Blood Libel #18 | “Israel is the reason Jews are in danger around the world.”
Anti-Zionist:
Israel’s actions are the reason antisemitism is rising. Jews are hated because of Israel.
Pro-Zionist:
So when a Jew is attacked in Paris or Cleveland because someone is angry at Israel… the story isn’t the bigotry of the attacker — it’s the actions of Israel?
That logic is called victim-blaming, and it’s morally bankrupt.
Let’s flip the script. If Jews are responsible for what Israel does, then:
Are Muslims responsible for ISIS?
Are Iranians in the West to blame for the Ayatollah?
Were Japanese Americans responsible for Pearl Harbor?
Of course not. Because collective guilt is racism. And it’s antisemitism when it’s applied to Jews.
Antisemitism didn’t begin in 1948. It didn’t start with Gaza. It has existed for thousands of years — in Christian Europe, in the Islamic world, in Soviet Russia — long before a modern Jewish state ever existed.
Israel didn’t cause antisemitism. Israel is a response to antisemitism.
What you’re really saying is:
“If Jews didn’t stand up for themselves, people wouldn’t hate them.”
That’s not a critique. That’s an excuse for hate.
BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS
The Dangerous Logic of Victim-Blaming
Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli journalist and analyst for The Times of Israel, explains that this logic normalizes bigotry and internalizes blame for the very hatred that Israel was founded to prevent:
To an Israeli, the argument that Israeli actions make Jews unsafe is the argument that if you attack Jews out there in the world because you’re angry at Israel… the story is the Israeli action must be the problem. If we apply this logic to Muslim minorities in the West, we are such obvious raging bigots.
Imagine saying that because Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Turkey have done bad things in the name of Islam — and many have, repeatedly, and declared themselves representatives of Islam — that Muslim Americans should be held responsible or face violence.
That would be considered Islamophobia. It would be called racism. But when it comes to Jews, that same logic — that diaspora Jews are responsible for Israel — is somehow accepted, even by Jews themselves.
This double standard is rarely applied to other minority groups. When Muslims are attacked after an ISIS terror attack, we call it Islamophobia. When Jews are attacked after an Israeli military operation, we’re told it’s “understandable anger.” This is collective guilt, which is racism by another name.
Antisemitism Preceded Israel — and Always Finds a Pretext
Blaming Israel for antisemitism erases centuries of Jewish persecution that occurred long before the modern State of Israel was founded in 1948:
Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306), Spain (1492).
Pogroms ravaged Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 19th century.
The Holocaust — the systematic murder of 6 million Jews — was carried out by Europeans, decades before the Gaza conflict or the occupation.
As historian Deborah Lipstadt notes in “Antisemitism: Here and Now”:
Antisemitism … arises independently of any action by Jews.
And she warns of “the clueless antisemite”:
The clueless antisemite is an otherwise nice and well-meaning person who is completely unaware that she has internalized antisemitic stereotypes .
Lipstadt emphasizes that antisemitism isn’t a reaction to Israeli policy—it’s “hatred of them because they are Jews,” not because of what Jews do . So blaming Israeli actions for diaspora antisemitism is exactly the kind of collective guilt she condemns: forcing an entire group to answer for the actions of one subset—something Lipstadt sees as a deeply flawed and dangerous logic.