Of Cults and Causes: The New Ideological Possession in Our Midst

It didn’t begin with violence. It began with slogans—simple, stark, seductive. It began with posters pinned to university walls and hashtags whispered through lecture halls. Palestine was no longer a geography or a people. It became a mantra. And as with all mantras, repetition begot reverence, and reverence made way for ritual.

Soon, protest ceased to be a tool of democratic contestation and became something else entirely. The march became a procession. The placard, an icon. And dissent—not from the state, but from within the movement—became blasphemy.

We are no longer dealing with a protest culture in the classical sense. What we are witnessing today, across campuses, social movements, and digital spaces, is the transformation of a political position into a totalising belief system. This is no longer solidarity—it is sanctification. Not advocacy, but absolution. Palestine is the new sacrament, and its high priests will tolerate neither heresy nor hesitation.

The psychological dynamics of this shift are not accidental. They mirror, almost precisely, the internal logic of the cult. The cause demands not merely agreement but conversion. Identity is stripped down and rebuilt in service of the creed. Moral complexity is replaced by moral purity. And the target—always the same—is not just Israel, but the Jew.

What follows in this analysis is an examination of that psychological possession, its structure, its methods, and the threat it now poses not only to Jewish life, but to the very integrity of civil society.

Let us be clear from the outset: to support the Palestinian people is not cultish. To mourn the loss of innocent lives in war is not ideological possession. But what we are witnessing now, from the radical flank of the pro-Palestinian movement, is something else entirely. It is a rupture from reality, a departure from nuance, and the entrance into the intoxicating architecture of cultism.

Like all cults, this new form begins by emptying the self. It demands a moral tabula rasa. Previous identities—national, religious, familial—are cast aside. One is reborn in the image of the Cause. And what is the Cause? It is the struggle, the purity of the victim, the monolithic righteousness of the oppressed. All history is restructured around this one, totalising lens. The Holocaust fades into irrelevance; October 7 becomes inconvenient to mention; Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, but a misunderstood liberation front. It is not amnesia. It is willed forgetting.

From that forgetting flows the next step: submission. The adherent no longer thinks. He repeats. He does not ask, “Is this just?” but rather, “Is this permissible within the cause?” The movement supplies a new vocabulary, stripped of uncertainty. Words like decolonise, intifada, resistance—words whose complexity once mattered—are chanted like psalms. The language is no longer a means of communication. It is a liturgy.

It is in this transformation that one sees the true pathology. A young protester shouts for the death of Jews and does not hear himself. A professor excuses rape and calls it a form of political expression. A crowd gathers to cheer the storming of a consulate or the desecration of a war memorial—and they call it “justice.” What are these, if not acts of ideological possession?

The cult’s greatest trick, of course, is its inversion of virtue. Compassion becomes rage. Solidarity becomes siege. The public square is no longer a place of encounter, but a theatre of performance. Opposing voices are not debated but erased. The Jew is not a citizen, nor even a human being, but an emblem—of capitalism, of whiteness, of colonialism, of every ill that the cult seeks to expunge.

And always, like a shadow cast across the wall, looms the enemy—not the Israeli soldier, nor even the state of Israel in its political form, but the metaphysical Israel: the Jew as permanent antagonist, the Zionist as cosmic evil. This, too, is an inheritance from every cult of violence in modern memory, from the pogrom to the gulag.

Let us also not ignore the theological element—because what we are seeing is a false religion masquerading as politics. In its cosmology, the Palestinian cause has become a sacred object, a relic above reproach. Its martyrs are saints. Its symbols are sacraments. Its scripture is grievance. To question it is not disagreement; it is heresy. And the heretic must be excommunicated—fired, silenced, erased.

There is also the element of apocalypse. Every cult believes in a coming reckoning, a final purging of impurity. And here, too, one hears the longing—for the fall of Israel, for the end of Zionism, for the disappearance of Jewish presence. These are not political objectives. They are dreams of annihilation.

And yet, this cult is not confined to some fringe. It has penetrated elite institutions, cultural bastions, schools and charities. Its sympathies have migrated into editorial pages, into parliamentary corridors. The boundary between the criminal and the acceptable has begun to dissolve. The adherents of the cult are not only tolerated—they are, in some cases, celebrated.

But who, then, will call this what it is?

Because this is not a movement for peace. It is not a politics of liberation. It is a system of enchantment, an anti-democratic, anti-rational, anti-Semitic movement dressed in the garb of progressive politics. It offers absolution in place of accountability. And for a generation hungry for purpose, it offers a new gospel—one that asks not for compassion but for sacrifice.

It is time to name this thing. Time to recognise that we are not dealing with a protest culture, but with a new cult of purity and violence, one whose targets are Jews, whose logic is persecution, and whose trajectory—if unchecked—is catastrophe.

And to those still unsure, to those still hoping for reason: remember this. The first duty of a democratic society is not to tolerate the intolerant. It is to defend truth, even when truth is difficult. It is to see clearly, and to speak with moral clarity.

The cult is here. It has names. It has chants. It has followers. And it must be resisted—with law, with courage, and with the unflinching defence of that oldest and most imperilled of truths: that the Jews have a right to live, and that Israel has a right to exist.