What we’re witnessing today is a coordinated
assault on Jewish existence, divided between cultural erasure in the West and
the pursuit of physical extermination abroad. But this is no longer just a
scattered set of prejudices or disconnected political movements—it has cohered
into a holistic ideology and, increasingly, an institutional framework. What
began as a battlefield strategy of Iran, Hamas, and other jihadist
movements—combining psychological warfare, propaganda, and asymmetric violence—has
been extended into Western cultural, academic, and political institutions.
In the West, the activist-university-NGO class
works relentlessly to push Jews out of public life unless they renounce their
connection to their ancestral homeland and the people who live there. Jews are
pressured to disavow their collective identity, redefine themselves as “White,”
and deny their status as a distinct and indigenous people. This is a modern
form of forced assimilation—one that echoes the historical forced conversions
Jews endured for centuries under both Christian and Islamic empires. Then, as
now, Jewish distinctiveness is treated as an intolerable affront to
universalizing ideologies.
At the same time, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and
jihadist militias openly pursue the physical destruction of Israel and the
Jewish People. These forces operate in tandem: cultural erasure in the West,
physical annihilation in the East. And at the center of it all is the same
recurring target—Jewish distinctiveness—now conveniently labeled “Zionism,” a stand-in
for the reality of Jewish Peoplehood and the right of Jews to live openly as a
people among the nations.
This is why the constant accusation of “genocide”
against Israel—used to demonize any Jew who refuses to sever ties with their
people as a so-called “genocide supporter”—is not merely a lie. It is a
political weapon, part and parcel of the broader project of antisemitic
exclusion. These accusations are not isolated statements to be analyzed in
abstraction; they operate as mechanisms of social control, enforcing the
marginalization of Jews in cultural, academic, and professional life unless
they publicly repudiate their peoplehood and sever their historical and
emotional ties to Israel.
This discourse functions through a closed circular
logic. The point is not the content of any single claim, but the form of
the discourse itself: a self-reinforcing system that closes off critical
inquiry and punishes dissent through moral panic and public shaming. We must
not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed or demoralized by this endless flood of
accusations, which do not proceed from a genuine concern for truth but from a self-sustaining
strategy of escalating defamation. Instead, we must learn to recognize the
structure of this discourse, expose the system that generates it, and refuse to
be drawn into its trap—bypassing its manufactured moral crises and standing
firm in the clarity of our own commitments.
At the same time, the universalism of international
law—born in part from the memory of the Holocaust—has been twisted and
weaponized against the very people whose suffering helped bring it into being.
Instead of moving from the particular experience of the Holocaust to a genuine,
principled universal concern with genocide, that universality has been
distorted and turned back against the Jews themselves. We are witnessing a
dialectical inversion: the language of universal rights deployed precisely to
deny the Jewish People the right to exist.
This inversion has found its most powerful rhetorical vehicle in the
language of anti-colonialism, where the accusation of genocide against Israel
is presented not as a claim requiring evidence, but as a self-evident truth
derived from a broader anti-colonial framework.
And yet, even this inversion relies on a dangerous
historical simplification. The conversation about colonialism and genocide has
become trapped in a narrow framework that views these phenomena almost
exclusively through the lens of European imperialism. As a result, other
imperial formations—and their long histories of conquest, domination, and
genocide—are erased or excused. But no serious, honest reckoning with the
global history of genocide can avoid confronting the imperial legacies of
Islamism and their ongoing consequences for indigenous and minority peoples
across the Middle East and beyond.
The Armenian Genocide stands as a critical case in
point. Far from being an isolated outbreak of nationalist violence, it was
carried out under the banner of an imperial Islamist ideology that fused
religious supremacy with imperial ambition. The Ottoman Empire, in its final
decades, sought to reassert control over its fracturing territories through the
ideology of Pan-Islamism—declaring Jihad and mobilizing Muslim populations
against Christian minorities, most brutally against the Armenians, but also targeting
Assyrians, Greeks, and other indigenous Christian peoples of the region. This
genocide was not simply a product of ethnic nationalism; it was driven by an
imperial Islamic vision of religious and territorial purification.
A full and honest analysis of the relationship
between colonialism and genocide would interrogate these dimensions of Islamist
imperialism—both historical and contemporary. It would ask why the ongoing
persecution and erasure of minorities in the Middle East—Yazidis, Assyrians,
Copts, Kurds, and of course, Jews—is so often left out of the global
conversation on colonialism and genocide. It would confront the reality that,
long before European colonial powers arrived, many of these indigenous and
ethnoreligious peoples had already suffered under Islamic imperial domination,
forced conversions, and displacement. And it would recognize that this
historical pattern continues today under modern Islamist movements that openly
aspire to restore imperial dominance under the guise of religious or
anti-colonial struggle.
Such an analysis would also challenge the
assumption that genocide is primarily a byproduct of modern nation-state
nationalism. In fact, it is often imperial nationalisms—ideological projects
that combine the expansive ambitions of empire with a violent drive for
cultural, religious, or ethnic homogeneity—that have been the most devastating
engines of genocide. The Ottoman vision of a purified Islamic empire, Nazi
Germany’s project of a racially pure Reich, and contemporary Islamist
movements dreaming of a global Caliphate all share this imperialist structure.
These are not defensive or localized nationalisms but expansive, totalizing
visions that seek to dominate and erase entire peoples in the service of their
ideological goals.
Genocide, then, should not be flattened into a
simplistic narrative of colonial victimhood or tied exclusively to the legacy
of Western imperialism. Nor should colonialism itself be reduced to a purely
European phenomenon. If we are serious about universal justice, we must
confront all imperial formations—Christian, Islamic, European, and
otherwise—that have built their power on the conquest, assimilation, and
annihilation of distinct peoples. And we must recognize that the genocidal
ideologies of the present are not confined to the nationalist right, but are
alive and well in the imperial ambitions of Islamist movements that continue to
target Jews and other indigenous peoples of the Middle East for erasure.
Through a sophisticated interplay of media
manipulation, NGO activism, and academic endorsement, we are seeing the
seamless integration of this anti-Jewish ideological project into the very
heart of Western discourse. This is not a coincidence. After World War II,
while Europe underwent an intensive process of denazification, much of the
ideological machinery of Nazism found refuge and continuity in the Middle East,
particularly through figures like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the
entrenchment of Nazi propaganda within the political cultures of the Arab
world. The Grand Mufti, Haj
Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler, collaborated with the SS, and broadcast
pro-Nazi, antisemitic radio propaganda to the Arab world. His ideological heirs
include the Muslim Brotherhood, whose fusion of political Islam and
antisemitism laid the groundwork for groups like Hamas—whose founding charter
cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After World War II, prominent Nazi
propagandist Johann von Leers fled to Cairo, converted to Islam, and helped
establish a center dedicated to antizionist agitation, blending Nazi
conspiracies with Islamist thought. The Protocols and similar texts circulated
widely among Islamist and pan-Arabist groups, forming a foundation for postwar
antizionist ideology.
At the core of today’s genocidal rhetoric is a
dangerously simplistic and abstract syllogism that now circulates almost
unchallenged in activist, academic, and policy spaces:
“All colonialism is genocide; Israel is
colonialism; therefore, Israel is committing genocide.”
This formula is presented with the force of moral
certainty, but it collapses under even the most basic scrutiny. Its simplicity
is precisely what makes it so seductive and so dangerous—it reduces history to
a set of abstract categories, flattens complex political realities, and
replaces concrete analysis with a priori ideological reasoning. Instead of
investigating the specific facts on the ground, it proceeds by deduction from
premises that are themselves historically and conceptually flawed.
The first premise—“All colonialism is genocide”—is
itself a distortion. While colonialism has undoubtedly involved genocidal
episodes, not all colonial projects have pursued or resulted in genocide. To
equate the two absolutely is to erase important historical distinctions and to
rob the concept of genocide of its specificity and analytical clarity.
Genocide, as a distinct crime, involves the deliberate intention to destroy a
people as such—something far more specific than the broad, often exploitative,
but not necessarily annihilatory dynamics of colonial regimes. While
colonialism and genocide may surely interact, they are not identical.
The second premise—“Israel is colonialism”—is
simply false. It rests on a deliberate mischaracterization of Zionism as a
foreign, settler-colonial movement imposed upon the Middle East by Western
powers. This ignores the basic historical and anthropological fact that the
Jewish People are indigenous to the Land of Israel, with an unbroken cultural,
religious, and historical connection to that land stretching back millennia.
Zionism is not an expression of European colonial
expansion—it is a movement of indigenous return, a national liberation movement
responding to centuries of forced exile, persecution, and dispossession. To
frame Jews as colonial invaders in their own ancestral homeland is to invert
reality entirely, erasing the history of Jewish survival and return in favor of
a politically convenient fiction. As Ben M.
Freeman has shown, Jews fulfill every substantive criterion of indigeneity:
their ethnogenesis took place in the Land of Israel; their ritual and
calendrical life is tied to its ecological rhythms and seasons; their
collective identity and ancestral memory are grounded in that specific
territory; and their attachment to the land has endured for millennia, despite
dispersion and exile. If these standards apply to others—and rightly so—they
must apply to Jews as well. Anything less is not intellectual rigor but
political selectivity.
Moreover, this ideological framework thrives
precisely because it plays into a deeply narcissistic form of Western
self-critique—one that centers the moral failings of the West while casting
Jews, paradoxically, as both the eternal outsiders and the ultimate symbols of
Western guilt. In this schema, the “White Jew” becomes the scapegoat par
excellence, the one who must bear the weight of colonial sins that have nothing
to do with Jewish history but everything to do with Europe’s need for
self-absolution. The Jew is simultaneously cast out as a foreign body and
condemned as the privileged insider, eternally caught in this double bind.
This is not analysis—it is a moralized abstraction
that weaponizes both the language of decolonization and the memory of genocide,
not to prevent genocide, but to justify and conceal new forms of antisemitic
exclusion and, in the case of Israel, openly expressed fantasies of
annihilation.
This is the reality we face: an
ideological and institutional assault that works across every register—legal,
political, academic, and cultural—to isolate, delegitimize, and ultimately
erase Jewish distinctiveness. It takes the battlefield strategies of genocidal
actors abroad and repackages them as moral imperatives in the West. It turns
international law, born from the horrors of the Holocaust, against its very
creators. It revives the specters of both Christian and Islamic imperial
ideologies, erases Jewish indigeneity through false historical narratives, and
weaponizes concepts like colonialism and genocide to render the Jews uniquely
guilty among the nations.
Through circular accusations and
closed discourses, antizionism creates a social environment in which Jews are
accepted only on the condition of their self-negation—only if they reject their
peoplehood, their history, and their living ties to Israel. And when they
refuse, they are denounced not merely as wrong, but as inherently evil—as
supporters of genocide, the most unforgivable crime imaginable. This is not a
debate over abstract concepts; it is a deliberate assault on the political,
cultural, and even physical existence of the Jewish People. And it will not
stop with Israel.
At bottom,
antisemitism constructs two contradictory realities: one imposed upon Jews, and
one spoken endlessly about them—but rarely with them. A tiny, often invisible
minority becomes symbolically inflated into the source of all social
contradictions, and when Jews speak—when they assert their history or defend
their peoplehood—their voice is met not with engagement but with suspicion.
This dynamic is amplified through the mechanisms of
genocide inversion that we have described here. For non-Jewish societies, the
image of the Jew as the ultimate victim of the Holocaust is an uncomfortable
symbol of absolute suffering that imposes an unresolved moral debt. Yet, this
very image conflicts with the deep-seated tendency to cast Jews as figures of
power, wealth, and hidden control. The accusation of genocide against Israel
functions as a backlash against that unresolved tension. It discharges the
burden of Holocaust empathy by inverting victimhood itself—transforming Jews
from the paradigmatic victims of genocide into its alleged perpetrators. Jews then
appear either as absolute victims or absolute villains, but never as ordinary
people in all their complexity and humanity.
And yet, despite every attempt to erase us—through forced conversion, forced
assimilation, or outright extermination—the Jewish People endures, distinct and
alive, refusing to disappear. This too is part of our story—the story of
survival, resilience, and return. And it is precisely that story—the undeniable
proof that a people can endure against the greatest odds—that they most wish to
erase. Which is why, in the face of these pressures, we must take up the
work of internal clarity, standing firm in who we are and refusing to let
others define our history, our identity, or our future.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2025
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