In October 2023, as Hamas live-streamed the mass murder and abduction of Israeli civilians, anti-Israel protests erupted across Western capitals within hours. In New York, London, Sydney, and Paris, rallies cheered “resistance” even as footage of atrocities spread in real time. On elite campuses, professors signed open letters framing the attacks as acts of decolonization. Days later, Jewish students at Cooper Union were locked inside a library for safety as demonstrators pounded on the glass.
In a bitter echo, just last month at Glastonbury, a performer led the crowd in a chant calling for the death of Israel’s “Jewish citizen army” — a chilling distortion of a nation whose soldiers are civilians conscripted to defend families like those massacred at Nova. The chant spread like wildfire: shouted outside the Welsh Parliament, then Westminster, then on New York streets. Most recently, a mob in Melbourne echoed it while attacking a restaurant with Jews inside. Days later, a synagogue in the same city was set ablaze — with worshippers inside. (RELATED: Singer’s ‘Death, Death to the IDF’ Chants Result in Revoked Visas)
In a historic reversal, antisemitism has not returned from the fringes, but from the core of elite institutions, influencer circles, and youth movements. According to the FBI, Jews have been the most targeted religious group in America since tabulating these stats, despite making up less than 2 percent of the population. In 2023 and 2024, hate crimes surged to historic highs. Yet in academia and media, antisemitism no longer wears swastikas. It comes cloaked in hashtags, open letters, and the relentless defamation of the world’s only Jewish state.
This is not old hatred in new clothes. It’s something different — Post-Identity Antisemitism.
This is not old hatred in new clothes. It’s something different — Post-Identity Antisemitism: a modern obsession, born of cultural breakdown and emotional displacement. Israel is no longer just a country; it’s a symbol. A mirror held up to a civilization that’s forgotten what it stands for.
Why “post-identity”? Because it reflects a culture that no longer shares a story. Since the 1960s, through the Boomer rupture, institutional decay, and identity politics under Obama, America has cycled through culture wars that frayed its civic bonds. Tribalism replaced citizenship. Memory became narrative. Virtue turned to performance. Politics to therapy. Without national coherence, people searched for causes offering meaning without sacrifice. Israel became a lightning rod — a projection screen for cultural confusion.
This symbolic charge hasn’t escaped the dissident media class. Figures like Ryan Grim, Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti, Tucker Carlson, and Lee Fang have all zeroed in on Israel. None are regional experts or diplomats, yet they claim moral authority while glossing over the complexity. From opposite ideological backgrounds, they converge on a single target: Israel.
In their view, Israel becomes a moral hologram. It stands in for every post-9/11 sin. Israel means endless war. Zionism equals empire. AIPAC is elite rot. Gaza becomes Abu Ghraib. Even in self-defense — after October 7 — Israel is recast not as a nation under attack but as a militarized aggressor.
A cooler, technocratic critique comes from academics like John Mearsheimer. For them, supporting Israel isn’t immoral, just strategically unwise: too costly, too emotional. But this logic always assumes Jewish nationalism is uniquely expendable. It revives claims that U.S. policy is steered by Israeli interests — blaming Israel for Iraq, Afghanistan, and American decline. Figures like Pat Buchanan mainstreamed this; now, Congressman Thomas Massie echoes it, warning of a Zionist grip on Washington.
These voices insist, “This isn’t antisemitism.” They qualify: “I’m Jewish,” or, “My Jewish friends agree,” or say, “This is about Netanyahu.” But caveats don’t erase patterns. Personal animus may be absent. Many critiques come from sincere anti-imperialism or elite skepticism. Yet knowingly or not, they reinforce a narrative that singles out one state — the Jewish one.
This isn’t classic antisemitism or even coherent anti-Zionism. It’s looser, more emotional, embedded in the culture in ways many don’t recognize. The fixation persists, out of conviction or convenience, and it taps something deeper than politics. (RELATED: Antisemitism Goes Hand-in-Hand With Societal Decay)
The emotional engine behind post-identity culture is resentment. From the French ressentiment — to relive pain without resolution. Nietzsche called it the emotion of the powerless: inverting the moral order, branding strength as evil and weakness as virtue. In the modern imagination, Israel causes unease. After centuries of exile and humiliation, Jews now stand upright and unapologetic. Their return disrupts the narrative of permanent victimhood. Israel forces a fractured West to confront a question: What have you done with your strength, your freedom, your blessings?
A Post-Modern Religion
The current hostility toward Jews didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Its intensity and selectivity are shaped by cultural forces. To understand why anti-Israelism has become the preferred vessel for post-identity grievance, we must look upstream — at the ideas that made it possible. Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom diagnosed this decay decades ago. Post-modernism eroded the moral confidence once used to distinguish justice from injustice. Into that void came synthetic ideologies, nihilistic parables, and a romanticized mythology around Palestine. (RELATED: The Mind Masters the Heart, but Not God)
Palestinianism offers spiritual release to elites who abandoned God but crave redemption.
In this environment, Palestinianism becomes a gateway drug. It offers spiritual release to elites who abandoned God but crave redemption: resistance without risk, solidarity without sacrifice. For religious communities with little else left, it sparks panic — a biblical return they can’t explain. This becomes the post-Christian West’s passion play, a synthetic identity cloaked in moral piety. It seeps into media studies, gender theory, international relations. “From the river to the sea” becomes irresistible — a script that feels righteous, emotionally satisfying, and easy to perform. Palestine isn’t the goal. It’s the way antisemitism slips back into Western thought unnoticed.
These aren’t demagogues or open bigots. They present as moral outsiders while moving easily in elite spaces, cloaking resentment in civic virtue. Like schoolyard instigators who whisper just loud enough to spark a fight, they provoke through curated outrage. They reframe the conflict as colonial cruelty funded by U.S. taxpayers — airbrushing Hamas’s genocidal murders, rape, and abductions; erasing the Jewish people’s ancient and modern claim; and treating a post-1967 Palestinian identity as an eternal fact.
What they ignore is telling. One side is a liberal democracy; the other, a radicalized society ruled by jihadist cults. Terms like “occupation” and “resistance” are weaponized even after Israel left Gaza, even after October 7. Journalists who’d never cite ISIS parrot Hamas’s Health Ministry numbers and treat partisan NGOs as gospel. Before the dust settles, they brand Israel genocidal — armed with unauthenticated footage and politicized sources. They validate Hamas’ use of human shields, omit Egypt’s blockade, ignore Gaza’s 500 km of terror tunnels — and line up dominoes of propaganda, ready for the next outcry.
NGOs and International Elites: Antisemitism Advocates
Like past eras, today’s antisemitism uses cultural institutions to launder its claims. Where the Church once sanctified blood libels and social Darwinists wrapped hatred in science, today’s legitimacy runs through NGOs, UN agencies, and international law. With faith in governments eroding, many now look to “the international community” for moral clarity.
But this isn’t justice. It’s mob rule in institutional form. The dissident media class — once skeptical of power — now parrots the scripts produced by elite bodies. They echo NGO reports and ICC probes without questioning their origins. Once cited by the U.N. or ICC, these accusations are recycled as “independent” evidence, creating a closed loop of endorsement that looks like consensus. (RELATED: Whitewashing Leftist and Islamist Jew Hatred)
The Goldstone Report (2009), UNHRC’s Gaza inquiry (2021), Amnesty’s “apartheid” report (2022) — all followed this pattern. Now the ICC is using recycled NGO claims to indict Israeli leaders for war crimes — an unprecedented attempt to criminalize democratic self-defense. These stories are echoed uncritically, just like the “Russian collusion” narrative used against Trump — another case of circular sourcing dressed as fact.
What unites this post-identity antisemitism isn’t just politics. It’s a civilization that can’t tell good from evil. Without moral reference points, it reduces everything to outrage, recites NGO scripts, and takes comfort in global consensus. That consensus becomes a rhetorical bludgeon — “the whole world disagrees” — making dissent look delusional. It’s an old tactic Jews have always faced: turn the mob into the measure of truth, and brand the one who stands apart as insane.
These institutional feedback loops — NGOs cite the U.N., the U.N. cites the NGOs, media cite both — create a fog of legitimacy around politicized claims. The battlefield becomes spectacle. Israel, the pariah. But the obsession isn’t random. In a West that has forgotten war’s cost, the burden of justice, or the loneliness of moral clarity, Israel stands out because it remembers. And that draws the spotlight, not because it’s the worst actor, but because it remains a mirror.
After 20 months of war — stonewalled by Biden, slandered by NGOs, maligned by the press — Israel dismantled terror proxies. Then it went further. In 12 days, it stared down Iran and removed the nuclear threat. It exposed not just its enemies’ weakness, but the West’s paralysis. And it did so without waiting for permission.
Antisemitism is a chimera — ancient, adaptable, near-metaphysical. It persists. It offers a thousand doors, but all lead to the same place: the Jew, embodied today by Israel, as scapegoat.
Israel has become a pressure point for a Western world unsure how to believe in itself. Post-Identity Antisemitism is not the disease, but a symptom of that confusion. This hatred won’t be argued away. It must be answered with presence. The kind Herzl envisioned and Ben-Gurion affirmed: Jewish sovereignty not as defiance, but as renewal.
Israel must be more than defended. It must be lived, allowed to become what it was meant to be: a lighthouse nation, grounded in moral clarity, ancient and modern, particular and universal. And perhaps, in its example, the West may rediscover its own.
In an age of fear and doubt, Israel’s intrepid journey offers a way back — not just for Jews, but for a great civilization adrift. Light does not beg to be seen. It burns through the fog.
Ariel Harkham is a co-founder of the Jewish National Initiative and a hi-tech executive.
READ MORE:
The Mind Masters the Heart, but Not God