Both ISIS and Israel instrumentalize faith in service of violent political projects. ISIS fuses Islam with terrorism; Israel fuses Judaism with Zionism and insists that its actions—regardless of how criminal—are carried out in the name of Jewish survival and security. In both cases, entire faith communities are symbolically implicated in violence committed in their name.
Just as ISIS made Muslims less safe, Israel is making Jews less safe—yet Israel is not treated as ISIS.
This distinction reveals the deep entrenchment of Islamophobia within the political and moral psyche of the West. The ideological violence of one group is designated as terrorism and treated as an existential threat, while the violence of another—even genocide—is accepted as self-defense, normalized through international and media narratives, shielded from accountability, and morally sanitized. One faith is securitized as inherently fundamentalist; the other—historically aligned with Zionism and Western geopolitical interests—is accepted, protected from scrutiny, and politically insulated, even as its leaders cite scripture to justify the killing of women, children, and civilians. While ISIS was confronted as a threat to the global order, Israel is embedded within Western moral architecture and protected by its power.
Even the treatment of individuals accused of association with these violent political projects differs starkly. Muslims were subjected to intense surveillance and suspicion and were continuously demanded to condemn violence and ideologies they neither committed nor endorsed. In contrast, Zionist Jewish groups are never expected to condemn internationally condemned genocide carried out under the banner of their faith. In fact, Zionist actors can openly celebrate the destruction of Palestinian and Muslim life without fear of consequence. Meanwhile, opposition to Israel’s political ideology or military violence is now categorized as “the new antisemitism.”
Zionism and the violence enacted in its name enjoy a level of impunity unprecedented in contemporary global politics. It is within this racialized hierarchy of accountability and empathy that the new antisemitism emerges.
This hierarchy—under which violence is selectively condemned—is fundamentally Islamophobic. Rather than holding Israel accountable for its crimes, Western states and institutions increasingly weaponize this rebranded concept of antisemitism as a tool of governance, deployed to protect Western geopolitical interests and maintain a global order in which some forms of violence are condemned while others are rendered invisible, permissible, or even virtuous under the guise of protecting Jewish security.
Within this framework, antisemitism no longer functions as a form of racism against Jews. Instead, it becomes a new instrument within the machinery of Islamophobia—one that normalizes and rationalizes Muslim death, while silencing Muslim grief and dissent through accusations that frame outrage at genocide as racism, opposition as extremism, and solidarity as criminality.
The New Antisemitism: A Zero-Sum Game
Australia offers a recent example of how this new concept of antisemitism is repurposed in the West as the latest apparatus of Islamophobia, operating through Israel’s zero-sum logic of existence and empathy—where Jewish security is framed as achievable only through the suppression of Palestinian existence, political expression, and solidarity.
Following Australia’s mass mobilization for Gaza and its recognition of Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australian Jews.” After the Bondi attack, Netanyahu again intervened, claiming that Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state had “fueled the flames of antisemitism.” Immediately thereafter, familiar Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian accusations—entirely baseless—spread rapidly among far-right and pro-Israel actors.
These claims exploited a moment of collective shock to manufacture causal links between pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitism. Their political function was clear: to pressure the Australian government into fast-tracking the highly criticized and draconian recommendations of Jillian Segal, the Special Envoy on Antisemitism—recommendations designed to silence criticism of Israel under the guise of combating antisemitism. Segal had previously drawn explicit connections between the Bondi attack and the large pro-Palestinian demonstration on Sydney Harbor Bridge, stating:
“We have to stop the hate speech, stop the slogans, stop flying terrorist flags, because this [movement] progresses exactly as we have seen—the Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, and now Bondi—each one a progression, with hateful words leading to where we are today.”
At the core of this “new antisemitism” narrative lies a zero-sum logic that frames Jewish security as fundamentally incompatible with Palestinian existence, resistance, and demands for justice. Palestinian visibility and political mobilization are coded as Jewish endangerment and antisemitism—a framework now increasingly reproduced within mainstream political discourse.
Under the banner of protecting Jews, this zero-sum framework is being institutionalized through policy. Segal’s recommendations push Australia toward joining forty-three other countries that have adopted and embedded the IHRA definition to silence and criminalize anti-Zionist voices. The UK, United States, France, and Germany lead this institutionalization. Extensive research and journalism have documented how antisemitism is invoked in these contexts to justify police repression, legal restrictions, discrimination, and excessive force against peaceful protesters. University encampments and mass demonstrations opposing genocide are labeled antisemitic. Calls to end apartheid, mass killings, and the imprisonment of children, journalists, doctors, and civilians are punished as hatred of Jews. Even visible expressions of Palestinian identity—keffiyehs, flags, chants, and collective mourning—are coded as antisemitism.
This dynamic is not accidental; it reflects a broader settler-colonial logic. Settler-colonial projects sustain themselves by constructing narratives of threatened security, allegedly endangered merely by the existence of the Indigenous population they seek to eliminate. Moral dominance in settler-colonial states entails not only physical displacement or genocide, but also the erasure of culture and the suppression of the right to resist oppression. Within this framework, Palestinian existence becomes incompatible with Israel’s settler-colonial project. Consequently, just as Palestinian destruction is defined as Israeli security, the control and punishment of dissent against that destruction is rebranded as combating “antisemitism.”
Muslims Bear the Greatest Cost
The new antisemitism, under the guise of protecting Jews, operates as a contemporary form of racism, while Islamophobia is used to discipline and suppress Muslim political expression. Once institutionalized through political rhetoric, media amplification, and policy tools, it materializes as surveillance, silencing, and punishment. Those most affected are communities already disproportionately racialized and securitized through Islamophobia—Muslims and Arabs in the West, who are inherently pro-Palestinian. These are precisely the communities Israel seeks to silence, criminalize, and eradicate to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of its colonial project.
Indeed, Israel and its Zionist allies have long been central architects of the Islamophobia industry—from the introduction of the concept of “Islamic terrorism” at the Jonathan Netanyahu Institute conferences in 1979 and 1984, to its embedding in U.S. foreign policy and domestic counterterrorism laws over the past twenty-five years, and most recently through new alliances with Europe and the U.S. far right under the banner of defending “Judeo-Christian civilization” against “political Islam.”
This is why, within the framework of the new antisemitism, support for Palestine is smeared as support for “Hamas,” “Islamic terrorism,” and “jihadism.” The Islamophobic trope of associating Muslims with terrorism is redeployed to delegitimize calls for Palestinian freedom and criticism of Israel. This aligns seamlessly with Israel’s current propaganda strategy: reviving fear of “radical Islam” and “jihadism” in an effort to repair its collapsing moral legitimacy as the world awakens to the machinery of hasbara.
In Australia, the consequences were immediate. Within twenty-four hours of the Bondi attack, the Islamic Council of Victoria reported a surge in abusive and threatening messages, forcing it to disable public comments on its platforms. Similarly, the Islamophobia Register recorded a sharp increase in incidents, while its social media channels were flooded with antisemitism accusations and overtly abusive rhetoric.
Rather than preventing harm, this maneuver reinforces the conditions under which both antisemitism and Islamophobia are reproduced, while shielding a genocidal state from accountability.
The new antisemitism sustains a global political environment in which opposition to state violence is criminalized and solidarity with its Muslim victims is delegitimized. It serves as a cover for further violence against Israel’s primary victims: Muslims and Palestinians.
No comments:
Post a Comment