The Moment of Reckoning That Never Came

Since October 7th, I’ve remained open—almost uncomfortably so—to the possibility that I was wrong. That what I understood as Jewish self-defense was in fact something more sinister. That Zionism, far from an indigenous liberation movement, might be, as critics claim, a modern form of racial supremacy. I waited for that moment of moral reckoning, the one where all the accusations—of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing—would suddenly cohere into a truth I had failed to grasp.

But that moment never came.

Instead, what became clearer with time was not the revelation of some hidden Zionist evil, but the operation of a much older and more insidious logic: the conspiracy about Jews. What presents itself today as moral consensus—within elite institutions, NGOs, activist spaces, and academia—is not the product of critical investigation. It is the product of an echo chamber that reproduces and intensifies an antisemitic narrative under the guise of social justice.

This consensus is not simply mistaken; it is conspiratorial in structure. It begins with the presumption that Jews must be hiding something—that behind Israel’s security discourse lies a racist agenda, that behind Jewish historical trauma lies a manipulative deflection, that behind every Jewish institution lies complicity in global oppression. The function of the echo chamber is to reinforce these presumptions through selective citation, moral repetition, and the exclusion of dissenting—especially Jewish—voices.

Terms like “genocide,” “settler-colonialism,” and “apartheid” circulate not as conclusions reached through rigorous analysis, but as axioms that organize the discourse itself. They operate as ideological litmus tests: to question them is to place oneself outside the moral community. Yet the lived realities that contradict them—Hamas’ own genocidal commitments, the demographic growth of the Palestinian population, the persistent attacks on Jews worldwide—are dismissed or distorted, because they interrupt the flow of confirmation.

Rather than uncovering some buried Zionist conspiracy, this system conceals the structure of contemporary antisemitism. It erases the ideological lineage connecting antizionism with classic antisemitic tropes. It suppresses Jewish history, rewrites Jewish indigeneity, and renders Jewish national identity uniquely illegitimate. It enacts what it claims to expose: a grand moral inversion, in which the people most consistently targeted across history are refigured as the world’s most dangerous oppressors.

In this framework, the moral conscience of the antizionist left is preserved not through engagement with truth, but through insulation from it. Jewish claims to peoplehood, to collective memory, to self-determination, are not refuted but foreclosed. The chamber does not allow for the possibility that Jews might be telling the truth—not about Israel, not about antisemitism, not about ourselves.

So no—there was no moment when the mask slipped and the Zionist conspiracy revealed itself. What revealed itself instead was the recursive logic of an antisemitic consensus that builds upon itself, feeds on moral certainty, and shields its participants from having to ask whether what they are reproducing is not justice at all—but a new iteration of a very old lie.