Antisemitism & The New Normal

When antisemitism is laundered through “anti-Zionism”, Jews become the only minority whose demonisation is treated as respectable opinion.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

I’m tired of talking about antisemitism. And you, dear reader, are no doubt tired of hearing about it. Judaism is a millennia old tradition steeped in culture, religion and history, and however small the world’s Jewish population has always been, it has punched far above its weight in positive contributions to the world at large. It, and we, deserve far more than to be defined by the people who hate us.

But the sad, inescapable truth of it is that the floodgates of Jew-hatred that burst open in the immediate wake of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust have shown no sign of slowing any time soon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Antisemitism isn’t just fully out in the open for the first time in decades, it’s like it never left. For the first time since the 1940s, hatred of Jews is explicit, proud and increasingly mainstream.

According to a shocking but unsurprising recent study, 2025 saw the highest amount of diaspora Jews murdered in antisemitic incidents in thirty years. This was quickly followed by an even more shocking study that revealed that the United Kingdom was home to the highest number of “antisemitic assaults” in the world per capita. That’s right, the country that once fought and defeated Hitler and has been a relative safe haven for Jews for nearly four centuries, is now one of the least safe places for Jews on Earth.

Just this past month, in fact, has seen five synagogues fire-bombed across the UK, a video has gone viral over the last few days (at least within Jewish circles) of Israeli tourists eating quietly in a restaurant in Vietnam being accosted by an English woman, and four Jewish-owned ambulances were set alight in London shortly before Passover.

And the overwhelming response to all this; the very best defence that is offered: “yes, but, what about Israel?”

Well, what about Israel?

The Anti-Zionism Excuse

It should go without saying that the actions of a government in another part of the world should have no bearing whatsoever on the discrimination, let alone violent assault, of people who happen to share the same religion or ethnicity of that country. No one in their right mind would sanction the persecution of Persians in the UK for the actions of the Ayatollah – or Russians for Putin, or Chinese people for Xi Jinping. So why Jews for Benjamin Netanyahu?

“Ah”, comes the quick reply, “but most Russians, Chinese or Persians don’t support the leaders of their countries, but most Jews support Israel!” First, of course, not all Jews support Netanyahu. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There are even some Jews who don’t support anything to do with Israel – the so-called “good Jews” that “anti-Zionists”, for now at least, give a free pass, but that hasn’t stopped “traditional” antisemites from still going after them.

What is true, though, is that the vast majority of Jews do indeed support the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and defend its right to defend itself. But again, so what? No one expects Russian, Chinese or Persian expats to denounce the very existence of their ancestral homes or to ignore the murder of its citizens. So, I ask again, why must the Jews?

The answer, of course, is that antisemitism has always thrived on hypocrisy, irrationality, and a sort of anti-logic that has allowed Jews to be painted, at once, as being vermin, scurrying in the dregs of society and also immensely powerful and rich overlords who rule society from above. For being both rich and poor, communist and capitalist, religious and heathen. This is true of Jews as people and now Israel as a state.

The Anti-Zionism Lie

Israel is a flawed country. There are a great number of things that it can be accused of that are genuinely troubling. The spate of terror attacks by Jews on innocent Palestinians in Judea and Samaria are horrific and even worse is the government’s refusal to properly prosecute these terrorists – or even, in the case of far right ministers like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, openly endorse them. Indeed, there’s a whole litany of things that these men say and do that deserve the harshest possible condemnation.

Even beyond these extremes and extremists, there are serious and valid criticisms to level at the Israeli governments treatment of Palestinians or at societal discrimination even against Arab-Israelis. One can harshly condemn the building of settlements that would make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible and deeply question the morality and viability of perpetual military occupation of another people.

The problem with “anti-Zionists” isn’t that they ask these tough questions, it’s that they have shown a constant unseriousness in grappling with them. Oh sure, they bring them up as “proof” of Israel’s fundamental illegitimacy and how it is, quite literally, the worst country on Earth, but they never bother to actually understand the reality on the ground – certainly not for Israelis, but also not for Palestinians. They certainly offer no solution other than the obliteration of Israel and all that entails (hint: it rhymes with menocide).

Speaking of rhymes-with-menocide, the way that the war in Gaza has been used to delegitimize Israel and any of the Jews around the world who “support” it, is even more craven, even more disingenuous. It is now taken as absolute, indisputable fact that this was not a war but a genocide by Israel against the innocent people of Gaza. After all “experts” say as much and South Africa won its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Of course, these “experts” are usually a) not experts or b) have an axe to grind against Israel, and South Africa not only didn’t win the case at the ICJ, it’s struggling even to hold it together.

But why let facts get in the way of the hatred. The only way anyone with even an ounce of integrity could call the Gaza war a genocide is by completely and utterly erasing Hamas from the equation. It’s to say that 70,000 innocent Palestinians died and not mention that a third of those (if not more) were active combatants. It’s to insist that Israel started the war and not mention that it was a retaliation to Hamas’ unprovoked pogrom in southern Israel and the taking of hundreds of hostages. And it’s to talk about the mass destruction in Gaza and not mention that Hamas used the enclave’s entire civilian infrastructure for terror purposes.

This perversion of reality matters not just because of how it affects Israel, but more damagingly, how it affects Jews in the rest of the world. It is at the very heart of the rise, legitimisation, and acceptability of Jew-hate worldwide.

Language Matters

Of course, now that there is a ceasefire in place and the situation in Gaza is stable, if nebulous, all eyes have turned to Israel’s latest “crime against humanity”: its attack on Iran and, of course, how it’s all Bibi’s fault that America joined in on Israel’s “war against the Iranian people”. If the language around the Gaza war was incendiary, there was at least the very real suffering of the Palestinian people and the complexity of the relationship between the Israel and the Palestinians that could at least appear to justify it on some level. But the way Israel is talked about and viewed in its war with Iran can be seen as nothing but a blatant attempt to not just deligitimize Israel, but to paint it, its people and Jews worldwide as uniquely evil. After all, if Iran is bad and Israel is even worse then what does that tell us about the Jewish state and, by extension, the Jewish people?

It’s not for nothing that most of the antisemitic incidents in the UK over the past few weeks have been done in the name of Iran. And, in yet another shocker of a report, why more young democrats in the US are hostile to Israel than to Iran.

But let’s get something straight: Israel is not at war with the Iranian people, it’s at war with the Islamic Republic. It did not start the war – the Islamic Republic did when one of its proxies attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, which was soon followed by more of its proxies and then it itself launching thousands of attacks against the Jewish state. It has called for “death to America, death to Israel” since its founding in 1979 and has directly and indirectly killed thousands of people worldwide.

Israel and Iran do not share a border and Israel has no interest in Iranian land, and has not started a single one of its war with the regime. The regime, meanwhile, according to most reports, murdered more almost as many Iranian civilians in two days in January as Gazan civilians died over two years of the Gazan war, and has violently oppressed their “own people” over the past near-half-century. It is a regime that represents the literal opposite of every single value that those very democrats are supposed to hold dear: democracy, freedom, equality, separation of church and state, fairness, compassion, and human rights.

Not that any of these actual facts remotely matter to those who are driven by hatred of Jews. The only thing that matters to them is the “respectability” of the language they can now freely use to demonize Israel, Israelis and any Jew who dares support them.

Who Are the Monsters?

Now, it has to be said, in terms of actual antisemitic incidents, we in South Africa have been very lucky. Which is ironic considering the outright support for Hamas and the Islamic Republic by the ANC and by others in positions of power and influence. But as has been noted time and time again, to use the most extreme example possible, the Holocaust started not with actions but with words. If that’s the case, and it clearly is with any sort of hate crime, there is very real reason to be concerned.

Consider, for example, two separate letters/ opinion pieces from two separate publications, that were published over the past few weeks.

The first, a letter by James Cunningham published here in Business Day that, once again, ascribes to Jews a conspiratorial level of control over even the world’s greatest powers: in this case the “Masada mob”, as he puts, and its control of America. This is a reference to the Jews that stood up against the tyranny of the Roman Empire some two millennia ago, but reconfigured by Cunningham as a coercive force that caused “untold destruction” to the great empire.

He also calls the buffer zone that the Israeli Defence Forces are carving in Southern Lebanon as a response to the incessant missile and rocket attacks by Hezbollah a “kill zone” and recontextualises the Islamic Republic as the “reasonable” victims of this crazed mob of Jews. Cunningham does correctly identify the small strain of extremism running through the fringe parts of the settler movement, but conflates it with Jews and Israelis en masse. The religious extremism of the Islamic republic obviously isn’t even worth a mention.

And then, inevitably, there is the column by Oscar Van Heerden in Sunday World entitled, “Once upon a time in Iran and Gaza, monsters lurked.” Van Heerden has proven himself to be an absolutely unrepentant Jew-hater a thousand times over since 7 October 2023, but even by his rotten standards, this op-ed is utterly jaw-dropping. As you may have guessed, the “monsters” in question are not Hamas or the Islamic Republic, but those nasty, duplicitous Jews and their ultimate benefactor, the United States of America. This piece has it all: Holocaust inversion, dehumanization of Jews, and ye old antisemitic canards of absolute Jewish control and influence. Even the Ayatollah would be impressed.

I have to say at this point that this is not a knock on either publication. I was given an opportunity to reply to another of Van Heerden’s hate screeds in Sunday World recently and Business Day has never failed to showcase the “other side”; not least by happily publishing numerous articles by yours truly in defence of Israel and world Jewry. I have no doubt that these particular opinion pieces do not in any way reflect the views of either publication’s editorial, and are simply the result of their wanting to publish as wide a scope of opinion as possible.

But let’s be serious, if this was about any other minority group, no mainstream publication would touch such opinion pieces with a ten metre poll. Antisemitism, as long as it is couched, however thinly, in “anti-Zionism”, has reached a level of widespread acceptance that Jews are now the one and only minority group where such blatant bigotry is allowed to fly. So, yes, it is to South Africa’s greatest credit that actual antisemitic incidents, and most especially, antisemitic violence is kept to a relative minimum, but with this sort of rhetoric given free rein, just how much longer will this remain true?

Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.