Here is what this piece is not. I am not going to weigh in on the settlers, the war in Gaza, or who did what to whom last week. I don’t live there. I don’t have a reporting staff to run down every claim. For this question, I don’t need one. I’ve covered the history of Israel in the Middle East since its founding in other pieces, which I list in an addendum, and nothing here depends on it.
Two faces
Anti-Semitism has worn many faces over the long history of the Jews. Two matter here.
The first: you know Jewish people and you don’t like them. That is real, and it is common. It is the same dislike any group gets from people who don’t like anyone different from themselves. It is ugly, but ordinary. It’s common to pick on minorities.
The second is the one that has gotten people killed. Something goes wrong. The real cause is something you don’t want to accept, so you find a cause you can accept. For two thousand years, that cause has been the Jews.
The word is scapegoat.
The plague
In 1348 the Black Death was sweeping Europe. It would kill a third or more of the population. The explanation that spread was that the Jews were poisoning the wells. Jews were tortured into confessing. Communities across France, Spain, and the German lands were massacred.
Pope Clement VI issued two official decrees that year telling Christians to stop. His argument was evidence. The Jews were dying of the plague too.
It didn’t matter.
Strasbourg’s council protected its Jews. On February 9, 1349, the guilds forced the city’s leaders from office. Five days later, Strasbourg burned its Jews on a wooden platform in their own cemetery, about 2,000 people by the chronicler’s count. The plague had not yet reached the city. The chronicler Jacob von Königshofen recorded what came next: debts owed to the Jews were cancelled, and their cash was divided among the townspeople.
The explanation did not need to be true. It needed to be useful.
The pattern
It repeats. Germany lost the First World War, and that was unacceptable. So Germany wasn’t defeated. It was stabbed in the back, and the knife was Jewish. A forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, explained everything from wars to depressions. One cause for every problem is the giveaway.
It hasn’t gone away, and it doesn’t belong to the left or the right.
On the right: in 2018, before she was elected to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted that California’s deadly Camp Fire might have been started by a beam from a space-based solar generator. She noted that a PG&E board member was vice chairman of Rothschild Inc. (Jewish conspiracy?)
Investigators found the fire was started by PG&E power lines.
On the left: starting in 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (a left-wing anti-Israel activist group) ran a campaign called “Deadly Exchange,” which tied American police violence to exchange trips that took American police officials to Israel. American police violence has American causes.
These are just a few of hundreds of tropes, old and new. Now Jeffrey Epstein gets tied to the Mossad, and the Rothschilds get blamed for everything.
Who drew the map
The history of the world is littered with the vestiges of European imperialism. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and others plundered the world for what they wanted until they could no longer do it. In the Middle East, Britain and France carved up the Ottoman lands, first in secret under the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, then as League of Nations mandates. They drew the borders and installed the kings.
Israel didn’t exist when the map was drawn, and the United States didn’t draw it. Yet those two are the modern bogeymen.
European imperialism is resented, and not without reason. But Israel was no part of it, and the Jewish people didn’t originate in Europe. In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, Britain capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years. The empire that drew the map closed the door on Jews fleeing Hitler.
Native, not foreign
Jews are not Europeans who moved to the Middle East. Their history, language, religion, and archaeology are rooted in that land, and genetic studies trace most diaspora Jewish communities to the Levant. Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, crushed the last revolt in 135, barred Jews from Jerusalem, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Jewish communities in the land never entirely disappeared.
Everywhere else, the world wants to protect indigenous peoples. Here, that standard is suspended. Nobody says American Indians, Aboriginal Australians, or New Zealand’s Maori stopped being indigenous because some of them married outsiders.
For generations, European anti-Semites told Jews to go back to Palestine. Now the slogan is go back to Europe. The charge reversed. The target didn’t.
When an accusation can flip to its opposite and the conclusion stays the same, the accusation was never the point.
How the state of Israel came to be
In 1947, the UN voted to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. The Arab states and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it, and war followed. From 1948 to 1967, Jordan held and annexed the West Bank, and Egypt held Gaza. Neither created a real Palestinian state. I’ve covered this history in Understanding the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and the 1947 vote in UN Resolution 181 for Palestine: The Stupidest Resolution Ever Passed.
How is it Israel’s fault that the Palestinians don’t have their state?
Meanwhile, elsewhere
Israel has been condemned since the day it was founded. Look at what else the world has lived through in that time.
In 1975, the UN General Assembly declared that Zionism is a form of racism. That same year, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. They went on to kill somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people.
In 1988, Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing about 5,000 people in a day. In 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda slaughtered about 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi, in 100 days. Starting in 2003, Sudan’s government and its militias waged a campaign in Darfur that left an estimated 300,000 dead from violence, disease, and hunger. Bashar al-Assad’s war on his own people set off a conflict in Syria that killed more than half a million. In 2014, ISIS tried to wipe out the Yazidis, murdering thousands and selling women and girls into slavery.
It hasn’t stopped. In January 2026, Iran’s regime gunned down its own people in the streets. Senior officials in its own Health Ministry put the toll at around 30,000, and opposition estimates run as high as 50,000. Sudan’s new civil war, now in its fourth year, has killed tens of thousands, by some estimates well over 100,000, and driven more than 11 million from their homes. Russia’s unprovoked war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, including more than 17,000 civilians killed, by the UN’s count.
Where is all the continued condemnation?
Who’s in the neighborhood
Saudi Arabia has no free press, no free speech, and no national elections.
On October 2, 2018, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen living in exile in Virginia and a frequent critic of his government, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get documents he needed to get married. A team sent from Riyadh killed him and dismembered his body.
Saudi women couldn’t drive until June 2018. A few weeks before the ban ended, the kingdom arrested the women who had campaigned to end it. The best known, Loujain al-Hathloul, spent nearly three years in prison.
Where were the campus encampments for Saudi women? For women in Afghanistan, where the Taliban won’t let girls go to school past the sixth grade? Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, co-founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College and built a political career opposing Israel. Where was his campaign for them?
The soft war
People watching the news can feel empathy for the civilians in Gaza and the West Bank caught up in this. They should. But they are watching the tail end of a long history, and few of the people objecting to Israel know much of it.
Someone is happy to teach them. Qatar is the largest foreign funder of American universities, with $6.6 billion in disclosed gifts and contracts, much of it for American branch campuses in Doha. Qatar’s emir also founded Al Jazeera, and the Qatari government still funds it.
Then there’s the UN, which is less about peace and unity than politics and old complaints. Its Human Rights Council has one permanent agenda item aimed at a single country. That country is Israel. (More in What the UN Is — and What It Is Not.)
This soft war against Israel has paid big dividends in shaping public opinion.
The new Democratic Party
“Some of my best friends are Jewish.” It comes from Jews and non-Jews in the Democratic Party and its leadership, and it doesn’t fool anyone.
Their pragmatic big tent has room for anti-Semitism on their road back to power.
I’ve laid out the record before, in Antisemitic Rhetoric Will Only Hurt the Democratic Party and Ro Khanna’s Publicity Stunt in Israel.
The question
So is anti-Israel the same as anti-Semitic?
Answer this for yourself.
A pattern that is more than 2,000 years old deserves to be taken seriously. Its motto is simple: when you need a scapegoat, the Jews will do.
Addendum: earlier pieces
UN Resolution 181 for Palestine: The Stupidest Resolution Ever Passed
No Going Back: What the Palestinians Must Accept Before It’s Too Late
Before You Ask for a Palestinian State, Define What You’re Asking For
Unboxing the UN Plan for a Palestinian State: What the New York Declaration Actually Says
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said Mayor Mamdani had not pledged to arrest Vladimir Putin. He did, in a September 2025 interview. That passage has been removed, and several figures have been made more precise.