Fascist politics and corporate feudalism are driving Jew-hatred
“If you see the poor oppressed in a province, and justice and righteousness trampled, do not be astonished at the matter; for one official is watched by a higher one, and there are yet higher ones over them.” —Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) 5:8
A response to Jacob Dallal, “Have we crossed the antisemitism Rubicon?”
There is no doubt: the sharp rise in antisemitism after October 7 is a fact, not a feeling. Surveys, monitoring by Jewish organizations, and everyday experience all point to a lasting escalation of hostility and violence, especially among younger generations in Western countries. Jacob Dallal’s article captures well the fear and estrangement many Jews in the US and Europe feel, and the sense that the “golden age” of Jewish security in the West may be ending.
But if we describe this process only in the language of a “return of antisemitism,” we lose sight of what is decisive. It is not only about Jews, and it is not only about hatred. The Rubicon that is being crossed in many countries is the passage from a demoralised liberal democracy to a hybrid of fascist politics and corporate feudalism. Antisemitism is one of the languages of this transformation – not its cause, and not its only content.
What is really breaking
Dallal concentrates on the symptoms: protests outside synagogues, physical attacks, boycotts, the casual use of terms like “genocide” as self-evident descriptions of Israel. These are real. But by themselves, they explain very little.
The breach runs elsewhere: in the material of everyday life. In the United States, we see at the same time an opioid epidemic, a collapse of public health, soaring obesity, a failing health care system, student and housing debt that condemns whole cohorts to a sense of defeat before life even begins. In many other countries – Brazil, India, large parts of Europe – the pattern is similar: dismantling of welfare institutions, privatisation of basic services, concentration of wealth in the hands of a small bloc of corporations and oligarchs.
In such conditions, representative democracy looks less and less like a promise of equal citizenship and more like theatre: a stage on which cultural conflicts are performed while the infrastructure of life is privatised and real power moves to the world of digital platforms, investment funds, and closed networks of influence. Antisemitism returns here as a convenient code: an old language of anger that can be plugged into new political machinery.
And it does not return alone. It comes bundled with racism, misogyny, transphobia, hatred of migrants – the whole kit of “substitute effects” managed by contemporary far-right politics and by techno-political elites. “Jew” and “Israel” are two figures in this kit, not the only ones.
Fascism without uniforms, feudalism without castles
The word “fascism” is overused, but there is a minimal set of features we can identify: a cult of the leader, mobilisation of rage against “internal enemies,” a myth of the nation under attack from an external conspiracy, and a desire for “order” stronger than attachment to human rights and the rule of law.
In many countries, in very different versions, this package is back. In the US as Trumpism, in Central and Eastern Europe, as a mix of nationalism, resentment and oligarchy, in India, as Hindutva, in Israel, in a messianic-ethnocratic version. Antisemitism can be central in this package (as in parts of the white far right in the US), or it can be more of a secondary tool, a way to attack “global elites,” “finance,” “cosmopolitan media.”
At the same time, we see the rise of what could be called corporate feudalism: a system in which we formally still have capitalism and democracy, but real dependencies increasingly resemble vassalage. Digital platforms become private legal-informational spaces; tech billionaires decide who counts as a “civilised partner” and who as an “enemy of freedom.” The recent conflict between a major social media owner and the ADL, where a Jewish organisation monitoring far-right extremism was branded a “hate group” by one of the richest men on the planet, is an almost textbook example of this reversal of victim and persecutor.
In such a structure, antisemitism becomes not only hatred of Jews, but also a tool for disciplining Jews: you will either accept the role the new order assigns you (loyal to “Judeo-Christian civilisation,” grateful for “protection”), or you will be moved into the category of “internal enemy.”
Christian Zionism: love for Jews without Jews
Dallal is right to point out the radicalisation of anti-Israel sentiment on parts of the left and among younger generations. But something else is happening in parallel: a part of the right is constructing a political project in which “the Jew” and Israel are functions in a Christian, nationalist narrative about “Western civilisation.”
Steve Bannon, often read as one of the ideologues of the new far right, speaks obsessively about “Judeo-Christian civilisation,” while drawing on old tropes of “financial elites” and “globalists.” In Christian nationalist movements, support for Israel is often intertwined with antisemitism: the Jew is simultaneously an ally in the culture war and a suspicious, external body inside the national community.
Names such as Donald Trump, JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and others matter here not as random examples but as figures who have discovered that they can do three things at once:
– proclaim unconditional support for Israel,
– appeal to evangelical eschatological imaginaries (Israel as a stage of the end times),
– and, at the same time, draw on antisemitic imagination about “Jewish liberals,” “Jewish cultural elites,” or “Jewish globalists.”
This is not incoherence; it is a logic. In that logic, the Jew is not a concrete citizen of the US, France or Israel with a biography, conflicts and political agency. The Jew is a theological function in a Christian narrative: a confirmation that the Bible is true, that the West is exceptional, that there is a sacred “covenant” between the chosen people and a new “nation of the covenant.” When real Jews – especially real Israelis – fail to behave according to this script, the tone can be switched very quickly: from “younger brother in faith” to “traitor” or “ingrate.”
A “pro-Israelism” that is ending
On the Israeli side, there is a parallel story that is rarely named directly. Parts of the Israeli right made a strategic bet on a long-term alliance with the American evangelical right. In exchange for political support – moving the US embassy, blocking criticism of Israel in international institutions, legitimising settlement policies – Israel became a crucial element in the identity architecture of American Christian nationalism.
There are growing indications that this bet is backfiring. The same electoral base that still declares love for Israel increasingly flirts with conspiratorial language about “Jewish capital,” “Jewish globalists,” or “cultural Marxism with a Jewish face.” The transition from “we love Israel” to “Jews are behind the secular, liberal corruption of our nation” does not require much conceptual effort.
For this logic, it is vital to split Jews into “good” and “bad.” The “good Jews” are those who support a strong, ethnically defined nation-state and align with the Christian nationalist project. The “bad Jews” are those in the diaspora and in the Israeli left who continue to speak in the language of minority rights, human rights, international law. They become more threatening than Muslims or migrants, because they are seen as “betraying their own people.”
This is what twenty-first-century fascism looks like: it does not need to hate all Jews at once. It is enough to select some Jews, for some time, as useful allies in dismantling liberal institutions.
No sentimentalism: Protestant roots of “love for Jews”
On top of this lies the long shadow of Protestant philosemitism. For decades, many Americans were raised on stories of “righteous among the nations,” on sermons about the duty to support “God’s people,” on films and books that connected Christian virtue with defending Jews. That tradition matters and should not be dismissed.
But this tradition also had a second side. The Jew in it was often more a theological figure than a real neighbour, doctor, teacher, or critic of Israeli policies. Philosemitism without encounter easily slides into disappointment and anger when “the Jewish people” do not perform as expected in the script of world salvation.
This helps explain how the same Protestant base that yesterday supported Israel with religious fervour can today embrace conspiracy theories about “Jewish elites” or “Jewish cultural subversion,” as long as these theories are wrapped in a narrative about defending “Christian civilisation” and fighting “globalism.”
Israel is not “the Jews,” Jews are not “Israel”
Both the far left and the far right often give in to a similar temptation: to reduce all of Judaism to the State of Israel, and all of Israeli history to the policies of the current government.
Inside Israel itself, however, the fractures are deep and old. Ultra-Orthodox currents have for a long time rejected the theological legitimacy of the State of Israel, precisely because the Messiah has not come and the Temple has not been rebuilt. For them, the Zionist project was a secular, pre-messianic appropriation of promises that belong to a different horizon. This internal Jewish critique of Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism, yet it is systematically erased from public discussion, because it complicates the simple map “Jews = Israel = current government.”
In the diaspora, there is a full spectrum of positions: from unconditional support for government policies, through critical solidarity, to radical distance. Throwing all these stances into one basket may be convenient for those who want to speak “in the name of the Jews,” but it does not help us understand either antisemitism or the crisis of the modern nation-state.
Which Rubicon are we crossing?
Against this background, the question “Have we crossed the antisemitism Rubicon?” is important but incomplete. The Rubicon being crossed today in many places is the passage from a system where open hatred of minorities was at least officially shameful, to a system where hatred – of Jews, Muslims, migrants, LGBT people, women – is becoming an accepted instrument for managing socio-economic frustration.
It is the Rubicon between the rule of law and the rule of emotions: between politics as a conflict over institutions and politics as mobilisation of rage against “traitors” and “fifth columns.” Antisemitism is one of the idioms of this mobilisation. Not the only one, and – in a way that is even more dangerous – not necessarily the central one.
In a world where real power is concentrating in the hands of corporations, tech billionaires and nationalist networks, Jews can be among the first victims and also among the first “tactical allies,” as long as they are willing to play a designated role. Once their role expires, the script changes fast.
If we want to think seriously about the future of Jews in the US, Europe or Israel, we need to move beyond the simple axis of “more or less antisemitism.” The more fundamental questions are: what kind of regime are we moving into? What kind of economy? What kind of health, education and work infrastructure?
Fascism and corporate feudalism do not require antisemitism in order to function. But if we lend them this old, proven language of hatred, they will use it to the full – and then they will find other groups to cast as “co-conspirators” or “internal enemies.”
Instead of asking only whether the antisemitism Rubicon has been crossed, we should ask a harder question: are we crossing a constitutional Rubicon in which antisemitism becomes one of the official dialects of a new, post-democratic order?
And is this not precisely the moment when, rather than once again placing our trust in “friends of the Jews,” from whatever political side, we should begin to build alliances based not on sentimental identifications or eschatological hopes, but on a clear recognition of the material conditions of life of all those whom this new order intends to turn into its expendable population.
