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 for the 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
Elder of Ziyon
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