Not Liberal Enough or Too Liberal: The Deadlock of Antisemitism

I recently attended a lecture by one of Israel’s most well-known legal scholars. As usual, the lecture was engaging, clear, and grounded. At some point, though, he drifted from the topic and began speaking about the government’s handling of the war. His criticism was sharp, and in my view, some of it was justified. Still, one claim stuck with me and kept bothering me afterward.

He argued that the Israeli government is partly responsible for the growing anti-Zionism and antisemitism we are seeing in the West. According to him, this backlash is a result of Israel adopting increasingly anti-liberal positions. He did not elaborate in detail, but based on his brief remarks and on positions he has expressed in the past, I understood him to be referring to actions such as the use of biblical language about the destruction of our enemies or proposals to enact the death penalty for terrorists.

This was not the first time I had encountered this line of thinking. Fellow students and acquaintances have voiced similar concerns. The argument usually runs as follows: if Israel and its representatives acted more consistently as a “proper” liberal democracy, much of the hostility we face – particularly from Western universities, human rights organizations, and other institutions that present themselves as the moral vanguard of society – would dissipate.

Before going any further, I want to be clear about what this essay is not. This is not another rant about progressives being naïve or detached from reality. The internet and social media is already saturated with shallow political commentary of that kind, and I am not interested in adding another one.

What I do want to do is ask a simple question: Would becoming less liberal actually reduce tensions in the Arab–Israeli conflict or the hostility Israel faces abroad? 

By now it should be clear that I do not share the view of my lecturer or some of my peers. I do not believe that further demonstrations of Israel’s liberal credentials, such as highlighting its protection of LGBTQ rights or favoring rehabilitation programs over capital punishment for terrorists are likely to win it broader support in the West. Part of this comes from what we can already clearly see. Despite the fact that Israel is, in many respects, more liberal than every country in its region it continues to face disproportionate condemnation.

But my main reason for doubting this argument comes from an unexpected place. Over the past few months, I have started paying closer attention to people who openly hate Israel and Jews not because Israel is insufficiently liberal, but because, in their eyes, it represents everything that is too liberal, too secular, and deeply immoral.

One example that left a strong impression on me was an antisemitic Christian preacher I listened to. He explained his hatred in very simple terms. For him, Jews symbolize everything that threatens his Christian worldview. He blamed Jews for the spread of progressive ideas in the West. Ideas about gender roles, sexuality, family life, the market, immigration, and more. At first, I dismissed him as just another neo-Nazi figure repeating old conspiracy theories about Jews corrupting Western values.

Then I remembered something from a few years earlier, at the beginning of my own spiritual Jewish  journey. I had studied for a time at a Haredi-oriented yeshiva, where a rabbi made an observation that sounded oddly similar. He argued that some modern antisemitism is fueled by the visibility of secular or Reform Jews who play prominent roles in progressive movements. Needless to say, this rabbi was not endorsing antisemitism, and certainly not repeating Nazi ideas. He was pointing to how Jews are perceived from the outside.

That is when something clicked. The Christian preacher knew nothing about Judaism and had no way of distinguishing between religious, secular, Reform, or traditional Jews. All he saw was a noticeable number of influential people with Jewish names, some of whom openly connected their political views to their Jewish identity. From there, it was easy for him to lump all Jews together and blame them for everything that conflicted with his values.

Of course, Christian antisemitism long predates modern secularism, let alone Reform Judaism. In that sense, today’s anti-progressive language may simply be a new justification layered on top of an old hatred. If progressive causes did not exist, other reasons would be found.

This may be the case for Christianity, but what about Islam? Could Islamist antisemitism be softened if Jews, and the Jewish state, emphasized their religious tradition more openly? Might it help to show that Judaism, in its traditional form, has far more in common with devout Muslim life than with progressive, secular Western culture?

For a short period, I genuinely thought the answer might be yes.

That brief moment of optimism came after I read Sayyid Qutb’s essay “The America I Have Seen.” It is important to situate this text properly in his life. At the time he wrote it, Qutb was an Egyptian intellectual and a devout Muslim, but he had not yet become the radical Islamist figure he is known as today. He was well read in Western literature and philosophy, deeply knowledgeable about Islamic sources, and he approached ideas with genuine intellectual curiosity.

In the late 1940s, the Egyptian Ministry of Education sent him to the United States to study modern teaching methods. He spent roughly two years there. Only after returning to Egypt did he write his famous essay, reflecting on his experiences and impressions of American society.

What stands out in this essay is how different it is from Qutb’s later writings. There is no call for jihad or violence. Much of the essay is personal and almost poetic in tone. He reflects on what he perceived as shallow human relationships, on people being absorbed by work while remaining emotionally distant from one another and from God. He describes what he saw as a troubling indifference toward the death of loved ones. And he repeatedly returns to questions of sexuality, criticizing what he saw as the absence of modesty and restraint, even in places that were meant to be religious.

It would be easy to dismiss this as the voice of a radical Islamist offended by Western norms, but that would be a mistake. Qutb does not sound radical in this essay. He does not demand that women cover their faces or call for the imposition of Islamic law. Instead, he writes as a moral critic, concerned with the loss of modesty as a condition for meaningful intimacy, both with God and between human beings. For him, modesty was not about control, but about depth.

Nevertheless, I can understand why, to a secular reader, this kind of critique still sounds like dogmatic religious moralizing. When religious thinkers speak about modesty or moral limits, it is often heard as an attempt to impose private beliefs rather than as a serious ethical claim. To make sense of this gap in understanding, I find the work of Jonathan Haidt helpful, particularly his book “The Righteous Mind“.

Haidt’s basic argument is that people do not all reason morally in the same way. In Western liberal societies, moral thinking tends to focus heavily on just two foundations: care (preventing harm to others) and fairness (ensuring equality and justice). But religious moral systems operate with a wider moral vocabulary. Alongside care and fairness, they emphasize ideas like sanctity and loyalty.

From that perspective, concerns about modesty or restraint are not about control, but about protecting what is seen as morally meaningful. Read this way, Qutb’s critique is not a call to police behavior, but an expression of a moral language that secular societies have largely lost the ability to hear.

Because of my own Jewish spiritual journey, I have become far more sensitive to ideas of sanctity than I was when I led a secular lifestyle. In the past, my moral judgments were shaped almost entirely by concerns about harm and consent. Any interaction that involved coercion, violence, or clear injustice felt wrong; beyond that, most consensual relationships seemed morally unproblematic. Today, I experience morality differently. I feel anchored in a deeper moral framework that makes me uneasy with relationships stripped of commitment, responsibility and modesty. What troubles me is the reduction of another person to a means rather than treating them as a purpose in themselves.

This shift explains why I felt such a strong connection to Qutb’s essay about America. I found myself recognizing his sense of repulsion. When I finished reading the essay, I briefly allowed myself to hope that perhaps Islamist hostility toward Jews and Israel rested on a tragic misunderstanding. If groups like Hamas view Israel primarily as an extension of secular, immoral Western modernity, then perhaps showing that Orthodox Judaism shares many moral intuitions with devout Muslim life could soften that hostility.

Motivated by this hope, I turned to Qutb’s later essay “Our Struggle with the Jews”. Before reading it, I assumed that, much like the Christian preacher I described earlier, Qutb understood Jews primarily as agents of secularism and progressive moral decay. I believed that, unlike Christian antisemitism, Islamist hostility toward Jews would fade once Judaism was properly understood.

I was wrong.

What I found instead was deeply disillusioning. While parts of Qutb’s argument do rest on a distorted image of Jews as agents of liberalism, a substantial portion of his hostility toward Jews is grounded explicitly in Muslim religious texts and theological interpretation.

As Benny Morris points out in his critique of how Western scholars write about Qutb, this religious dimension is often underestimated. Many writers treat his antisemitism as just another social bias, shaped by politics or culture and detachable from faith. Morris argues that this misses something essential. Qutb was not simply anti-Zionist or reacting to Western influence. He grounded his hostility toward Jews in selective readings of the Qur’an and Hadith, presenting Jews as a religious and moral enemy rather than as a political one. In this framework, the conflict with Jews is not historical or contingent, but timeless and unavoidable.

Bassam Tibi helps explain why this represents a major break from earlier Islamic attitudes toward Jews. He distinguishes between classical Islamic Judeophobia and modern antisemitism. Earlier hostility involved prejudice, discrimination, and theological polemics, but it did not portray Jews as the embodiment of evil or call for their elimination. That shift, Tibi argues, appears only in modern Islamism, when European antisemitic ideas are fused with Islamic sources. Qutb plays a decisive role in this transformation by rereading Qur’anic and prophetic texts through an antisemitic lens and turning them into a total worldview.

Esther Webman shows how this theological move plays out in practice. Historically, calling someone “a Jew” in Arab discourse could function as an insult, but Jews were not imagined as a cosmic danger. Islamist antisemitism changes this. Drawing directly on Qutb’s legacy, it turns “the Jew” into a symbol of corruption itself, a source of all evil whose very existence is portrayed as a threat that must be removed. This is the same logic later adopted by Hamas, whose charter similarly frames Jews as eternal enemies of Islam, citing Qur’anic verses and Hadith to justify a religious war rather than a political struggle.

Taken together, these insights forced me to let go of my earlier hope. Qutb’s antisemitism is not based on a misunderstanding that can be corrected by explaining Jewish beliefs or traditions. It is anchored in theology, reinforced by scripture, and presented as absolute and non-negotiable.

To conclude this essay, I see no hope in trying to highlight Orthodox Jewish tradition in order to convince Islamists that Jews are more similar to them than they think. Islamist antisemitism does not hate the Jew only because he is seen as too progressive or liberal. Even the Jew of Qur’anic times, long before secularism existed, is portrayed as an eternal enemy who must be eradicated.

This goes far beyond pseudo-scientific ideas or conspiracy theories driven by resentment over “Jewish success.” It is not merely the product of social frustration or misinformation. It is embedded in religious conviction, and for that reason it cannot be changed by facts or clarification.

I can understand this logic to a certain extent. The Torah, too, speaks of Amalek as an eternal enemy of God who must be eradicated. The difference is that across Jewish theology, Amalek ultimately became a symbol of the evil within ourselves that must be confronted in order to draw closer to God. In Islamist antisemitism, by contrast, the enemy is not symbolic. The living Jew himself is seen as a threat that must be eliminated.