Daniel Ben-Ami
Spiked, June 29, 2025
“The conviction that Israel is evil, then, is sustained by several, prominent overlapping arguments: that it is perpetrating a holocaust, that Jews are the bearers of white privilege, and that Israel is no more than an expression of white colonial domination.”
Since 7 October and the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, Western ‘progressives’ have rounded on the Jewish State. On the streets and in the media, the volume and intensity of the loathing towards Israel, and invariably towards Jews, has often been overwhelming.
This has sometimes made it difficult to comprehend the nature of today’s Jew hatred. It is just so widespread and all-encompassing. Nevertheless, it is still possible to delineate the main elements of the ‘progressive’ attack on Israel – indeed, the main elements of what I elsewhere call ‘woke anti-Semitism’.
At its core is the conviction that Israel is the epitome of evil. That it is a supremely malevolent state. You can see this in the way Israel’s opponents no longer criticise Israel by normal standards. They don’t just condemn Israel’s government, its policies or its operation in Gaza. They don’t criticise Israel as other states might be criticised. No, Israel’s critics also portray it as the fount of all evil in the world.
This can be seen in a diagram that was circulated last summer in anti-Israel circles. ‘Palestine is the issue’, reads the title, the issue that supposedly ‘connects it all’ – the ‘it’ being all that so-called progressives believe is wrong with the world. The diagram illustrates the point by putting Palestine at the centre of overlapping circles, each one representing various woke bêtes noires, from ‘environmental terrorism’ (ie, fossil-fuel companies), ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ to ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘white supremacy’.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, is an arch exponent of this tendency to find Israel guilty of all the sins of the modern world. Speaking last September, Albanese accused Israel of committing ‘domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide’. That is, Israel is not waging a war, according to Albanese – it is engaged in the wanton destruction of homes, cities, education, medical infrastructure, culture and the environment……SOURCE