I won’t drink that water until I know how it voted

I hate all Russians. Russia invaded Ukraine.

I hate all Chinese people. China has imprisoned Uyghurs in detention camps.

I hate all Syrians. The Assad regime killed and tortured civilians on a massive scale during the Syrian civil war.

I hate all Belgians. Belgium’s colonial rule in the Congo was extraordinarily brutal.

I hate all Turks. The Ottoman Empire perpetrated the Armenian genocide.

I hate all Japanese people. Japan massacred civilians at Nanjing and committed atrocities across Asia.

I hate all Ugandans. Uganda punishes consensual same-sex activity with life imprisonment and, in some cases, death.

I hate all French people. French colonial rule and the Algerian War resulted in hundreds of thousands of Algerian deaths.

I hate all Australians too. Aboriginal Australians were dispossessed of their lands, and generations of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families.

And come to think of it, I hate all British people. The British Empire conquered, colonized, and exploited peoples across much of the world.

I also realize that I hate all Canadians. Canada forcibly removed generations of Indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools.

Apparently, I have several reasons to hate all Americans. The United States displaced Indigenous peoples, invaded Iraq, helped overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom, and still governs Guam and Puerto Rico without full voting representation.

Oh, and all Germans. Germany perpetrated the Holocaust.

I could go on, but this is exhausting. I apparently hate an enormous percentage of humanity, and I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee.

Of course I don’t believe any of this.

Perhaps you objected to one or more of my historical characterizations. Good. We can argue about them. But suppose that every premise above is accurate. Would that make the hatred any less absurd?

A government is not a population. A regime is not an ethnicity. A soldier is not everyone who shares his nationality. A person born today does not inherit the moral culpability of someone who lived a century ago. The principle is simple: individuals are responsible for what they do, not for what others who share their nationality, ethnicity, or ancestry do or have done.

Now change the identity.

Israeli. Zionist. Jewish.

Something peculiar begins to happen.

The actions of an Israeli government become the responsibility of Israel. The actions of Israel become the responsibility of Israelis. The responsibility of Israelis migrates to Zionists. And because most Jews believe, in one form or another, in the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish homeland, responsibility eventually finds its way to Jews.

Somewhere along the way, culpability stops attaching to conduct and begins attaching to identity. That is what troubles me most about the current discourse. My objection is not to disagreement about Israel. It is to the shrinking distance between disagreement and villainization, between what a country does and what association with it supposedly reveals about a person. Increasingly, identifying someone as Israeli, Zionist, or Jewish can seem sufficient to tell us what that person believes, supports, and ultimately deserves. Once identity supplies culpability, it supplies a ready-made scapegoat.

ASSOCIATION AND CULPABILITY

There is a familiar framework for recognizing antisemitism: demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. The shrinking distance between identification and villainization can produce all three. Israel becomes uniquely malevolent, its legitimacy uniquely conditional, and Jewish or Israeli identity becomes evidence of culpability.

Consider how routinely people debate whether Israel has a “right to exist.” The phrase is so familiar that its peculiarity barely registers. Where else do we debate whether an existing country has a right to exist? We condemn Russia’s invasion of Crimea and subsequent war without debating Russia’s right to exist. We may condemn the North Korean regime without asking whether North Korea should cease to exist. Yet Israel’s legitimacy is routinely treated as an open question.

We recognize this reasoning in familiar forms. When race, ethnicity, or nationality is treated as evidence of character, beliefs, or behavior, we call it prejudice, xenophobia, or racism. We need not hear a slur to recognize a stereotype. Yet similar reasoning can sound factual when the identity is Israeli, Zionist, or Jewish.

The process becomes easier when connection itself is treated as evidence. Jews are White Europeans. Zionists are White supremacists. Jews believe they are superior to non-Jews. Goyim is a slur. Zionists control Congress. All Zionists support genocide. Jews control the media. American politicians are bought by Israel. And when something sufficiently mysterious happens anywhere in the world, “Mossad?”

Imagine responding to every unexplained assassination, explosion, coup, attack, or suspicious death with “CIA?” Or “MI6?” Yet “Mossad?” increasingly functions as a self-contained explanation requiring no evidence.

The conspiracy can become almost comically elastic. In some far-right and manosphere circles, “goyslop” describes supposedly unhealthy food produced for non-Jews. The theory holds that Jews manipulate the food supply to keep non-Jews unhealthy while reserving healthier kosher food for themselves. Even an ancient dietary system can become evidence of a contemporary Jewish conspiracy.

These claims differ. Some are false, some distorted, and some contested but presented as fact. What they share is the distance between evidence and conclusion.

CULPABILITY TRAVELS

Then there is the bottle of water.

I recently came across a video of an American passenger aboard a Royal Jordanian flight who seemed quite alarmed that the airline had served her Nestlé water. She urged others to pressure the airline because, she said, Nestlé was high on a boycott list for its support of what she characterized as Israel’s “genocide and occupation.”

Boycotting Nestlé is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression.

But consider how far culpability has traveled. The Israeli government’s actions attach to companies doing business with Israel, then to their products, then to a Jordanian airline’s in-flight service. Eventually, the policy itself nearly disappears, and association becomes the offense.

A bottle of water has acquired collective guilt. It is funny only because the object is a bottle of water. The same reasoning becomes considerably less amusing when the object is a person.

Political backlash against public figures is nothing new. In 2017, Kathy Griffin posed with what appeared to be Donald Trump’s bloody severed head and lost her CNN job, an endorsement, and performances. Whatever one thinks of the response, she was judged for something she actually did.

The backlash against P!nk is more telling. She reposted a message criticizing Macklemore’s pro-Palestinian performance while he opened for Ed Sheeran. A repost is not meaningless: she amplified someone else’s words to millions, and something in them presumably resonated with her.

But the reaction went far beyond what P!nk said. She was labeled a Zionist, accused of supporting genocide, and assigned positions that she says she never expressed. Responding, she acknowledged language that she would not have chosen and said that people had decided what she believed because “a repost and the word ‘Jew’ were apparently enough to fill in the rest.”

We are responsible for what we say and can reasonably be held responsible for what we amplify. We are not responsible for everything others decide that those choices must mean.

The progression becomes more troubling when the person need not express an opinion. Adidas recently apologized after boycott calls over a campaign for its Single Shoe service, which lets amputees buy one shoe. It featured Shalev Biton, a former Israeli soldier who lost a leg in 2021 when an anti-tank missile from Gaza struck his vehicle. The advertisement reportedly did not mention his military service.

Biton was an amputee promoting a service for amputees, not representing the Israeli government or IDF. Yet his previous military service made his appearance objectionable.

We have moved from what a person said, to what a person once did, to what group membership supposedly reveals about their beliefs, and finally to calls to boycott an entire company for featuring that person.

Ordinarily, culpability should diminish with distance from the act. Here, it expands.

THE POWER OF COMPRESSION

Susan Sarandon recently called it a “major revelation” that Americans are discovering “how much money the United States gives to Israel.”

But gives fully removes one side of the ledger.

U.S. aid funds a security relationship that successive administrations have concluded serves American interests. Much of it buys American weapons, while the countries cooperate on missile defense, intelligence, technology, and common threats. Foreign policy is not charity. Security relationships reflect mutual interests, even when the benefits are unequal, and one party writes the larger check.

Compression does not have to make a claim false. Sometimes it merely makes the desired conclusion easier to reach.

The same compression surrounds AIPAC, a powerful pro-Israel organization. AIPAC operates within an American system where organized groups spend to influence elections and policy. Yet AIPAC is routinely characterized as “buying Congress” and dividing us with “dark money.” Political influence becomes control, spending becomes conspiracy, and Americans advocating a foreign-policy position become agents of a foreign country.

Corporations, unions, advocacy groups, and industries of every kind lobby. Ukrainian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, Armenian-American, Greek-American, and Turkish-American organizations advocate positions involving their homelands. Why does this familiar machinery become uniquely sinister when associated with Jews? How often do we hear warnings about the Armenian lobby controlling Congress or politicians acting as agents of Greece? Where are the viral exposés of Turkish-American influence? Disproportionate scrutiny of the same behavior when associated with Jews is quite literally a double standard. Hence the cynical expression: “No Jews, No News.”

WHEN REPETITION BECOMES KNOWLEDGE

Social media makes this easier. Political discourse increasingly takes the form of slogans, memes, infographics, twenty-second videos, context-free statistics, and accusatory labels. Optimized for transmission rather than examination, they make intellectual laziness remarkably efficient.

A slogan lets us possess an argument without understanding it. Repeat a phrase often enough, and familiarity becomes knowledge. In an echo chamber, repetition substitutes for corroboration. Knowledge becomes certainty, and certainty enters our values without our examining the reasoning behind it.

The effect is not merely to make us lazier. It can make us meaner.

Once a slogan supplies the villain and moral judgment, there is little reason to ask what the person in front of us believes. The label has answered it. “Zionist” no longer describes a political belief requiring clarification. It diagnoses character.

I recently saw someone in a video wearing a T-shirt declaring, “ISRAEL KILLS A CHILD EVERY 30 MINS.” Evaluating it requires identifying the timeframe, sources, casualty data, who is counted, and the arithmetic. Similarly, the word genocide takes a second to utter. Refuting the accusation requires evidence, context, and a full legal framework.

Worse, the correction can itself become evidence of guilt. Challenge a casualty statistic, and you don’t care about dead children. Question whether genocide is a legal conclusion or a political accusation, and you support genocide. Explain Jewish historical connections to the land, and you are spreading Zionist propaganda. Challenge a claim that Jews control Congress, and your objection proves how much the lobby has brainwashed you. At that point, debating the claim becomes evidence that it is true.

In my previous essay, The Protocols of Contradiction, I argued that contradiction is not a defect in antisemitism but one of its mechanisms. I had not considered what happens when that ancient mechanism meets an information environment almost perfectly designed to sustain it.

WHEN IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

Words can hurt. So can memes, slogans, and social media posts. There is no constitutional or moral right to avoid offensive speech. Sometimes the answer is argument, sometimes a thicker skin, and sometimes it is best to simply ignore an insipid social media comment.

But words also persuade.

And persuasive ideas shape behavior. An offensive Facebook post is not morally equivalent to vandalizing a synagogue, threatening a Jewish school, or assaulting someone because they are Jewish. But history gives us reason to care about the principle before consequences become extreme.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans applied that logic in reverse, incarcerating roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Nearly 70,000 were citizens. They faced no charges of disloyalty and had no means of appeal. Association alone became grounds for suspicion and presumed guilt.

The incarceration is now recognized as a profound violation of civil liberties. A country’s actions cannot justify presumptions about someone based on ancestry. The lesson seems straightforward.

Or at least it seemed straightforward.

Today, Israelis have been refused hotel accommodations because they are Israeli. An Italian hotel manager rejected an Israeli couple while accusing the “Israeli people” collectively of genocide. In Germany, Israelis seeking a reservation received a haunting response: “There are no Jews allowed in our hotel.” In Florida, a waitress wearing a Star of David received no tip on a $245 check. Written on the receipt: “Great service, but Free Palestine!”

These incidents differ in severity but reflect the same underlying logic. There is reason to worry where that logic can lead. Jews constitute roughly 0.2 percent of humanity. In New York City, where they make up about 10 percent of the population, anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 229 of 425 confirmed hate crimes (53.9%) during the first eight months of 2026.

None of these statistics proves that criticism of Israel causes antisemitic crime. But if identity becomes evidence of moral depravity, what follows for the person identified as Israeli? As Zionist? As Jewish?? If Israeli nationality or a Star of David is enough to establish what someone believes and what that person is responsible for, why should that person expect to be treated fairly?

There is another irony. Tactics intended to weaken Israel or Zionism can reinforce what their advocates hope to change. Broad boycotts or trade bans can cost Palestinians employed by Israeli businesses their livelihoods. Indiscriminate pressure can strengthen Israeli political forces arguing that compromise is naive because no change in Israel’s conduct will produce acceptance or diminish hostility. Rising antisemitism also supplies Zionism with perhaps its most compelling argument: Jewish safety cannot ultimately be left in the hands of others.

Every synagogue attacked, every Jew excluded because of Israel, and every Israeli made unwelcome by nationality strengthens that argument.

Nor is an isolated and threatened population necessarily more willing to take risks for peace. If the objective is greater Israeli compromise, convincing Israelis that the world is implacably hostile to them seems extraordinarily ineffective.

Which brings me, somewhat uncomfortably, to other Jews.

In an earlier essay, I wrote about anti-Zionist Passover Seders that transformed the story of Jewish liberation into an indictment of Israel. I sometimes wonder whether, in certain progressive Jewish spaces, publicly repudiating Zionism has itself become a way of demonstrating moral virtue. A way of saying: I am Jewish, but not one of those Jews. History gives me little confidence that the distinction is protective.

Antisemitism has repeatedly ignored distinctions Jews make among themselves. Religious and secular. Assimilated and observant. Left and right. Zionist and anti-Zionist. It has ignored how Jews define themselves, express their identity, or distance themselves from it. When nationality, political belief, and Jewish identity can become evidence of culpability, we have moved beyond just criticizing a government. “Anti-Zionism” is becoming code for antisemitism. Where does it all end?

WHEN EVIDENCE STOPS MATTERING

The Oxford Union recently debated the proposition, “This House Believes Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine.” The motion passed 208 to 129.

I was struck by one word.

Never.

Never is an extraordinary historical claim. It encompasses Israeli governments of the left and right, many generations of leaders, peace proposals, territorial withdrawals, failed negotiations, and wars. Showing that Israeli governments sometimes obstructed peace is one proposition. Showing that particular leaders acted in bad faith is another. Establishing that Israel never truly wanted peace requires far more. More importantly, what evidence could disprove it?

If an offer of peace can demonstrate deception, a failed negotiation can demonstrate rejectionism, a withdrawal can conceal an ulterior motive, and subsequent violence can reveal what Israel intended all along, the proposition becomes extraordinarily difficult to falsify.

Debate requires more than two sides speaking. It requires some shared agreement that facts can be established, that words have meanings, that context matters, that evidence can alter a conclusion and, most importantly, that there is some imaginable evidence that could prove us wrong. When debate is short-circuited, it simply becomes another act of persuasion.

Repetition persuades. Compression persuades. Images persuade. Outrage persuades. Fear persuades. Social belonging persuades. The desire to be seen as morally righteous persuades. None requires a proposition to survive serious examination.

Yet there is an important detail. Avi Mayer, who argued against the motion, wrote afterward that several students told his side that their arguments had changed their minds. So logical argument is not dead. Debate is not useless.

But what happens when it is no longer enough? What can we do when the slogan travels farther than the correction and the accusation is more persuasive than the evidence?

I don’t have all the answers, but abandoning argument is not one of them. Demand specificity. Ask for evidence. Restore omitted context. Ask what would disprove the claim. Separate conduct from association. Try another nationality and see whether the reasoning still sounds reasonable.

And the standard must apply in both directions. Intellectual honesty requires us to scrutinize claims that confirm what we already believe as carefully as those that offend us. A morally desirable conclusion does not make the evidence offered for it true.

Nor is ignoring competing evidence fair play. Consider the recent documentary NAZA, which relies heavily on anonymous testimony about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The allegations may be disturbing, but before they are accepted as fact, they must stand up to serious evidentiary standards. That means asking what can be independently verified, what relevant context or competing evidence has been omitted, and whether either would change the conclusion.

Logic may not always persuade. Facts may be outrun by slogans. Corrections may never travel as far as accusations. None of that makes logic, facts, or correction less necessary.

It makes them more necessary.

Because once we decide that evidence no longer matters because the other side has stopped caring about it, we haven’t defeated the problem. We have joined it.