A first responder holds a waterpipe at the site of an Israeli strike in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City on May 15, 2026. AFP via Getty Images Few could have predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century — and in America of all places.
After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East: It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive and legislative checks and balances.
Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity and tolerance of gays are guaranteed, in marked contrast to all its neighbors.
True, the recent affluence of the Gulf states presents a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media.
But just because Qatar didn’t censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha doesn’t make it a free society.
After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance.
So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?
There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.
First, demography: The US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and substantially higher birth rates than the American norm.
There are now nearly 5 million Muslim Americans; by 2030, their numbers will likely surpass the Jewish American population.
And billions of dollars in the last few years have flowed into American universities from the Gulf states.
These enormous sums bankroll weaponized Middle East Studies programs and enrich left-wing NGOs.
An entire generation of young American elites has been groomed in universities to despise Israel and, by extension, to express hostility toward Jews.
After Oct. 7, the scab was torn away, revealing what had festered underneath for years.
Second, the DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus.
In this Marxist moral schema, the world is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims.”
The dichotomy is reductive and often absurd, collapsing immense differences in class, wealth, power, culture and historical circumstance into a crude racial narrative.
Superficial appearance can brand one as a nonwhite victim — and once so identified, the supposedly oppressed are granted exemptions from censure.
DEI offers a pass from charges of antisemitism on the theory that the oppressed cannot themselves become oppressors.
Jews in America found themselves classified among the whitest and most privileged of the oppressor class, perhaps by virtue of their material success, while Israel abroad was deemed a white colonialist settler state.
Third, Israel itself is no longer the underdog of 1947, 1956, 1967 or 1973.
In this century, Benjamin Netanyahu helped open the Israeli economy and foster a meritocratic, free-market boom.
Only oil-rich Qatar and the UAE surpass Israel in regional per capita income.
Its military, honed over generations of warfare, has become more capable than those of France, Germany or the UK in key areas, especially combat aviation.
In short, tiny underdog Israel has been recast as the settler “overdog” bully.
Oct. 7 and its aftermath, counterintuitively, accelerated the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hatred.
If Israel had not responded to the massacre, the new anti-Israel cohort would have claimed their inaction was a passive admission of prior guilt for which the attack was merely partial payment.
Yet once Israel moved to destroy Hamas, it was branded genocidal.
How could any army descend into a billion-dollar, booby-trapped labyrinth of tunnels, its exits and entries hidden beneath schools, private homes, mosques, and hospitals, to free hostages and kill terrorists while the media effectively shilled for Hamas?
Finally, the new Jacobin agenda means that anti-Israelism has merged into a broader leftist potpourri of open borders, illegal immigration, anti-ICE violence, Green New Deal-style wokism and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
These causes are viewed as an inseparable package whose elements are interconnected — and no apostasy from any of them is tolerated.
Jacobinism has become an all-or-nothing litmus test.
For figures like Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer to forcefully challenge hatred of Israel — and, by extension, of the Jews — would now be treated as political heresy, a career-ending death wish.
So the old party has largely kept mum and sanctioned the new loathing.
As for the “conservative” podcasters and internet influencers now fixated on the Jews, perhaps they had grown tired of being ostracized from popular culture and establishment media and entertainment.
The left has found them useful as both shields and validators: Their rhetoric suggests that virulent anti-Israelism is not merely a left-wing fixation but something shared across the political spectrum.
And in the final irony, what is left blocking the pathway of antisemitism is the supposed bigot Donald Trump and his “irredeemable,” “deplorable” MAGA movement — the last dam holding back, for now, the rising flood.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
