Nothing justifies antisemitism.

That must be the starting premise of any serious analysis on the subject. Despite this, since October 7, 2023, attempts have become frequent to associate the surge in antisemitic incidents worldwide with the policies of the Israeli government—or even with the very existence of the State of Israel.

It is a tempting argument in its simplicity, but it does not withstand a more rigorous historical and sociological examination.

First, it is worth recalling the obvious: hostility toward Jews was not born in 1948, nor in 2023. It has spanned centuries of history.

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, it took the form of religious anti-Judaism; in modernity, it morphed into a racial ideology and became a pillar of Nazism.

Moreover, blaming Israel for the rise of antisemitism ignores the fact that this hatred had already been on the rise for more than a decade, long before the current escalation in Gaza.

International surveys had pointed to this trend, fueled both by the digital spread of hate speech and by the strengthening of ultranationalist movements in various regions of the world.

Second, holding Israel responsible shifts the blame away from the true agents of antisemitism: the antisemites themselves.

This logic is equivalent to blaming the victim for the violence they suffer or using an external factor to minimize the responsibility of the perpetrator—a historical mechanism applied against various minorities.

Antisemites are not automatons reacting to external stimuli: they are individuals with agency, who choose to embrace hatred and must be held accountable for it.

It is worth recalling that blaming Jews for antisemitism is an old trick.

Antisemitism has always operated through conspiracy theories attributing to Jews the ability to manipulate others’ behavior.

During the Russian Civil War, for example, around 250,000 Jews were massacred in pogroms carried out largely by anti-Bolshevik forces. These massacres were justified as a reaction to the alleged “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

The same reasoning was employed by Nazism: Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and responsible for the murder of more than one million Jews, even wrote in his memoirs:

“Antisemitism is nothing new. It has always existed all over the world. It becomes more apparent when the Jews push themselves too much in their pursuit of power.”

Today, this rationale is recycled when people claim that antisemitism is merely a reaction to Israel’s actions.

Another problem with this perspective is that it absolves states of their responsibilities.

When a Jew is assaulted in Paris, New York, or São Paulo, it is the duty of the local state to ensure their safety.

Shifting the blame to Israel means excusing governments that fail to protect their own citizens and turning a domestic obligation into an external problem.

There is also an evident racial dimension to this logic.

As Tzvetan Todorov notes in Us and Them, one of the hallmarks of racism is reducing the individual to a representative of a category, treating the behavior of one as defining for all.

When someone attacks random Jews in London or Buenos Aires under the pretext of protesting Israel, they are not engaging in political resistance but reproducing racial hatred.

This does not mean shielding Israel from criticism, nor ignoring when Israeli leaders themselves harm the debate by labeling legitimate criticism as antisemitism.

Like any state, Israel can and should be held accountable for its policies, and criticizing governments or specific decisions is not, in itself, antisemitism.

The problem lies in framing antisemitism as the inevitable consequence of those policies: this normalizes a dangerous practice of collectively blaming Jews for the actions of a government.

The analogy is simple: those who project their hatred of the Chinese Communist Party onto all Chinese people—or even onto all East Asians—are not criticizing the Chinese government; they are being racist.

The same happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when hate crimes against East Asians multiplied.

Most of us, rightly, blamed the aggressors, not the virus nor China. The same reasoning should apply to Jews.

Ultimately, blaming Israel for the rise of antisemitism not only fails to explain the phenomenon but also weakens the fight against it.

After all, if antisemitism is merely a reflection of Israeli policies, then the struggle is not against antisemitism itself but only against Israel’s policies.

And that is simply not true.

This reasoning reduces an age-old, structural hatred to a circumstantial dispute and feeds the illusion that the problem would disappear if Israel changed its policies—or ceased to exist.
History has already shown, painfully, how many lives such a fallacy can cost.

The rise of antisemitism is not Israel’s fault.

It is the sole responsibility of those who practice it, those who legitimize it, and those who remain silent in the face of it.

Attacking Jews around the world under the pretext of protesting against Israel is not a political act: it is antisemitism. And this uncomfortable truth must be reaffirmed with clarity.