When Obsession Replaces Judgment: A Moroccan Arab Reflection on Anti-Zionism, the West, and Moral Collapse

I want to begin with something personal. I am a Moroccan Arab. I was raised Muslim. I grew up with deep sympathy for the suffering of others, especially Palestinians. And yet today, I am openly pro-Israel and pro–Jewish life — not in spite of my background, but because of it. What I am witnessing now, both in the Middle East and in the West, forces honesty. Not slogans. Not tribal loyalty. Honesty.

In recent years, Jews have been attacked and murdered in places that once prided themselves on moral clarity — Colorado, Manchester, Bondi, Washington D.C. Each time, the Jewish community mourns. Each time, they rebuild. And each time, the broader moral class hesitates, looks away, or explains. One moment from Australia still haunts me: after the Bondi massacre, the prime minister found time to visit a heroic bystander — but not the Jewish victims. Not because he denied their suffering, but because he feared protest. Fear of outrage had replaced duty. At the same time, mass protests in Iran — courageous young people risking their lives — were met with near silence from Western progressive elites. Videos of resistance were suppressed. Defenders of the ayatollahs were louder than defenders of the victims. This is not a coincidence; it is a pattern.

For decades, Western societies were admired — even in the Arab world — for something precious: the ability to judge complexity without hysteria, to distinguish victim from aggressor, to resist ideological intoxication. That capacity is now breaking down. Instead of analysis, we have moral theater. Instead of responsibility, we have slogans. Instead of courage, we have reputation management. Politics has been reduced to a childish moral sorting game: who is oppressed, who is wounded, who performs pain convincingly enough to earn moral immunity. Under this logic, the more barbaric an actor becomes, the more its violence is excused — because someone else must have “caused” it. Hamas massacres civilians, and somehow Israel is blamed for “provoking” it. This is not moral reasoning. It is moral collapse.

Here is the uncomfortable truth many refuse to face: in much of the Muslim and Arab world, anti-Zionism has replaced theology as the core moral identity. You can be atheist. You can reject Islam. You can reject God entirely. But you cannot be pro-Israel. This is why secular Arab intellectuals often sound indistinguishable from Islamists when speaking about Jews. This is why Gaza commands endless outrage while Sudan — sharing borders with Egypt — barely registers. This is why Jewish suffering is always contextualized, but never centered. Anti-Zionism is no longer a political position. It is the organizing myth, the story that explains failure, humiliation, and resentment without requiring self-examination.

This obsession did not emerge naturally from Islam. It was engineered. In the twentieth century, Arab elites imported European ideologies wholesale — fascism, Marxism, racial nationalism — and grafted them onto societies hollowed out by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Jews became the universal enemy through borrowed European antisemitic frameworks, later sanctified by religious language. When secular nationalism failed, Islamism inherited the same hatreds: different vocabulary, same structure. Once absorbed, these ideas reproduced endlessly. Even those who “escaped” religion carried the worldview with them. The enemy remained the same.

What terrifies me today is not only what happened in the Middle East, but how these ideas have returned to Europe and North America, disguised as moral progress. Western institutions, hollowed out by elite competition and moral cowardice, proved defenseless. Universities chose donor protection over student safety. Media chose outrage over truth. Activism became a performance of righteousness rather than a search for justice. Into this vacuum stepped well-funded foreign actors, ideological networks, and domestic opportunists. They did not invent Western radicalism; they invested in it because it worked. Anti-Zionism became the ultimate moral weapon — flexible enough to unite Islamists, far-left activists, and reactionary populists — each projecting their resentments onto the same target.

Jews occupy a dangerous position in modern societies: visible, successful, morally demanding, and historically persecuted. In moments of elite competition and cultural crisis, this visibility becomes vulnerability. Remove Jews, delegitimize Israel, and you create space — symbolic and literal — for new elites to rise. This is why anti-Zionism metastasized across the political spectrum. It offers moral prestige without accountability, rage without responsibility, unity without truth. It is the cheapest form of righteousness, because it demands nothing from those who perform it except louder declarations.

Israel’s greatest “crime” is not only its policies; it is its existence. A Jewish state that survives, defends itself, argues internally, corrects itself, and refuses to disappear shatters the mythology that Jews are powerless — or illegitimate. Israel exposes the lie at the heart of antisemitic worldviews: that Jewish dignity must always depend on permission. For those who built their identity around Jewish fragility and inevitable collapse, Israel is the unforgivable reality.

I left the Middle East not because I hated my people, but because I refused to live inside a system where questioning the moral order is punished. You can live comfortably there — if you don’t think too deeply, if you don’t challenge the narrative, if you don’t ask why women are brutalized, minorities silenced, and Jews demonized. Importing these unresolved pathologies into Western societies was always going to end badly. We are seeing the early results now, and the speed of the deterioration should terrify anyone who still believes liberal democracy is self-sustaining.

Being pro-Israel does not require abandoning compassion for Palestinians. It requires rejecting the addiction to hatred that has destroyed too many societies already. Peace is not built on myths. Justice is not built on lies. And moral clarity is not built on obsession. I speak as a Moroccan, as an Arab, as a Muslim, and I say this with full awareness of the cost: the fixation on Jews has broken the moral compass of entire cultures. Israel is not the disease. It is the mirror. And until we have the courage to look into it honestly, the collapse will continue — everywhere.