When it comes to publishing anything on mises.org that touches on the state of Israel, I advise authors to not use the phrase “the Jewish state.” This is because the phrase is employed by pro-Israel propagandists to buttress the dishonest tactic of denouncing any critic of the State of Israel as anti-Semitic.  

This can been seen in the reaction to recent chants of “death to the IDF” which occurred at the Glastonbury music festival last weekend. Apologists for the secular and socialist state known as “Israel” insist that calls for the destruction of that government’s army in is somehow anti-Semitism. A representative reaction comes from a British rabbi named Ephraim Mirvis. Mirvis claims:  

This is a time of national shame. The airing of vile Jew-hatred at Glastonbury and the BBC’s belated and mishandled response, brings confidence in our national broadcaster’s ability to treat antisemitism seriously to a new low. 

It should trouble all decent people that now, one need only couch their outright incitement to violence and hatred as edgy political commentary, for ordinary people to not only fail to see it for what it is, but also to cheer it, chant it and celebrate it.

Toxic Jew-hatred is a threat to our entire society.

This is a rather dubious conclusion drawn by Mirvis. He is referring to chants about a state’s army, but he rather disingenuously concludes that this is synonymous with calling for the destruction of an entire ethnic group—i.e., Jews. How does he come to this conclusion, especially when many of the most vehement opponents of the State of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza have been Jews? (By the way, according to Pew, one-third American Jews polled in 2024 viewed the State of Israel’s response to the Dec 7 Hamas attack as “unacceptable.”)

Mirvis is hardly novel in his approach. Mirvis is employing a well-worn tactic, employed by agents of the State of Israel, designed to conflate the State of Israel with global Jewry precisely so opponents of the Israeli state can be denounced as anti-Semitic. 

Historically, the phrase was popularized by Theodor Herzl in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat as part of Herzl’s efforts to find support for his new ideology of Zionism. Since then, the phrase has become part of standard Israeli state propaganda in efforts to denounce all critics as anti-Semites who might as well be National Socialists. Increasingly, Israeli lobbyists in West have also encouraged the weaponization of this concept, as we now see realized in the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the First Amendment and declare criticism of the foreign state—i.e., “Israel”—to be either terroristic or anti-Semitic.   

Unfortunately, this conflating of two very distinct groups cuts both directions. After nearly 80 years of propaganda equating the State of Israel with Judaism, many people now believe the two are essentially the same thing. This has fueled real anti-Semitism—which is not to be confused with the fake “anti-Semitism” that is merely opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state. 

Consequently many people who are rightly appalled by the genocidal tactics of the Israeli state in Gaza think that this is something that virtually all Jews necessarily support. This, however, is no more a sound conclusion than is the idea that Catholics necessary support whatever policy is supported by Catholic-majority states. For example, when Mussolini was running around invading Africa during the 1930s, it hardly followed that this was “Catholic policy” because the Italian population at the time was overwhelmingly Catholic. (On the other hand, maybe if Italy had called itself “the Catholic state” for decades before carrying out its own war crimes, such a ruse might have worked.) 

As a result of the Israeli state’s grotesque targeting of women and children, however, many Jews who don’t even choose to live in Israel or support its government’s actions are being blamed for the state’s crimes. This, unfortunately, is one of the many results of the creation of ethno-states. A state claims that its interests are synonymous with those of an entire nation of people. Many people believe the lie and then fail to make a distinction between nation and state.