound accountability vacuum.
A Deliberate Gamble on Innovation Over Precaution
The challenges of AI within Israel’s legal system are a direct consequence of a national policy that consciously prioritizes technological and economic ambitions over robust legal and ethical safeguards. This permissive environment, characterized by a preference for “soft law,” sets the stage for the injustices documented in courtrooms across the country.
In December 2023, the government cemented a strategy of forgoing formal, rigid AI legislation, viewing it as a potential impediment to the nation’s powerful high-tech sector, which contributes 18% of its GDP. The policy’s primary objective is to foster AI advancement, with safeguarding human rights presented as a parallel, but not overriding, concern.
This strategic choice has created a fundamental disconnect between the executive branch’s economic priorities and the judiciary’s need for clear, enforceable rules. The government’s “soft law” approach effectively outsources the work of setting AI standards to the courts, forcing them into a reactive posture.
The consequences are severe. In the absence of binding rules, legal practitioners and even state agencies have experimented with powerful but flawed AI tools, leading directly to the submission of fabricated evidence and fictitious laws in court.
The 2023 AI Policy champions “Responsible Innovation” and “explainability” as core principles. Yet, the hands-off regulatory approach simultaneously allows for the unfettered development of “black box” systems whose inner workings are opaque.
This is the “explainability paradox”: the government’s policy espouses a critical safeguard for justice while cultivating an environment that ensures this safeguard cannot be enforced. The direct result is the situation sharply criticized by an Israeli District Court, where the police used a predictive AI tool that operated as a “black box,” with no one able to explain how it reached its conclusions, making effective judicial review impossible.
The Machine in the Courtroom: A Record of Missteps and Rebuke
The negative impact of AI on the Israeli justice system is not speculative but a documented fact. The most glaring failure has been the repeated submission of court filings based on AI-generated “hallucinations”—entirely fabricated case law and fictitious legal statutes.
This pattern of misconduct has escalated from individual attorneys to the Israel Police. In one instance, an attorney submitted pleadings to the Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court citing fabricated rulings. The crisis reached a head in February 2025, when the Supreme Court heard an appeal from a Sharia Court decision where the argument was based almost entirely on fabricated judgments.
The case involving the Israel Police is particularly alarming. In May 2025, during a hearing at the Hadera Magistrate’s Court, the police submitted an argument citing legal clauses that simply did not exist. The defendant’s attorney correctly suspected the use of ChatGPT, a suspicion the police representative was forced to admit was correct. Judge Ehud Kaplan reacted with shock, stating, “If I thought I had seen everything in the 30 years I have been on the bench, I must have been wrong.” This incident reveals a dangerous combination of technological illiteracy and professional irresponsibility from a state actor.
Beyond fabricated law lies the more subtle threat of algorithmic bias. In a personal injury lawsuit in the Haifa Magistrates’ Court, an AI-generated summary of medical records was disqualified not because it was demonstrably false, but because of the inherent risk that the AI could create “new, processed content tailored to the needs of the party using them,” subtly influencing an expert’s judgment. This established a crucial precedent: the potential for undetectable bias can be sufficient grounds for inadmissibility.
Corrosion of Trust
The very fabric of Israeli society is woven with trust—trust in the State’s institutions, media, and legal system. Technology, particularly AI, is proving to be a powerful corrosive agent against this trust. Just as a simple Google Translate glitch can turn a routine police report into an international incident by mistranslating an innocent bystander’s post as “attack them,” the uncritical use of AI in law destroys the assumption of veracity that underpins the entire judicial process.
When a lawyer or police officer can, with a few keystrokes, generate and submit a legal argument based on non-existent laws, the court is no longer a forum for truth-seeking.
This technological carelessness finds fertile ground in a legal culture already accustomed to sidelining due process, most notably through the state’s use of administrative detention, where individuals are imprisoned without trial and judicial oversight is often rendered moot. In an environment so permissive of such a profound departure from the rule of law, it is little wonder that the new, more subtle erosion of justice represented by AI has been so easily and carelessly accepted.
It becomes a theater of digital illusion, and public confidence plummets. Each AI “hallucination” submitted as fact is a small tear in the social contract, leaving citizens to wonder if they are governed by law or by algorithmic whim.
This erosion of trust is not a bug but a feature of a system that moves too fast and with too much complexity for human oversight to keep pace. The allure of speed and efficiency creates a powerful temptation to abdicate responsibility to the machine.
As seen in other high-stakes domains, from aviation to finance, the increasing autonomy of AI systems creates an “inescapable risk.” When these complex, self-learning systems fail, they fail in unpredictable and often catastrophic ways, and the distributed nature of their creation makes it nearly impossible to assign accountability.
This is the accountability vacuum now emerging in Israeli law: when an algorithmic error leads to a miscarriage of justice, who is to blame? The developer? The user? The machine itself? Without clear answers, there can be no true recourse, and therefore, no justice.
Beit Din and the Algorithm: Halachic Impasse
While the secular legal system struggles with the misapplication of AI, Israel’s religious court system, the Batei Din, present a different case. Here, there are no documented instances of a dayan being caught using AI for legal rulings. Resistance to AI stems from a profound understanding of the nature of halakha (Jewish law).
A significant body of rabbinic opinion argues that AI is constitutionally incompatible with rendering a ruling. Halakha is not a binary legal code; rulings depend on intangible human factors. Justice, in this view, requires an empathetic engagement that a machine cannot replicate.
Furthermore, a correct ruling is derived not only from written texts but from mesorah—the vast body of unwritten tradition passed down orally—and shimush, the practical wisdom gained through long apprenticeship. An AI has no access to this lived, embodied wisdom. Finally, traditional Jewish thought holds that a qualified human judge receives divine assistance—siyata dishmaya—to arrive at a just ruling, a grace not extended to an algorithm.
However, the religious courts are not entirely insulated from AI’s disruptive influence. In a significant case, an attorney was caught misusing AI in an attempt to challenge a religious court’s ruling within the secular legal system. The lawyer’s appeal to the Supreme Court was based almost entirely on AI-hallucinated precedents. This incident highlights how the risks of AI can still affect and undermine the religious courts, even if the technology is not used by the judges themselves, by corrupting the appellate process in the secular system.
Are We Just Machines Now?
The uncritical embrace of technology risks a profound dehumanization, a flattening of human experience into machine-readable data. We are becoming primitive moderns, armed with godlike technological power but increasingly disconnected from the truth and wisdom that give it meaning. In a world mediated by luminous screens and dead algorithms, we are losing the ability to truly hear one another. Communication becomes a transaction, an exchange of information rather than a meeting of souls.
This is precisely the danger AI introduces into the courtroom. It tempts the legal system to treat human beings—with their complex histories, emotions, and moral struggles—as mere bundles of data points to be processed. A judge’s wisdom, a lawyer’s empathy, a litigant’s plea for understanding—these are the very things that cannot be digitized. By outsourcing legal reasoning to a machine, we are not just risking error; we are risking our own humanity.
Pursuing True Justice
The evidence from Israel’s national policy, secular courtrooms, and religious legal philosophy converges on a single, troubling conclusion: Artificial Intelligence, in its current form and under the prevailing regulatory regime, fundamentally subverts the pursuit of justice. The injunction “Justice, justice you shall pursue” is not a call for perfect, automated outcomes. It is a call for a deeply human process—a relentless, conscientious, and empathetic struggle toward what is right. It demands that we use just means to achieve just ends.
An algorithm cannot “pursue.” It can only process. A machine cannot weigh the unquantifiable essence of a human life. It cannot understand mercy, context, or repentance. To place our faith in such a tool is to abandon the very pursuit the Torah commands. To realign the integration of technology with the core principles of justice, a fundamental shift is required: from a “soft law” approach to binding legislation for high-stakes sectors; from advisory opinions to mandatory professional education; and from a naive embrace of innovation to a mature, critical engagement with its moral limits.
The pursuit of justice is the work of human hands, human minds, and human hearts working in partnership with the Creator, according to His law.
As AI’s footprint grows, so does the urgency to protect this essential truth, lest Israel’s courts, mere processors of data, ravage the souls they blindly judge while remaining deaf to the Torah’s call to pursue justice, justly.
Italian Comedian ENDS “Religion Of Peace” Myth, (And British Crowd ERUPTED!) [14:56] Yishai Fleisher
Aug 22, 2025 – Smart, hard hitting humor to clear the cobwebs of the mind… Nicholas De Santo.
Israel: The US’ Uniquely Pro-Active Ally Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger
August 21, 2025 “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
*During June 13-21, 2025, Israel carried out a most complex and successful military offensive against Iran’s Ayatollah regime, which is the epicenter of anti-US global Islamic terrorism and drug trafficking, obliterating Iran’s air force and ground-to-air tracking, jamming and intercepting systems. This Israeli offensive facilitated the June 21, 2025 US bombing of three critical Iranian nuclear facilities, with no effective Iranian opposition.
*In 2017, Israel infiltrated an al-Qaeda bomb-making cell in Syria, sharing with the US details of a scheme to plant explosives in batteries of laptops and other electronic devices, while evading airport screening devices. Consequently, airport security has been dramatically upgraded, sparing the US homeland security nightmare.
*These two cases demonstrate the pro-active Israeli contributions to US homeland and national security, which no other US ally would/could perform in the face of mutual threats, such as Sunni and Shiite global terrorism, and in defiance of Russian and Chinese interests.
*Previous examples of Israel’s pro-active game-changing operations and their benefits to the US include:
<The 2007 destruction of Syria’s nuclear reactor, which spared the region and the globe the ramifications of a nuclearized civil war in Syria;
<The 1981 destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which snatched all pro-US Arab oil-producing regimes from the jaws of Saddam Hussein, and spared the US a nuclear confrontation during the 1991 First Gulf War;
<The 1982 destruction of 20 most advanced Soviet ground-to-air missile batteries (“Operation Mole Cricket 19”), which tilted the global balance of power in favor of the US, and is still featured prominently in the US Air Force’s training program and battle tactics;
<The 1976 Entebbe Operation, which inspired and upgraded the US counter-terrorism performance;
<The 1970 Israeli military deployment to the Golan Heights, which forced a rollback of the pro-Soviet Syrian invasion of pro-US Jordan. The invasion could have triggered the ousting of all pro-US oil-producing Arab regimes south of Jordan, yielding the USSR a strategic bonanza, at a time when the US was bogged down in Southeast Asia, unable to dispatch a military force to Jordan, and largely-dependent on Persian Gulf oil;
<The 1967 Six Day War, which aborted the Soviet plan to catapult Egyptian President Nasser into Pan Arab leadership, while toppling every pro-US Arab regime;
<etc.
US’ European allies
*The national security of NATO’s European countries is highly reliant on US military bases, requiring an annual US appropriation of some $36bn, including 80,000 US servicemen.
*Unlike European allies of the US (as well as Japan and South Korea – $7bn annual appropriation and 81,000 US servicemen), Israel does not need US military bases on its soil, is largely self-funded and is militarily self-manned. Since 1967, upon gaining control of the mountain ridges of the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, Israel has been transformed from a security-consumer to a security-producer for the US; from a war-inducing to a war-deterring US ally.
*While Europe is a platform for US military bases, Israel is a platform for US research and development bases of 250 US high tech giants (e.g., Nvidia, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials, IBM, Philips, Apple). These Israeli-based research and development centers have played a key role in enhancing the US’ global technological edge, increasing US exports and expanding US employment.
*Unlike European allies of the US – whose strategic cooperation depends on the Left/Right ideology of the government and domestic public opinion – a vast majority of Israel’s constituency and political establishment has been unconditionally pro-US, irrespective of Left/Right governments in Jerusalem and independent of DEM or GOP presidency in Washington.
*Moreover, European ideology, perception of national interests and public opinion could slow/limit support for specific US-led military operations, especially those outside Europe, or involving high military risk. Contrary to the overwhelming support in Israel for strategic cooperation with the US, European support is not automatic or homogeneous.
*Right-of-Center European governments tend to underscore their unilateral national interests, tending to align strategically with the US. On the other hand, Left-of-Center European governments tend to highlight a multilateral (cosmopolitan) common denominator with the European Union, the (anti-Western) UN and (anti-Western) international organizations, demonstrating skepticism toward US military initiatives.
*The 1991 First Gulf War highlighted the limited support of the US by some NATO allies, which restricted their involvement to funding, rather than dispatching any military personnel. The current war on Islamic terrorism has exposed NATO’s reluctance to fully-support the US, lending credence to a contention, by many US Generals, that NATO stands for No Action Talk Only.
*Notwithstanding their frequent reservations about the US’ military initiatives, European countries are anxious about the possibility of a significant reduction in the US military presence in Europe, which may jeopardize regional and global stability.
The bottom line
Unlike all other US allies, Israel produces an annual R-o-I (Return-on-Investment) of at least a few hundred percent on the annual US investment of $3.8bn, which is misperceived as “foreign aid.” Israel, the pro-active US ally, carries out ground-breaking military operations,and performs as the Battle-Tested-Laboratory, Innovation Center and Showroom of the US defense and aerospace industries, as well as the US Armed Forces. Israel has spared the US defense industries many years of research and development, which amounts to mega billions of dollars increasing US exports, expanding US employment and upgrading US battle tactics.
The Holiest Hatred BY ADAM LOUIS-KLEIN
August 20, 2025
Since medieval times, antisemitism has cloaked itself in righteousness. Today’s anti-Zionism is the latest passion play—with Jews once again cast as the villains, and those who want them dead as the redeemers.
Antisemitism has always called itself justice. In some sense, we shouldn’t be surprised. For centuries, it has cloaked itself in sentimentalism and lofty ideals of humanity, framing itself not as malice but as moral necessity. Not as a descent into barbarism, but as the coming of redemption.
In Christian Europe, this meant opposing the love and compassion of Jesus to the supposed cruelty of the Jews—the killers of children, the enemies of grace. Medieval passion plays showed Jews as villains so that violence against them could feel like a defense of love itself. Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies was not written as a confession of hate, but as a call to “defend” Christendom from the spiritual rot of stubborn unbelief. Jews were cast as cold, legalistic, spiritually barren—bound to the letter of the law rather than its spirit. It was moral theater, not merely prejudice.
Enlightenment antisemitism followed the same pattern. Jews were accused not only of wickedness but also of failing to rise to the universal ideals of reason and emancipation. As Steven Fine and Philip Spencer show in Antisemitism and the Left, the Enlightenment’s appeal to liberty, equality, and justice was only sometimes an “inclusive universalism” capable of valuing the persistence of distinct peoples. At other times, it was deeply “exclusionary,” universal in name only, made coherent by casting the Jew as its constitutive exception.
Anti-Zionism is now woven into the worldview of Western elites, which frames the expulsion of the Jewish state from the community of nations not as a tragic necessity, but as a redemptive consummation.
This was the logic of the Jewish question—now revived as the Israel question—in which Jews are cast as a danger to humanity, their “right to exist” framed as contingent and temporary. In this frame, Jews are seen as a negative foil and shadow for Gentile anxieties rather than a positively existing people with a robust civilization of their own. The debates over Jewish existence are often conducted by non-Jews, with Jews standing in as symbols for someone else’s rights, privileges, and projections.
Today, the left draws on the ideals of exclusionary universalism to purge Jews from their spaces, once again accusing Jews of being too particular, too stubborn, too committed to their own inheritance. That Jews have an ethnostate is cast as a moral scandal—despite the existence of dozens of Arab and Muslim ethnostates that provoke no such outrage. Jewish difference, uniquely, is framed as a crime.
Nietzsche, too, wrote vividly about the affects, discursive maneuvers, and sentimentality of the antisemites of his day. He poured out his scorn upon the early German Romantic antisemites—figures like Wagner—whose syrupy morality masked a deep, festering resentment. Wagner’s Judaism in Music spoke of Jews as corruptors of art and enemies of “authentic feeling,” with language draped in the finery of cultural rescue.
That moral aestheticism paved the way for what would follow. We see echoes of it today in the keffiyeh-clad activist cosplaying the romanticized Indigenous victim while denouncing Jewish survival as oppression. The New York Times treats Mahmoud Khalil as an eloquent spokesperson for Palestinian rights, despite his endorsement of the Oct. 7 genocide. It’s a performance—a pseudo-revolutionary theater of grievance—that feeds off the same resentment Nietzsche diagnosed, dressed now in the language of postcolonialism and solidarity.
Anti-Zionism today is not, in any meaningful sense, a contentful position in the space of reason. It is a creed. Anti-Zionism begins with a single article of faith—that Israel is essentially evil—and no fact can breach that belief. Every libel against Israel is not merely plausible but imbued with special gravity, for it confirms the dogma. Circulating the libel becomes a ritual act, a reenactment of faith.
When substance runs thin, it is supplied by the priestly class of anti-Israel “experts”—the human-rights functionaries and academic settler-colonial theorists—forever refining the language of accusation, composing new gospels of guilt. In the culminating gesture of this liturgy, they raise the suffering Palestinian as an icon, crucifying him again and again in expiation for the sins of colonialism.
The libels themselves acquire a pulse, an energy. They move from person to person, amplified by the crowd’s rhythm—each repetition giving the speaker a rush of virtue, compounded by the thrill of dominance over the scapegoated minority. Unconscious historical and political forces make this possible, but in the moment, it seems like participation in something larger, righteous, and pure. As Hannah Arendt understood, the priestly elites and the mob join hands here, the jargon and the attack dogs (now bots) fusing into a single machinery of condemnation.
We should think deeply about the aesthetics of anti-Zionist ritual—about how much it owes to the liturgical imagination of Christian Europe, where the sacred victim is elevated for adoration and the scapegoat is driven back into exile. Christ is paraded before the crowd in agony, while the Jew is cast out as the enemy of love.
In the anti-Zionist moral cosmology, the “suffering Palestinian” has become the consecrated victim whose pain redeems the sins of empire, while the Jew, displaced from that role, is rendered the contaminant to be expelled. This figure functions as the key symbol through which anti-Zionism unifies all the world’s evils into its constructed image of “Israel,” the source of all wrong. The claim that Jesus was Palestinian is not only a silly anachronism. It’s also a symbolic anchor.
Like the coming together of two rivers, the Islamist figure of the shahid— the martyr, suicide bomber, and human shield—now flows seamlessly into the icon of the Palestinian Christ, until West and East resonate together in one shared cult of death.
These symbols, tropes, and rhetorics form the backbone of anti-Zionist ideology: its sacrament of accusation, its passion play rewritten for the age of NGOs, academic conferences, and algorithmic amplification. Anti-Zionism has gone institutional, now woven into the worldview of Western elites, which frames the expulsion of the Jewish state from the community of nations not as a tragic necessity, but as a redemptive consummation—proof that the world still knows how to purify itself through pogroms and revolution.
And yet, despite this emerging megastructure of institutional anti-Zionism, its adherents have immunized themselves against recognizing their majoritarian power over Jews, through a familiar conspiratorial reversal: the Jew no longer as a vulnerable minority, but as the symbol of global domination. The more Jews are imagined as “powerful,” the more powerful the accuser feels in attacking them. It is a transference of strength. The blandest bigotry, the erosion of all decent standards, and that raw commitment to believing the libels—these are enough to turn resentment into sanctimony, envy into enlightenment.
During the campus riots of 2023 to 2024, activists marshaled the aesthetics of protest as “dissent,” acting out the conspiracy that “Zionists” control universities and governments in the very performance of protesting against the Jews. The result is freedom of speech for the Gentiles, but not for Jews, who are met instead with social ostracism, exclusion, and the demand to renounce their collective identity. School rules, and liberal principles, break like dams in the face of anti-Zionism’s energetic floods of accusation.
Antisemitism-as-justice is raw power with a humanitarian face. It is the stirrings of totalitarianism and the flouting of the law, coded in the language of law, now jammed into academic settler-colonial theory’s jargon of libel. Legal and moral evaluations are cast aside, irrelevant before the fixed drama that casts the Jew as the genocidal settler and the Palestinian as the natural force of Indigenous resistance. Once the roles are set, every outcome is already decided. The show trial of the Jew is set.
So yes, the “humanitarians” may be seething with bitterness and corrosive envy—but they believe themselves righteous. In this respect, nothing has changed. The medieval priest defending Christ from the enemies of love itself, the Enlightenment reformer purging the stubborn particularist from the universal order, the Romantic moralist rescuing culture from aesthetic corruption—all saw themselves as defenders of justice. Anti-Zionism inherits the same role, transposed into the register of human rights and international law while destroying their foundations in the process.
When hatred wears the robes of justice, it is immune to moral appeal. It will always claim the higher ground because the hate itself is the proof of one’s virtue. It will call itself a critique, and you will be the defendant on trial.
That is what makes this antisemitism of righteousness so persistent and so dangerous: It not only distorts the truth about Jews but also corrodes the very space in which truth and justice could be spoken at all.
Adam Louis-Klein is a PhD candidate in anthropology at McGill University, where he researches antisemitism, Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, and broader questions of indigeneity and historical narrative.
