Antisemitism Did Not Begin with Israel’s Response to October 7

In the months since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, a troubling argument has taken hold in political, academic, and media circles: that the global surge in antisemitism is a reaction to Israel’s military response in Gaza. According to this logic, attacks on Jews, Jewish institutions, and Jewish students are not expressions of hatred, but misguided protests against Israeli policy.

This claim is not only false. It is dangerous.

Antisemitism did not erupt because of Israel’s actions after October 7. It surged because October 7 exposed how thin the veneer restraining antisemitism had already become, and how quickly Jews, everywhere, are held collectively responsible for violence committed against them.

Antisemitism spiked before Israel fired a shot.

The timeline alone dismantles the argument.

In the days immediately following October 7, before Israel launched its major ground operations, Jewish institutions across the world reported sharp increases in threats, vandalism, and violence. Synagogues were attacked, Jewish schools locked down, and Jews assaulted in the streets of cities thousands of miles from Gaza.

None of this had anything to do with Israeli military tactics. It had everything to do with the fact that Jews were once again being treated as a global proxy, collectively blamed, targeted, and punished.

History has a name for that phenomenon. It is called antisemitism.

Jews are not attacked for what Israel does, but for what antisemites believe Jews are.

The argument that antisemitism is a response to Israeli policy rests on a premise that would be rejected for any other group: that violence against civilians is an understandable reaction to political disagreement with a state.

No one claims attacks on Muslim communities are “provoked” by Saudi policy. No one excuses violence against Chinese Americans because of Beijing’s actions. No one rationalizes assaults on Russian churches as “criticism of Putin.”

Only Jews are expected to absorb violence as the cost of geopolitics.

That expectation itself is antisemitic.

The October 7 massacres were not condemned. They were celebrated. Perhaps the most damning evidence against the “Israel caused antisemitism” narrative is what happened on October 7 and in its immediate aftermath. Before Israel responded, before Gaza was invaded, before airstrikes dominated headlines, rallies erupted across Western cities celebrating Hamas’s actions. Protesters waved paragliders, chanted slogans glorifying “resistance,”  screaming at the top of their lungs to “Globalize the Intifada,” and framed the mass murder of civilians as liberation.

This was not backlash to Israeli policy. It was endorsement of Jewish death.

To suggest that the antisemitism we are witnessing is a response to Israel’s conduct is to erase the moral reality that Jews were targeted, mocked, and attacked precisely when they were most visibly the victims.

Antisemitism thrives when Jews are denied moral innocence.

At the heart of this hypothesis lies a deeper pathology: the refusal to allow Jews moral innocence.

October 7 should have been a moment of universal clarity. Children were butchered. Families burned alive. Women raped. Civilians dragged into tunnels.

Yet within hours, Jews were told – implicitly and explicitly – that their suffering was contextual, complicated, and ultimately deserved.

This is not new. Antisemitism has always adapted to the dominant moral language of the age. In medieval Europe, Jews were Christ-killers. In the 20th century, they were racial contaminants. Today, they are cast as “colonizers” whose victimhood is automatically suspect.

Israel did not create this framework. It merely became its latest vessel.

Blaming antisemitism on Israel absolves antisemites of responsibility.

The most corrosive effect of this argument is that it shifts blame away from perpetrators.

If antisemitism is framed as an understandable reaction to Israeli policy, then those who harass Jewish students, firebomb synagogues, assault and murder Jews in the street are no longer bigots. They are activists who “went too far.”

This logic does not fight antisemitism. It launders it.

It also sends a clear message to Jewish communities worldwide: your safety is conditional, and your rights are negotiable, depending on events beyond your control.

Antisemitism rises not when Israel acts—but when boundaries collapse.

The current wave of antisemitism is not a referendum on Israeli military decisions. It is the result of years of normalization: the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking, the erosion of Holocaust memory, the collapse of moral red lines around Jewish safety, and the increasing acceptability of treating Jews as a collective political entity rather than as individual citizens.

October 7 did not cause antisemitism. It revealed how ready it already was.

Some Closing Thoughts:  “The Uncomfortable Truth.”

Antisemitism is not a response to Israeli actions. It is a belief system that precedes them, survives them, and outlives them.

Those who insist otherwise are not explaining antisemitism. They are excusing it.

And history has shown, repeatedly, where that road leads.

The insistence on blaming Israel for the resurgence of antisemitism does more than distort reality. It normalizes a world in which Jewish safety is conditional and Jewish victimhood is perpetually suspect. Antisemitism is not a policy critique gone awry; it is an ancient hatred that adapts to modern language and finds new justifications in every era. Those who claim that Israel’s actions “caused” antisemitism are not confronting bigotry. They are providing it with cover. If Jews are to be safe in a democratic world, the line must be redrawn clearly and without apology: hatred of Jews is the responsibility of those who practice it, not of the Jewish state or the Jewish people.