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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3840 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?

Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.

I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.

Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.

  1. Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.
  2. Antisemitism is an intrinsic force of nature. It doesn’t have a cause, or if it does, it has a cause which cannot be effectively operated upon. Asking what causes antisemitism is like asking what causes DeCarlos Brown to stab people on the subway. The way to deal with antisemitism is to kill, deport, or disenfranchise antisemites.

It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.

*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.

You're being overly systematic, here- 'antisemitism' in Zionist parlance is a snarl word. There are uses of the term which have a definition, sure, but not the Zionist one. They're not worried about the cause. They're worried about using it as a cudgel against critics. And as long as this lines up with somebody else's interests in the west, it will.

here are uses of the term which have a definition, sure, but not the Zionist one. They're not worried about the cause. They're worried about using it as a cudgel against critics. And as long as this lines up with somebody else's interests in the west, it will.

I would challenge you to find 2 situations from the last 25 years where (1) a prominent Zionist made an accusation of anti-Semitism; and (2) the accusation was baseless.

I assume members of the Israeli government count as prominent zionists? Bibi himself have accused Anthony Albanese and Macron (both die hard zionists) of antisemittism.

Not to mention the whole witch hunt against Ms Rachel that started because she mentioned Gaza (along with Congo and Sudan) in a fundraiser for save the children.

It seems manifestly true to me that they're is a substantial portion of the world's population who believe that Israel as a nation should not exist and who will cheer enthusiastically upon seeing Israeli sons killed and daughters raped.

To dismiss the acknowledgement of this fact as a mere "snarl word" strikes me as either extremely naive or purposefully uncharitable.

This is a real phenomenon, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon, and obviously a lot of anti-Semites are also anti-Israel, but you can want Israel destroyed without hating Jews qua Jews. Using "anti-Semitism" for - even vicious - hatred of Eretz Yisrael alone frankly is mostly a cudgel - it's trying to discredit all anti-Zionists by equating them to Hitler. (Of course, the NSDAP, while of course horrifically anti-Semitic, wasn't actually notably anti-Zionist - in some cases they supported Zionism in order to get Jews to emigrate.)

To give a similar non-Jew example: I'm very leery of Mainland Chinese expats and exports. This problem does not apply to (South) Korean, Japanese or Taiwanese expats and exports. I have no problem with the Han Chinese as an ethnic group (and remember, most present Taiwanese are Han; the refugees from the Chinese Civil War outnumbered the native population), nor with the nearly-racially-indistinguishable Koreans and Japanese. My problem is with the totalitarian state of the People's Republic of China, which brainwashes its youth and may in the near future enact full-scale cyberwarfare against the West; enemy agents and hardware with enemy backdoors are dangerous.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike Israel and Western support of Israel that have nothing to do with the fact that most of its citizen population is Jewish. I don't happen to think that those reasons justify massacre, but some do. To insistently consider such people "anti-Semitic" is to buy into the Zionists' (and, to some degree, the neo-Nazis') preferred frame that Israel speaks for and is supported by all Jews, which it doesn't and isn't.

Are there true anti-Semites, including in the West? Yes, obviously. But your proffered litmus test for them is inaccurate. And while I'm not attributing malice to you personally, the conflation of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites is to a large degree enemy action - and it's difficult to blame people for refusing to concede to that.

This is a real phenomenon, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon, and obviously a lot of anti-Semites are also anti-Israel, but you can want Israel destroyed without hating Jews qua Jews.

In theory this is possible, but typically the surrounding circumstances strongly suggest that the anti-Israel sentiment is motivated in large part by anti-Semitism. For example, if the anti-Israel person applies double-standards to Israel. Or if the anti-Israel person professes to care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs but doesn't seem to particularly care about other third-world groups. And doesn't particularly care about the way Palestinian Arabs are treated, for example, by Lebanon. Or by Hamas.

There's sort of a parallelism here: If someone uses Palestinian Arabs strictly as a cudgel to attack Israel, it's reasonable to respond with the "cudgel" of an anti-Semitism accusation.

You don’t think they use the term “antisemitism” amongst themselves to describe (what they think is) a real concept?

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