Antisemitism and Liberation: The Inversion of Our Time
Across Europe, the echoes of the past have taken a new form. In Berlin, Jewish students at Technical University barricaded themselves in the student union building after being excluded from a student council now dominated by Hamas supporters. In Amsterdam, attackers filmed themselves conducting “Jew hunts,” shouting “Free Palestine” as they chased their targets. On Kristallnacht’s anniversary, Norway’s prime minister attended a memorial that excluded Jews.
These very recent incidents are not isolated but part of a larger shift: antisemitism has been rebranded as social justice.
The transformation became undeniable since October 7, 2023. Hamas men invaded Israeli homes and systematically murdered 1,200 civilians; families were burned alive, and young people were hunted at a music festival. They filmed themselves doing it. The recordings weren’t accidental; they were trophies. This wasn’t warfare but extermination–the deliberate hunting of civilians, the torture and abduction of 251 hostages, all documented with pride. Soon after, people across Western cities were celebrating the massacre as “resistance.” Since then, Jews have been attacked not for their views but for their identity–each assault justified as solidarity with Palestinians.
How did ancient hatred acquire the language of liberation?
Antisemitism has always worn the moral costume of its age. Medieval Christianity made Jew-hatred a religious duty–persecuting Jews demonstrated faith. When science replaced theology as moral authority, antisemitism adapted. By the late 1800s, Jews weren’t theologically wrong but racially inferior. Pseudo scientific theories about blood and breeding made hatred sound rational. The Nazis didn’t invent racial antisemitism; they inherited a framework that made genocide sound like hygiene.
Today’s version speaks through the language of human rights – the most ingenious disguise yet, because it appropriates the language of the oppressed. When antisemitism is called “decolonization” and “resistance,” opposing it seems reactionary. After all, who dares stand against “liberation”?
Criticism of any nation’s policies is legitimate and vital to local and global discourse. To recognize antisemitism’s new disguise is not to sanctify Israel, but to protect the moral language that allows us to judge any nation – including Israel – by universal standards rather than by hatred. While antisemitism may feed on criticism of Israel–sometimes legitimate policy criticism–it exists independently and cannot draw justification from it.
Recognizing antisemitism’s new disguise must also mean resisting its misuse. In Israel too, politicians sometimes invoke antisemitism not to defend Jews, but to deflect criticism or silence dissent. That, too, corrodes moral language. The integrity of this fight depends on applying the same standards of truth and accountability everywhere –including at home.
The distinction between legitimate criticism and the moral masquerade of hate matters because the mechanism of today’s antisemitism is simple: cast Jews as oppressors, and violence against them becomes righteous. The formula requires erasing inconvenient facts. Hamas’s rule over Gaza since 2007 vanishes. The Jewish refugees from Arab nations who comprise half of Israel’s population disappear. Zionism–the return of a persecuted people to their ancestral homeland–gets rewritten as European colonialism. The deliberate slaughter of civilians becomes armed struggle.
This moral inversion works because of a broader collapse in how we understand truth. The useful insight that power shapes narrative, that history is written by victors, has mutated into the belief that there are no facts, only competing stories. If everything is “just a narrative,” nothing can be false. Evidence becomes “propaganda,” video becomes “context,” and history becomes a colonial myth. Social media amplifies the distortion: algorithms reward outrage over accuracy, and a simple equation–oppressor versus oppressed–travels faster than complexity.
There is space for legitimate debate about borders, policies, and peace processes. But to believe that hunting Jews in the street can ever be explained by politics is to reveal the moral collapse of our moment. To claim otherwise is to make every atrocity explainable, every cruelty excusable-to suggest that with enough context, burning children alive makes sense.
The stakes here transcend the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When we accept that facts are just opinions, that words mean whatever serves the cause, we lose the ability to recognize evil even when it announces itself. Hamas filmed their atrocities because they were proud. The crowds that cheered were not confused; they were convinced. When “liberation” means slaughter and “solidarity” means erasure, even remembrance becomes a form of forgetting.
The defense against this inversion begins with insisting on facts–verifiable, documented, accountable facts. Words like “colonialism”, “genocide,” and “apartheid” have legal definitions, not emotional ones. Historical events happened or they didn’t. Videos show what they show. The remedy starts with language – with the courage to name things truthfully. That is where real liberation begins.
