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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5477 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.

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.

I mean, I suppose I fall into this camp.

When I look at Israel's actions during the relevant time periods where support for the state has gone down, I simply think they couldn't have done anything different, or at least substantially different. Because of the way Hamas and Hezbollah operate, every square foot of an area they occupy ends up being a legitimate military target. This is, of course, famously schools, hospitals, mosques, etc. If you want to disable Hamas soldier and rockets, you basically have no choice but to bomb targets in those categories. This will then create the "wall of dead children" as you put it. IMO responsible reporting would ignore said dead children, or, if they did report, emphasize strenuously that the children were killed by Hamas's actions.

That said this isn't unique to Israel. The same tactics are deployed by American press against America all the time. The press, as a rule, does not like competency and patriotism, and the mix of competency with patriotism is particularly offensive to them. Well, Israel is both so they will be hated by the press.

Does antisemitism help drop Israel below the floor that the press can drive America to? Yes. But the press's vitriol for a winner is even more important.

How about not occupying more and more territory. How about not sponsoring jihadists in neighbouring countries. How about not turning millions of people into refugees.

Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.

Antisemitism has one cause, jewish behviour. Jewish behaviour is caused by an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group. Jews stick together by being in constant conflict with the rest of the world.

Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.

I don't think you're comparing apples with oranges.

  1. Read the mission statements for the IRA, the UVF, the UDA and every other paramilitary organisation in the North. Conspicuous by its absence will be any explicit declaration of intent to completely exterminate the opposing ethnic group. The same cannot be said of Hamas's founding charter. It's extremely difficult to do business with a rival ethnic group who simply want your entire ethnic group dead. How do you come to a compromise? ("Okay – you can have your own state and only kill half of us"?)
  2. There were moderate leaders on both sides (e.g. John Hume and David Trimble) of the Troubles who were willing and able to work together to find a compromise. Every would-be moderate Palestinian leader has good reason to believe he'll be assassinated by one of his own side if he ever dilutes his maximal hatred and distrust of Jews one iota.
  3. The inability to compromise inevitably results in Palestinian leaders turning down offers far more generous than any offered to Northern Irish Catholics. At no point in the Troubles was complete ceding of territory from the UK to Ireland ever even considered never mind offered, and John Hume and Gerry Adams knew this going into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have been offered their own state at least three times in the last fifty years and turned it down every time. These would strike me as a transparent example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face if you accept the Palestinian leaders' claims at face value that they only want their own state and a "right of return" or similar.
  4. As odious as some of the IRA's tactics were, they pale in comparison to Hamas's. It's not easy to ask someone to swallow their pride and bury the hatchet with someone who killed your cousin, but it can and has been done. Asking someone to bury the hatchet with someone who murdered your cousin and violated her corpse is a much harder ask.

I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like

an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group

Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.

(Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948)

This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.

Anyway, if it's so difficult for Jews to co-exist, it would be great if they could just... have their own country which other people could avoid, right? They could even build a wall to separate them from the other groups so there's no trouble. Of course, we know how that turned out. (and it ignores the Israeli Arabs, who don't seem to be particularly worse off than minorities in many other nations)

Well sure but the Israelis also control the other side of that wall. They control the borders of the West Bank and have a whole hodgepodge of fully integrated settlements on the other side of that wall. and they've had fifty years to enunciate some sort of borders.

Other wall.

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