Jews, Power, and the Comfort of Blame
Visibility mistaken for control in the story told about Jews
The oldest conspiracy in the world has survived everything but originality. It claims that a people smaller than a statistical rounding error control the banks, the media, the wars, the weather, and, presumably, your last bad haircut. A plot so grand, it has to be true-because the absence of evidence is itself evidence, isn’t it? It’s the intellectual equivalent of blaming gravity for clumsiness.
The medieval priest once thundered that Jews poisoned wells. His modern heir tweets that Jews poison minds. The tone has changed, the theology hasn’t. Today’s antisemitic sophisticate wears the perfume of moral concern-he doesn’t hate Jews, he merely ‘questions’ Zionism, deplores ‘lobbies’, and mourns ‘colonialism’. His self-image is of a philosopher, not a bigot. One imagines he dines on organic quinoa while denouncing Israeli agriculture.
To mistake Jewish visibility for Jewish power is the trick of the trade. Jews are noticed precisely because they’re blamed. Two-tenths of one per cent of humanity have become the world’s mirror: everything hated, feared, or envied is projected onto them. They are accused of ruling Wall Street, funding Hollywood, and running Washington-all at once, despite the contradictions. A remarkable multitasking feat, if only it were true.
The myth is psychologically elegant: it turns envy into ethics. The mediocre are absolved of failure; their resentments are reframed as rebellion. ‘I’m not jealous,’ the accuser insists. ‘I’m opposing power.’ A construction worker in Melbourne becomes Che Guevara by retweeting a meme about Jewish bankers.
The moral inversion is complete. The Jews, once victims of every crown and creed, are recast as puppet-masters of every creed and crown. Even the Holocaust becomes suspect: an ‘industry’, a moral investment portfolio. The same minds that deny it in the morning accuse its survivors of exploiting it by afternoon. This isn’t logic; it’s psychological vandalism.
And then, of course, Israel-the lightning rod for every Western guilt complex with a Wi-Fi connection. The rebirth of Jewish sovereignty was meant to normalise Jewish life. Instead, it has become the West’s favourite passion play. The world applauds dead Jews in Warsaw museums but boos living ones in Jerusalem. A people once slaughtered for lacking a homeland are now condemned for having one.
When Israel defends itself, the critics sigh that it has ‘lost its moral compass’. One wonders which compass they prefer-the one buried at Treblinka?
Let us, for the sake of argument, imagine the triumph of this prejudice. The anti-Jewish chorus gets its wish. Israel collapses; the Zionist project dissolves into dust. A ‘Free Palestine’ rises, where democracy and human rights will undoubtedly blossom-in the tender embrace of clerical rule, corruption, and the occasional martyrdom video.
A postmodern pogrom, this time applauded on social media. And then what? Will the Western conscience feel purified? What new scapegoat will it invent to keep the moral theatre running? The crisis wouldn’t be political alone-it would expose the hollowness of Western liberalism itself, that sentimental machine that mistakes self-loathing for virtue.
Meanwhile, reality intrudes. In Paris, Jewish schools are guarded by soldiers. In New York, synagogues resemble embassies. In Melbourne and London, hate crimes spike whenever Israel appears in the headlines. The supposed puppet-masters of the planet can barely attend a bar mitzvah without metal detectors. If this is power, it’s a most inconvenient kind.
The myth persists because it is flattering. It converts resentment into revelation. The man who mutters about ‘Jewish influence’ sees himself as a detective of forbidden truths. The pleasure of the conspiracy lies not in hatred but in vanity: to believe one has finally ‘seen through’ the world’s illusions. It’s theology for the terminally self-important.
Yet the truth is tedious. Jewish strength has never been in dominion but in endurance: a civilisation without empire, a faith without coercion, a people who survive by arguing with themselves. Their so-called conspiracy is survival itself, which the world still finds suspicious.
To dismantle the myth, one must puncture its romance. Antisemitism is not rebellion-it is submission to cliché. It thrives on cowardice disguised as conviction, and ignorance parading as insight. It is, in the end, the oldest refuge for the intellectually unemployed. The myth of Jewish power will die the day societies tire of outsourcing their failures. Until then, the whisper continues in the market square-that the Jews run everything, except, somehow, their own safety.
