Image artist: Laika Appearance: 25 May 2025, Basilio Bricci Street, Roma, Italy
“The Nazis had it right,”
screamed the post headline. I did a double take, and it was not a White nationalist, not a Muslim extremist, not a leather-jacketed supremacist with a swastika tattoo. It was a normally reasonable, sane liberal.
My instinct was the standard one: the government of Israel cannot be conflated with the entire Jewish population, and the actions of people in power cannot be laid at the door of ordinary citizens, even ones who voted for them. This is the position I have held, and would ordinarily state, and move on.
Except there is a rather powerful institution that would dispute this framing, and not from the direction you might expect. The government of the State of Israel has, with considerable consistency, insisted that the state represents every single Jew on earth, regardless of citizenship, regardless of Zionist conviction, regardless of personal political opinion. And it has further insisted that any disagreement with (let along condemnation of) its conduct is not merely a political, ideological, or moral difference of opinion, but antisemitism, literal and actionable.
This is where it gets interesting.
Because if you watch what is actually happening in Israel, not in the cabinet and war rooms, but on the streets, in the offices and the schools and the beach cafes, in online forums and debating clubs, in cocktail parties and art galleries, in Insta reels and mainstream media, the Israeli population has not, in any meaningful number, pushed back. Other states conducting operations of this scale have historically produced, at minimum, a visible constituency of discomfort. The thing about Israel is that the masks came off some time ago. The justifications shifted from security to something considerably less articulable, and what remained, when you stripped away the language of defence and counter-terrorism, was a kind of cheerful, open endorsement, even glee of collective punishment, with crowds literally celebrating the more extreme moments. The distinction between state, government, and people, the distinction that civilised political discourse depends upon, has, in Israel’s case, been almost entirely voluntarily dissolved. By Israelis. Who insist, rather aggressively, that there is no difference.
Come to think of it, there is only one historical example I can think of where this convergence was so complete that it became genuinely impossible to see the state and the people as separate entities. Nazi Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reached a point where calling every German a Nazi was not an unfair generalisation but a reasonable working description of a collective moral position. And the Germans agreed. Vehemently. At least then.
Now here is the rhetorical trap, and I want to be precise about the word rhetorical, because the argument I am about to make is one I am making to expose a logical collapse, not to endorse a conclusion. If the State of Israel insists that it represents all Jews everywhere, and if the Israeli public within the country and Jewish community across the world has by and large confirmed this unity through its visible, vocal, and largely enthusiastic solidarity with the Israeli government’s conduct, then the question that follows, the one that I suspect is rattling around in the heads of a great many people who are not neo-Nazis, not Islamists, and are not racists, is this: under these specific and extraordinary conditions, is hostility toward Jews, or let us call it by the name it has been given: antisemitism not the only consistent morally valid position available to the sane?
The answer, to be absolutely plain, is no. Of course it is no. Fuck Nazis, and fuck every ideology that leads in that direction, including the one currently being constructed by people who believe they are opposing one.
But here is why the question matters. Israel and its defenders have spent years insisting that to criticise Israeli policy is to be antisemitic, and in doing so they have, with extraordinary carelessness, fused the identity of a state with the identity of a people, even people who are not Israelis. They built the logical architecture. They insisted on the equation. The Jews in and outside Israel by and large agreed. And now, as the consequences of that equation become visible to a watching world, they appear genuinely surprised that some people are doing the arithmetic.
The liberal who posted that headline did not arrive there because of hatred. He arrived there because someone handed him a logical trap and told him it was a moral position.
That is the real crime in all of this, and the people most responsible for it are not the ones being blamed. The most effective architects of antisemitism in the world today do not wear swastikas. They carry Israeli passports.
