No, Israel Doesn't "Cause" Antisemitism. (Yehuda Teitelbaum)

The same argument keeps coming up every time diaspora Jews are attacked. It usually sounds something like this: no one supports antisemitism, no one wants Jews to be harmed, but given what Israel is doing, a rise in anger and even violence is an inevitable reaction. So let me ask a few questions.

Isn’t that just a justification with a polite disclaimer attached? When you tell the world that violence against Jews is an inevitable consequence of Israeli behavior, are you reporting on reality or are you constructing it? Because when you hand someone a grievance and tell them their anger is understandable, what exactly do you think is going to happen?

And if this is really about Israeli policy producing an inevitable outcome, why aren’t Russians being stabbed on the streets of London? Russia has committed a staggering amount of documented war crimes and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths at a minimum. Where’s the inevitable backlash against Russians?

The Chinese Communist Party runs an authoritarian repressive system with documented abuses on a massive scale. Where’s the inevitable violence against Chinese people in London? The inevitability only ever seems to apply to Jews. So is it really about the behavior of governments, or is something else going on?

And if the violence is a rational response to Israeli policy, shouldn’t it at least be directed at people who actually support that policy? Do you think the attackers stop and ask their victims where they stand on Israeli settlement policy before they act? Do they check whether the person wearing a kippah supports Netanyahu or opposes him? Because who tends to get targeted in these attacks? Visibly Orthodox Jews. And which Jewish group tends to be among the most critical and ideologically opposed to the Israeli government? Ultra-Orthodox Jews. There are some Hasidic sects who oppose the political state of Israel entirely on religious grounds. Did the attacker in Golders Green know that? Did he care? So what exactly does Israeli government policy have to do with any of this? If this were really an inevitable political response to Israeli actions, wouldn’t the attackers at least be going after the “right Jews”?

When people say Israel is responsible for antisemitism, which Israel do they mean? The State of Israel, meaning the Jewish people governing themselves in their ancestral homeland? Or are they talking about Netanyahu specifically? Because Netanyahu can barely hold a coalition together in his own Knesset. Do you really think he speaks for world Jewry?

When people get accused of fostering hatred toward Jews, they immediately point to Jews like Zack Polanski and say Jews aren’t a monolith, they don’t all support Israel, stop painting us as antisemitic. So then why, when they want to explain away attacks on Jews, do they turn around and treat every Jew as a unified pro-Israel bloc? Which is it? Either Jewish opinion on Israel is diverse and cannot be used to justify targeting Jews, or it isn’t. You don’t get to use that argument in both directions depending on what’s convenient.

And before we even get to policy, is there any other country on earth where the debate isn’t about government policy but about whether the country has a right to exist at all? Any other country where that question is treated as a serious and legitimate one? Because that conversation only ever comes up about Israel. So when people say they’re just criticizing Israeli policy, are they being honest with themselves?

Consider Donald Trump. Arguably the most hated political figure in Europe, certainly in London. Does anyone accuse Londoners of being anti-American for despising him? Does anyone accuse Americans of being unpatriotic for disagreeing with his policies, just as nobody did with Joe Biden? Why does opposition to a government become a justification for Jews, anywhere, to bear the consequences? Why does that logic exist nowhere else on earth? Why only Israel? Why only us?

Even if you accept, for the sake of argument, the premise being pushed, that Jews broadly support the worst accusations leveled at the Israeli government, since when does holding a political opinion about a conflict thousands of miles away justify being stabbed in the street? Reprehensible views exist among British citizens, as they do in any society. They do not get hunted down for it. Jews in England are openly anxious about their safety right now, and yet nobody expects them to retaliate by attacking random people who disagree with them. No one who spends their time demonizing Jews is looking over their shoulder, worried that the Jewish community will respond in kind.

What’s really happening is a reversal of cause and effect. Does Israel cause antisemitism? Or does antisemitism, ancient and adaptable, always finding a new justification, cause these attacks? And when every Jew stabbed in the diaspora is another rung on the ladder of Aliyah, when Jews watch the government response and the public response and find it abysmal, can you really blame them for drawing the obvious conclusion? That there is one country on earth where the government is constitutionally committed to protect them? Is it really a mystery why that country keeps looking more appealing?

So what does England want to do? Does it want to keep blaming Israel, muddying the waters, treating Jewish safety as a geopolitical debate, while things get worse and worse until it isn’t only Jews bearing the consequences? Or does it want to say clearly that it will not allow its citizens to be stabbed in the streets?

If England can’t say that and mean it, then it should at least be honest with its Jewish community. Why keep them waiting in limbo for a protection that isn’t coming? Why not just tell them the truth?

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Will They Ever Apologize For Lying? (Yehuda Teitelbaum)

By Yehuda Teitelbaum

It was always strange that Hamas managed to convince so much of the world that Gaza was starving. Anyone who has studied or lived through real famine knows it looks nothing like what we were shown. Real famine is unmistakable. There is no ambiguity. It strips away everything. In Yemen, in Sudan, in Ethiopia, the evidence was everywhere. Children so emaciated they could not stand. Mothers too weak to carry them. Families dying in the streets because there was simply nothing left to eat. Those images were burned into the world’s memory because they could not be denied.

When you looked at Gaza, none of that existed. There were no pictures of groups of skeletal children sitting in rubble, no photos of neighborhoods reduced to wandering ghosts. What we saw instead were markets filled with produce, bakeries still open, and restaurants crowded late into the night. Countless videos came out of Gaza, not from Israeli sources or foreign reporters, but from Gazans themselves, showing normal commerce and daily life continuing amid the war. That did not mean life was easy. It was not. War creates chaos. Distribution networks break down. Prices rise. People go hungry. But that is not famine.

Famine is the collapse of an entire social fabric. It is starvation so deep that the weak simply disappear. It is the unraveling of families and the death of entire communities. It cannot be hidden or managed. When famine takes hold, the evidence becomes overwhelming and impossible to ignore. Gaza never looked like that, and the difference matters because words matter. When the word “famine” is used, it is not just describing a humanitarian crisis, it is triggering a political and legal framework. It transforms a tragic situation into an accusation of criminal intent.

The story itself was not new. Gaza had supposedly been starving since 2005. Each year the same claims returned under different slogans, siege, starvation, food insecurity, blockade. The language always shifted, but the accusation remained the same. In 2018, Oxfam declared that a million Gazans could not feed their families. Others echoed it without evidence, repeating it because it was convenient and effective.

Meanwhile, Israel became the only country in modern history to send food into the territory of an enemy it was fighting. Millions of pounds of supplies crossed the border even as rockets were launched at the crossing points. Over two million tons of humanitarian aid entered Gaza during the war, more than enough to feed its civilian population. Yet the United Nations still declared famine, because once you call it that, the entire framework shifts. A famine allows the narrative to move from a battlefield to a courtroom. It turns a war for survival into a moral trial. It lets international organizations accuse Israel of crimes rather than confront Hamas for creating the conditions of war in the first place.

That was always the purpose. The famine story was never meant to describe reality. Hamas understood that it could not win militarily. Its only chance was to win through narrative. Every image of destruction, every hungry child, every collapsed building could be repurposed into a weapon. And the international community played along. NGOs repeated the talking points as fact, journalists published them without verification, and politicians echoed them in speeches. The repetition was the point. Once said often enough, the lie began to sound like truth.

Inside Gaza, food was never truly the issue. Control was. Hamas controlled everything, the aid distribution, the warehouses, the access to supplies. Loyalists received food first. Fighters and their families were fed before anyone else. Ordinary people were kept desperate because desperation creates sympathy. The goal was to sustain the crisis long enough to turn public opinion against Israel.

And the world helped make that possible. The United Nations continued to fund UNRWA, an agency that has long since abandoned the idea of resettlement or reconciliation and instead exists to preserve refugee status indefinitely. Western governments poured billions into a system that guarantees permanent dependency. Human rights organizations repeated Hamas propaganda almost word for word, dressing it up as analysis. Major media outlets presented Hamas press releases as verified reporting. Western politicians followed along because it was easier than facing their own role in enabling a movement built on hate.

If the same claims had been made about Yemen or Sudan, the world would have demanded evidence. They would have sent photographers and researchers. But when it came to Gaza, the absence of evidence was treated as proof. The more the claim unraveled, the louder it was repeated. The famine narrative was never intended to help the people of Gaza. It was designed to weaponize their suffering against Israel.

Now that the war has seemingly ended, the truth is difficult to ignore. Gaza endured hardship and hunger. Lives were lost. But there was no famine. What there was, was manipulation, by Hamas, by NGOs, by journalists who knew better, and by international bodies that long ago abandoned integrity for politics. Yet the damage is done. The famine that never existed will live on in the archives of the United Nations, in the speeches of activists, and in the history books of the future.

That is how propaganda becomes history. The lie survives because it is useful, and the truth fades because it is inconvenient. The famine in Gaza was never real, but it achieved what it was meant to achieve. It turned the defense of a nation into a moral indictment, and it ensured that even in victory, Israel would stand accused.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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A Flood of Lies (Yehuda Teitelbaum)

One of the most enduring weapons in modern conflict is not the rocket or the rifle but the accusation. For Hamas, the most effective charge has always been the word “genocide.” It is repeated with such frequency, across so many platforms, that it begins to feel less like an allegation than an axiom.

It is a meticulously organized tactic, accomplished with the support and encouragement of the UN and various NGOs. It goes like this. Make a sweeping claim, ensure it races through the headlines, and move on before anyone has time to dismantle it. By the time the details are checked, the falsehood has already shaped public opinion. The lie itself becomes the fact.

It is not only the word itself that matters, but the way it is deployed. Hamas and its advocates understand the power of a flood. One falsehood is never enough. They release dozens at a time. A hospital bombing, a famine, a mass grave, a strike on aid workers, a claim of genocide. Each accusation is crafted to dominate headlines for a few hours or days. By the time the details are debunked, the news cycle has already moved on and the next charge is already circulating.

 A lie that travels faster than the correction can never really be corrected. The falsehood lingers in memory long after the retraction, shaping opinion in ways that facts no longer reach. In time, the accumulation of accusations builds a kind of moral sediment. Each story, however false, leaves behind a residue that hardens into conventional wisdom.

That is why the genocide accusation feels so immovable. It is not that anyone has proved it. It is that the sheer repetition has made it seem axiomatic. Each new claim adds another layer, another echo. Even when dismantled, the next one has already arrived to take its place. The flood itself becomes the strategy. The goal is not persuasion in the courtroom of law, but saturation in the court of public opinion.

That cycle is playing out again today. Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate Gaza City, Hamas’s last remaining stronghold. Simultaneously, the UN has once again declared that Israel is commiting genocide. Predictably, Western outlets splashed the front page with cries of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” Yet these two headlines directly contradict one another. After nearly two years of war, Gaza City was still full of civilians. If Israel had truly been pursuing a campaign of extermination, there would not be hundreds of thousands left to evacuate. The presence of so many people at the very center of Hamas’s operations is evidence not of indiscriminate slaughter, but of a military campaign that has left vast populations untouched.

This is not the first time the genocide narrative has been deployed. In 1979 Edward Said accused Israel of “naked genocidal wars.” In the 1980s Noam Chomsky spoke of “Israeli concentration camps” and dismissed the Hebrew Bible as a “genocidal” text. The 2001 Durban NGO Forum labeled Israel guilty of “acts of genocide” while calling for its isolation. Mahmoud Abbas repeated the charge at the UN in 2014. Most recently, UN rapporteurs and professional activist networks have institutionalized the accusation in resolutions and reports. The word has become a political instrument, passed down through decades, polished and redeployed in every conflict.

But politics and law are not the same thing. The International Court of Justice, the only body with authority to rule on genocide, has never convicted Israel of it. In fact, even its much-cited provisional ruling has been widely misrepresented. In April, Joan Donoghue, the president of the court at the time, explained in a BBC interview that the court did not find Israel guilty of genocide, nor even that genocide was occurring. The court’s purpose, she said, was simply to affirm that South Africa had standing to bring its case and that Palestinians had “plausible rights to protection from genocide.” That careful legal distinction was collapsed by activists and the media into a false headline: “ICJ rules Israel plausibly guilty of genocide.”

That is why the current evacuation order matters so much. It is not a footnote in the war. It is the collapse of the central accusation. The existence of large civilian populations inside Gaza City proves that Israel has not waged a campaign of indiscriminate killing. The evidence completely contradicts the indictment.

And yet the indictment will never be withdrawn. It was never meant to withstand scrutiny. Its purpose is not to protect civilians but to delegitimize the state that fights the terrorists who endanger them. The word “genocide” has become less a claim than a strategy. A way to fix Israel permanently in the moral imagination as heir to the crimes of the twentieth century.

The tragedy is not only that this slander persists, but that it is echoed and amplified by institutions that are still considered reputable in the eyes of the world. When UN bodies, NGOs, and media outlets repeat the charge without rigor, they do not illuminate the truth. They just make it harder for Israel to finish this war once and for all.

And that is the anatomy of the lie. It begins with Hamas, but it finds its power only when others choose to repeat it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More