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The introduction is here:
Chapter 1: The return of antisemitism
The world has changed. The aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel revealed just how much. The golden age of liberal democracy is over, and so too is the golden age for Jews in the West.
On October 7, 2023, a brigade-sized group of 5,000–5,600 attackers crossed from Gaza into Israel. They included thousands of fighters from Hamas, a Palestinian terror group, other Palestinian militants, and Gazan civilians who entered through the breached border. They murdered and tortured about 1,200 people, taking 251 hostages, in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Hamas terrorists stormed into southern Israel with unspeakable brutality. They went house to house in civilian communities, shooting families in their beds, torching homes, and gunning down people as they tried to flee. In Kibbutz Be’eri, families were tied up and executed. Children were murdered in front of their parents. Bodies were found burned beyond recognition. Some victims had been shot at such close range that autopsies revealed the gun barrel’s imprint on their skin.
At the Nova music festival near Re’im, young people were hunted like prey. Hamas gunmen in pickup trucks opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing over 360 partygoers. Survivors described hiding under their friends’ bodies and pretending to be dead while the attackers roamed the fields for hours, murdering anyone they encountered. Videos that the terrorists themselves released showed them gleefully abducting bleeding women and shooting panicked civilians in the back. One young woman was filmed being paraded through Gaza, half-naked and clearly lifeless, her body desecrated while civilian crowds cheered. Hostages were dragged into Gaza with broken limbs, bloodied faces, and in a state of terror. Acts of toe-curling sexual violence speak to Islamism’s deep misogyny and repression.
I apologize for such gruesome detail. I did not intend this first chapter to resemble the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan and leave readers shell-shocked. However, how Hamas murdered its victims on October 7 is an essential part of the story.
It speaks not just to their savagery, but to their worldview that holds that such horrors are sacred acts that will be rewarded in the afterlife. The gleeful sadism and live-streamed executions were not just barbarism; they were theology. Even the Nazis tried to hide the Holocaust. Hamas filmed theirs.
And yet, less than 24 hours after the attack, before Israel had even regained control of its own territory or begun a military response, it was clear that antisemitism was back. The world had descended into moral derangement.
Before the dead were buried or the abducted accounted for, mobs from London to New York, and from Jakarta to Sydney, were baying for Jewish blood. Police stood back and watched. In Europe, Jewish homes, buildings, and cemeteries were marked in an eerie throwback to the Holocaust’s beginnings.
In the three years since that has been the Israel-Hamas War, rallies openly calling for the genocide of Jews have gone unpunished —and often have been defended. They have taken place from America’s Ivy League colleges to the White House’s gates. Social media has amplified them into a frenzy. Antisemitism is at its highest in living memory. It is acceptable again.
When confronted, these demonstrators recite carefully rehearsed lines:
I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m anti-Israel.
I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m anti-Zionist.
I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m anti-colonialist.
Anti-Zionism is today’s most prominent form of antisemitism. These slogans reveal the lie at the heart of the “anti-Zionist” pose: that they do not have a problem with Jews, only with Israel. This is like claiming you are not anti-Japanese, but just want Japan destroyed. It is absurd.
How can calling for the destruction of Israel, which would mean the death of millions of Jews, not be antisemitism? How is it that Jews are the only people denied the right to a homeland and self-determination? Why is it that in the case of Israel alone, denying indigenous rights is considered progressive?
It is partly because too few people understand what Zionism is, confusing it with Israeli governments’ policies and actions. Zionism is a simple concept. It is the movement for the Jewish people’s national self-determination in their ancestral homeland, a right that other peoples take for granted. That is it. A Jewish state could be capitalist, or communist, or even anoint a king.
When protesters chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “By any means necessary” or “Free Palestine,” it is a call for genocide. The area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is Israel. “Free” means free of Jews.
There is a deeper layer to this masquerade of antisemitism as anti-Zionism — one that rarely gets discussed because it requires a proper understanding of Judaism, which few possess.
Judaism is not just a religion. It predates all modern categories of political and theological thought. It is a unique fusion of peoplehood, faith, and land. It consists of Am Yisrael (the Jewish people), Torah (the Word), and Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). These three are inseparable.
The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that Christians would call the Old Testament, is more than scripture. It is the Jewish nation’s constitution. It shapes how Jews live, eat, think, celebrate, and mourn. It embodies Jews’ mission to bring holiness into the world through justice, memory, and action. This relentless intellectual wrestling with the Torah explains, in part, the disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners.
The Land of Israel is central to Jewish theology. As part of the covenant, God gives the Jews the Torah and the land in which to live it. If three things are required for Judaism to exist, and Jews are told they have no right to one of them, then they are effectively told they have no right to be Jewish — and no right to exist.
This is why anti-Zionism is not simply opposition to a state, but an attack on the Jewish people themselves. Antisemitism’s ugly reincarnation and revival as anti-Zionism shows how hard Jew hatred is to defeat. It does not die. It sleeps, mutates, and returns.
In Christian Europe, the lie that Jews killed Christ fueled centuries of persecution. In the 1930s, the Nazis expanded this into racial extermination. In Muslim lands, Jews may have fared better than in Europe — a low bar — but they were never treated as equals. Eventually, they were expelled.
Today, antisemitism dresses itself in the language of anti-colonialism and social justice. It comes from the Far Left, the Woke Left, the Muslim world — and now, again, from the Far Right.
Its deep roots run through the dysfunctional family of Abrahamic religions. Jews are a tiny minority among the billions of people who are neither Christian nor Muslim. But no one seems to hate Hindus, Buddhists, or Taoists for not believing in Jesus or Muhammad. They were not there to witness their miracles. The Jews were.
ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM
Hatred towards Jews stems from them being living testimony to something deeply uncomfortable: not everyone who encountered Jesus or Muhammad was moved by them or their teachings. That is an affront. It would be much easier if the Jews were not here to remind the world of that fact. This is the ultimate source of antisemitism and why so many want to murder the Jews. It is akin to killing the witness.
To certain religious minds, Israel’s recreation looks uncomfortably like the Hebrew God keeping His covenant to return His “Chosen People” to their land, as outlined in the Torah. The land itself even seems to have given up its fertility to the Jews. Zionists made the desert bloom, cultivating lush citrus groves in regions that had been largely barren.
To many Muslim minds, this is not seen as educated Jews applying agricultural science — it is seen as divine favor. It is religiously confronting and a theological insult.
Even Israel’s military success poses a theological challenge. Many Muslims view Islam’s rapid expansion and battlefield triumphs during Muhammad’s warlord years as validation of its divine truth. Victory was proof of righteousness. However, Muslim states’ repeated military failures against Israel undermine that logic. Israel’s battlefield success disrupts a deeply held religious narrative.
These are the wounds into which Israel’s re-creation in 1948 poured salt. It gives lie to the notion that the Israel–Palestinian conflict is simply a nationalistic dispute about land. It is, at its heart, a religious one.
Israel’s continued success has widened and deepened this wound. Islam claims to be the final revelation of God. With access to divine truth, the Islamic world ought to be flourishing. Yet, aside from the Gulf’s petrostates, most of the Muslim world is underdeveloped.
Israel’s success is Islam’s humiliation. It is confronting to watch the Jews, on a sliver of land with no oil, build a thriving, pluralistic, high-tech democracy within a human lifetime. It is galling to watch them possess the world’s most effective military.
That is why the more successful Israel becomes, the more it is hated, even if that success benefits Arabs and Muslims. This dynamic predates Israel’s independence.
Islam is also theocratically antisemitic. The Quran says a range of things about Jews — some respectful, recognizing them as People of the Book — and some deeply antisemitic passages.
Consider verse 2:61, which accuses Jews of killing prophets and defying Allah’s will, stating that “shame and misery” are “stamped upon them.” Verse 5:60 describes Jews being turned into apes and pigs. Verse 5:64 accuses Jews of spreading war and corruption across the earth.
Many ordinary Muslims absorb these ideas from an early age. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority (PA) dictator whom the West ignorantly calls “moderate,” frequently quotes such verses.
WESTERN ANTISEMITISM
While antisemitism’s roots lie in antiquity, in the births of Christianity and Islam, the modern Left has layered its own grievances onto it.
The Left’s discomfort with Jews is not new. It has Marxist ancestry with the Left superimposing a Marxist framework onto the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. After 1948, the Left began to view Israel as an outpost of Western imperialism, conveniently framing it as a colonizer just as decolonization was sweeping the globe and Europe’s empires were crumbling.
That Israel was founded by refugees, mostly Jews expelled from Arab countries, is irrelevant to this narrative. That Israel’s founding in its 1948 War of Independence created two refugee groups — 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and 850,000 Middle Eastern Jews — is barely mentioned, let alone acknowledged. That Jews have lived there continuously for thousands of years is ignored or denied.
