The Irresistible Urge

Why Europe’s oldest hatred refuses to die, why the West keeps surrendering to it, and why the Jewish world continues to fight the wrong war.

There is something almost pathological about the West’s relationship with the Jews. For centuries, European nations persecuted, expelled, dispossessed, forcibly converted, segregated, and ultimately participated in the attempted extermination of their Jewish populations. Throughout the centuries, whenever their societies encountered crises they could not explain, conflicts they could not resolve, or failures they could not acknowledge, the Jews became the scapegoat.

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism became socially disreputable in the democratic West. Now, less than a century later, it appears that European antisemitism didn’t actually disappear, only that Europeans have learned new ways to express it openly. How is it that societies that have spent generations teaching the dangers of antisemitism remain susceptible to it? The warning is not simply that antisemitism has returned, but in how little resistance its resurgence has encountered.

Europe’s Culture of Antisemitism

To understand the contemporary response to Israel, we must consider the countries whose historical relationships with Jews were shaped by centuries of exclusion, persecution, and, in too many cases, mass murder. National histories create enduring cultural narratives, political reflexes, and moral blind spots. Many societies that have repudiated their pasts continue to hold certain core beliefs, instilled over centuries, that perpetuate the very core beliefs that made the now-repudiated past possible.

Given their past conduct toward the Jews, is it any wonder Spain vilifies Israel? How about Ireland or the Netherlands? Any historical surprises with France or the United Kingdom? Is contemporary hostility toward Israel due solely to policy disputes, or can older cultural bigotries be lingering beneath a new political vocabulary?

Why the Temptation Is So Powerful

The irresistible urge to join the antisemitic wave can be found in six hard-to-resist forces.

First, there is the political utility of a common enemy. Domestic politics is often complicated by hard-to-resolve issues like economic stagnation, immigration, housing shortages, and cultural fragmentation. Condemning Israel creates an opportunity for moral theater without requiring governments to address their own failures.

Second, there is the appeal of ideological simplicity. Contemporary political culture increasingly rewards binary categories like oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, powerful and powerless. Israel is particularly vulnerable to this framework because its military strength is visible, while the historical vulnerability that made Jewish sovereignty necessary is less immediately understood.

Third, there is the pressure of domestic constituencies. Governments respond to voters, activists, institutions, media organizations, and organized political movements. That is normal democratic behavior. The danger arises when leaders allow political pressure to determine moral standards, applying principles to Israel that they would not apply elsewhere or failing to confront antisemitism within movements they regard as electorally valuable.

Fourth, there is institutional conformity. Universities, cultural organizations, NGOs, professional associations, and political parties are highly susceptible to reputational pressure. Once a position becomes a marker of moral respectability, dissent can carry a social cost. People repeat claims they have not examined, endorse slogans they do not fully understand, or remain silent about intimidation because challenging the prevailing narrative threatens their standing.

Fifth, there is the psychological satisfaction of righteous condemnation. To paraphrase Dr. Naya Lekht, hatred never introduces itself as hatred. It presents itself as moral obligation, allowing people to experience themselves as courageous opponents of injustice.

Sixth, there is the enduring adaptability of antisemitism itself. Antisemitism is more an explanation for whatever a society fears than it is a coherent theory about Jews. Israel (and by extension the Jews), provides a highly visible object onto which those fears can be projected.

None of these factors require us to believe that Europeans are inherently antisemitic. But they do require us to recognize that European political culture has retained prejudicial habits toward the Jews, even as their citizens claim to have rejected the doctrines from which those habits emerged.

When Jewish institutions require extraordinary security, Jewish students conceal their identities, synagogues are threatened, Jewish businesses and professionals are boycotted, and Jewish citizens are treated as representatives of a foreign government, the boundary between criticism of Israel and hostility toward Jews has already been breached.

Western leaders know this and yet they tolerate or exploit antisemitic rhetoric, either because they themselves believe it, or they think hostility toward Israel, contained within foreign-policy debate, can be separated from the safety of Jewish citizens. History, alongside the unconcealed antisemitism we are witnessing today, suggests they are wrong.

Why are Jews surprised?

What precisely did we believe had happened after 1945? Did we believe that two thousand years of anti-Jewish prejudice had been permanently erased by the revelation of the Holocaust? Did we think that museums, memorials, school curricula, and commemorative speeches had fundamentally transformed the cultural instincts of entire societies? We mistook the public suppression of antisemitism for its disappearance. There is a difference between building institutions that discourage prejudice and eliminating the conditions that make prejudice attractive.

The post-Holocaust consensus created powerful constraints against explicit antisemitism, but it did not guarantee that antisemitism could never return. And it certainly did not guarantee that the next generation would inherit the emotional force of lessons learned by their great-grandparents. For many young Westerners, the Holocaust is a historical event. Algorithmically boosted anti-Israel content, by contrast, appears on their phones daily. Which do we imagine will shape their immediate political instincts?

We, as a community, have invested enormously in teaching people what antisemitism looked like in the past, but have not been equally successful in teaching them to recognize how it operates in the present. We have confused historical remembrance with contemporary resilience. The distinction may be proving disastrous.

As a community, Jews are overwhelmingly organized to respond to antisemitism after it appears. We are primed to respond when a synagogue is vandalized, a Jewish student is threatened, an antisemitic conspiracy reaches a mainstream audience, a media outlet misleads, a politician repeats an inflammatory accusation, or a demonstration becomes an occasion for intimidation.

Our response arrives after the vandalism, after the student is scarred, after emotional associations are formed, and after political pressure has been created. We are attempting to correct beliefs after the machinery that produced those beliefs has finished its work. We become trapped in strategies designed for a world that no longer exists. It is the equivalent of deploying firefighters to every fire while ignoring the network of arsonists, accelerants, and ignition systems spreading the flames.

Why, then, do we continue relying so heavily on the same methods? Part of the answer may lie in our institutions themselves. Organizations develop expertise, professional cultures, funding structures, and measures of success around the problems they were created to confront. Consequently, established institutions can become exceptionally capable of responding to the visible consequences of antisemitism while remaining less equipped to confront the systems that generate and amplify it.

There is also a psychological dimension to our own institutional behavior. Familiar strategies offer reassurance. They allow us to demonstrate that we are acting, that we are defending our communities, and that we are demanding accountability. They draw upon decades of experience and relationships with political leaders, educators, law enforcement, and civil society. But activity is not necessarily effectiveness, and the ability to respond to an incident should not be confused with the ability to prevent the conditions that produced it.

We must question our longstanding reliance on the moral authority of Holocaust remembrance. For decades, Jewish advocacy has operated partly on the assumption that reminding Western societies of their historical failures would encourage them to resist contemporary antisemitism. But this approach depends upon those societies accepting the relevance of that history to their present conduct. We are now confronting a new generation that believes that it has absorbed the lessons of the Holocaust, considers itself morally superior to the generations that perpetrated it, and regards accusations of contemporary antisemitism as attempts to silence its political convictions. What happens when the very people we hope to persuade believe that their hostility is not prejudice, but evidence of their commitment to justice?

This is why the contemporary information environment represents such a fundamental challenge. Antisemitism no longer depends exclusively on traditional institutions, political movements, or recognizable ideological organizations to spread. It can be packaged as entertainment, circulated through seemingly ordinary social media accounts, reinforced by coordinated networks, and introduced into mainstream discussion through repeated exposure.

We must develop an equally serious capacity to intervene before falsehoods become accepted truths. We must learn to compete in the information environment where attitudes are being formed, rather than relying primarily on institutions designed to respond after those attitudes have produced consequences.

The West has its irresistible urge to rediscover the usefulness of antisemitism. We may have developed an irresistible urge of our own: to believe that the methods that once protected us will automatically protect us again.

In light of the limitations of our current approach, we must recognize that more commemorations will not, by themselves, interrupt an algorithmic amplification campaign. More security guards will not prevent millions of young people from encountering fabricated narratives.

If antisemitism is being amplified upstream through coordinated information operations, then the response must reach upstream as well. We must understand who creates the narratives, who finances their distribution, who amplifies them, how they cross platforms, and how they acquire the appearance of truth. We must learn to fight not only the consequences of hatred, but the systems that accelerate its spread.

If we fail to recognize the difference between the hatred we have always confronted and the machinery that now accelerates it, we risk becoming extraordinarily proficient at documenting a problem we have not learned how to prevent.

In Conclusion

The current crises confronting world Jewry is more than the West’s recurring tendency to turn against the Jews. At play is a broader failure of human societies – the irresistible urge to find a scapegoat, to transform complex problems into simple moral accusations, to exchange historical responsibility for contemporary self-righteousness, to join a movement that offers belonging, certainty, and the intoxicating feeling of moral superiority.

The Jewish community’s contemporary failure would be to recognize this pattern, watch it being amplified through the most powerful communications infrastructure ever created, and continue responding as though we were living in a different century.

We cannot assume that Western leaders will resist the political incentives to tolerate or exploit antisemitism. If we want this to end differently from every earlier chapter, we have to go upstream, find where the current is being made, and work there. The antisemitism is ancient, but the machinery is new. Our strategy must finally recognize the difference.