If non-Israeli Jews want to stop antisemitism in their own countries, why don’t they simply criticise Israel’s overreach in Gaza and the killings and land grabs in the West Bank?
This claim is often made, sometimes politely, sometimes with menace. It rests on the idea that antisemitism is a reaction to Israeli behaviour, and that Jewish criticism of Israel would therefore defuse it.
History suggests that this is, at best, unreliable.
Deep, structural antisemitism does not depend on Israeli behaviour at all. It predates Israel by centuries. Jews were persecuted when they were stateless, powerless, assimilated, patriotic, socialist, conservative, religious and secular. The notion that safety can be earned through correct political posture has been tested repeatedly and has failed every time. German Jews’ loyalty did not save them. Soviet Jews’ denunciations of Zionism did not protect them. Antisemitism adapts.
That said, it would be dishonest to pretend nothing has changed since Gaza.
There has been a sharp rise in hostility following Israel’s assault on Gaza, and not all of that hostility was previously entrenched. Israel’s actions have acted as an accelerant. Televised civilian deaths, the flattening of neighbourhoods, explicit statements of collective punishment, and the continued, well-documented violence and land seizures in the West Bank have generated anger far beyond the usual activist base.
Some of that anger has manifested as antisemitism. Some has been deliberately redirected into antisemitism by those inclined that way already. And some has been categorised as antisemitism through an increasingly expansive political lens. These categories overlap, messily. Denying any one of them weakens the analysis.
Many Jews outside Israel already criticise Israeli policy. Some march. Some write. Some organise. This has not insulated them. In some cases it has increased hostility, exposing them to attack from both directions. Antisemites do not check someone’s views on settlements before targeting a synagogue or school.
Where institutional behaviour does matter is in how conflation is challenged or allowed to persist.
Major representative Jewish bodies in the diaspora, in their dominant public messaging, have tended to avoid sustained, explicit criticism of Israeli actions, even where those actions involve matters that are not in serious dispute. Civilian deaths in Gaza are documented by the UN and humanitarian agencies. Systematic law-breaking in the West Bank, including settlement expansion and settler violence, is documented by Israeli human rights organisations, international monitors, and Israel’s own legal authorities. These are objective matters of record, not ideological interpretation.
The reasons for institutional caution are understandable. Fear of internal fracture. Donor pressure. A defensive instinct shaped by historical trauma and by the real increase in antisemitic incidents. None of this requires conspiracy to explain.
In 2025, 36 elected deputies to the Board of Deputies signed an open letter in the Financial Times critically describing Israel’s war conduct, warning that “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” and referencing West Bank violence and other excesses. That letter led to disciplinary action and suspensions of some signatories, which shows that public criticism does exist inside the institution - but is not endorsed as the Board’s official position.
But it has consequences.
By declining to draw a clear public boundary between Jewish identity and Israeli state action, institutions leave others to draw it for them. Antisemites insist Jews are collectively responsible for Israel. Political actors insist that criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish by definition. Silence does not neutralise that logic. It allows it to harden.
This is where the category error becomes dangerous. Protest against a state is collapsed into hostility towards a people. Political slogans are treated as intent. Criticism becomes hate by definition. Policing and public suspicion then follow visibility rather than evidence. We reach the absurd position where Jews protesting the war in Tel Aviv are rhetorically grouped with those attacking synagogues in London.
At the same time, the definition of antisemitism has been stretched well beyond its original diagnostic purpose. The IHRA definition was never intended as law, but its illustrative examples are now routinely used to reclassify opposition to Israeli policy as antisemitism. This does not eliminate antisemitism. It dilutes the term, making it harder to identify and confront when it genuinely appears.
Selective silence reinforces this problem. The muted institutional response to Nigel Farage’s antisemitic remarks at Dulwich College illustrates the point. Grassroots Jewish voices and Holocaust survivors spoke. Formal leadership largely did not. Antisemitism is condemned loudly when it comes from marches and foreign-sounding language. When it comes from a politically useful ally aligned with Israel’s war aims, the threshold quietly rises.
If the priority of non-Israeli Jewish institutions is to reduce antisemitism at home, this approach is counterproductive.
Their role is not to defend a foreign government from scrutiny. It is to protect Jewish citizens as citizens. That requires clarity as well as caution. It requires saying, publicly and consistently, that mass civilian killing is wrong, that settler violence and land theft in the West Bank are wrong, and that none of this is done in the name of Jews everywhere.
This would not eliminate antisemitism. Nothing will. It may even carry short-term risk. But it would deny antisemites their most convenient pretext, expose deliberate conflation for what it is, and restore meaning to the word itself.
When everything is called antisemitism, eventually nothing is taken seriously as antisemitism at all. And that leaves Jewish communities less safe, not more.
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