By Emma Isabella Sage
Friday, December 19, 2025
Sixteen people have died as a result of the Bondi Beach
attack. No one is surprised by another bout of antisemitic killing,
particularly the Jews who have been warning
of the dangers
of incitement
for years. But although we’ve come to expect it, there is still a pervasive
lack of understanding regarding the mechanisms of this violence—the “whys” of
antisemitism, and the “hows” of its infectious spread.
Australia’s response to the attack will include strengthening
laws against hate speech, and that makes sense: Radicalization does not
occur in a vacuum. Much of the discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict deliberately operates at the very cusp of antisemitism—close enough to
harness its emotional force, yet protected
by careful disclaimers. The distinction may matter to those producing or
promoting antisemitic content, but it likely does not matter to many of those
consuming it. What may in isolation appear as a morally righteous critique is,
in practice, circulating in the spaces and trafficking in the tropes of
full-blown antisemites, who see it as a validation of their worldview. This
ecosystem allows people to enjoy the social rewards of perceived
moral purity while their actions stoke the flames of an old and violent
hatred.
Indeed, for years, people from all walks of life have
thronged the streets and chanted “From the
River to the Sea.” It goes without saying that the river is the Jordan and
the sea is the Mediterranean, and if all the territory between these two
landmarks is “Palestine” then the Jews are, best-case, politically
extinguished, and realistically, genocidally
driven into
the sea. There’s a reason that the October 7 pogrom was known by its
perpetrators as “Al-Aqsa Flood,” among other thinly-veiled
references to washing my community away.
Still, while many whom I respect disagree with me, I
think that criminalizing the River/Sea chant would not be productive. There
will always be another phrase to take its place, another way to “globalize the
intifada” all the way down to Australia. I don’t feel fear because these
offensive and incendiary words are legal—I’m afraid because they’ve gained such
widespread acceptance and are seen as proof of a high
moral character.
That is the challenge of speaking or writing as a
contrarian about the conflict: You’re going up against a prefabricated,
just-add-water personal branding tool that has been adopted by millions as a
core part of their identity. The symbolism is powerful because it communicates
so much. Whether it’s a watermelon emoji, a Palestinian flag or a keffiyeh, you
can simultaneously demonstrate your position on domestic politics and foreign
affairs, and align yourself with a movement that gives the semblance of seeking
change without ever risking being held personally responsible for the actions
taken in support of your goals. You can be fully idealistic, rising above
gritty local issues with their infuriating trade-offs and needs for compromise,
and you can feel the exhilaration of a blindly uncompromising stance. The moral
certitude is like a drug. People can’t quit it; when pressed, they double down.
Of course, there are some reputational risks. You
could end up like Zohran Mamdani, having to endure answering questions about
your views multiple
times before being put in charge of one of America’s most populous cities.
If you’re a student, you might for the first time face
consequences for particularly egregious violations (although these changes
have not gone so far as to provide
a safe environment for Jewish students).
In general, though, the thing you should be the most
afraid of is meeting someone who has studied the history of the conflict. You
might be asked about the more
than 850,000 Jews expelled from the Arab-controlled regions of the Middle
East. You could get tough questions on who would govern a
Palestinian state, what civil liberties are protected in areas they control,
and why it’s been 20-odd years since anyone in Palestinian politics held an
election above the local level. You could even find someone who brings up the
extraordinary ethnoreligious diversity of the region and questions
why the deeply-entrenched and often violently upheld system of Arab
racial supremacy, which has suppressed efforts at self-determination for
ethnic minorities (the
Kurds being the most persistent and well-justified example) deserves the
undying support of Western democratic youth.
Ironically, much of the allure of a pro-Palestinian
stance stems from the guilt and shame baked into the modern experience of
Western history, and some turn to support for the Palestinian cause as a kind
of counterweight to the crimes of colonialism. This is furthered by ahistorical
attempts to shoehorn Jewish presence in our own homeland into a colonial
narrative, despite the fact that less
than half of Israel’s Jews have ancestors who ever lived in Europe, and
they certainly didn’t do so as native Europeans. And of course, the demand that
Jews move back
to Poland, the site of the largest mass extermination we have faced since
our expulsion
from our own homeland—and more generally, that our safety should continue to be
determined by which other nation is in the mood to tolerate our presence—is
antisemitic.
But even if one lets the “emigration” of 7.5 million Jews
from the Jewish homeland be recast as a feasible or noble cause, well, what’s
wrong with being a Jew in America? Land of the free, birthplace of the
bagel? Some are still unaware of the vastly disproportionate extent to which
American Jews are the victims of hate
crimes. Despite making up 2 percent of the population, antisemitic attacks
are high, and still rising: Jews are the targeted group in 69 percent
of religiously motivated hate crimes and 18 percent
of all hate crimes in America.
So what accounts for the recent spike
in anti-Jewish acts? If you listen to the voices aligned with the
pro-Palestinian camp, they’ll claim no relation to the older stocks of
antisemitism and say that if (if!) anyone around them feels a deep and abiding
rage toward my community, it’s driven entirely by Jewish or
Israeli conduct. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of
antisemitism knows that this is not a new angle; such forced naiveté is a
blatant attempt to offer ideological cover for antisemites via recycled
antisemitic tropes.
As I write this, the death toll ticks up again.
Why doesn’t a place like Sudan, with higher casualties and
at least as much colonial
responsibility, get the kind of treatment that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict does? One could claim that it’s a case of “no
Jews, no news” or that the struggle for control between black Africans and
Arabs can’t fit within a colonial narrative built around only white Europeans
as colonizers, but the best answer is the smart use of media,
technology,
and psychology by
proponents of the Palestinian national narrative. This mastery of
communications also explains
why the self-described pro-Palestinian crowd was so silent as Gazans attempted
to protest against Hamas.
The first step in this communication strategy is to know
your audience: In the Middle East, the message is that Israel is mere
months or weeks away from annihilation, that brave fighters will retake the
land and reign supreme again, and that the Jews will fall under the weight of
their own deceptive, conniving natures. The antisemitism in this local version
is much
more overt than what Anglophone and European audiences get to see.
For the West, the narrative
is one of Palestinian innocence, that the Israeli forces are among the gravest
human rights offenders of the modern era, and that failure to take action
against Israelis (even on an individual
level) means complicity in genocide. It’s the jihad narrative for one
audience, the victim narrative for another. But if you look closer, you can see
where the two start
to collide. What else can the Palestinians do to defend themselves,
I’ve been asked. When the status quo is so wrong, resistance by any means is
justified. Pretty soon, it seems like Osama bin Laden’s
manifesto—particularly, its justifications
for indiscriminate violence—might have had
a point.
Palestinian militant organizations were among the earliest non-state actors to
use terrorism as a communication tool, compensating for their weakness in terms
of conventional capabilities by forcing the conflict onto the international
agenda. From blowing up airplanes to taking (and murdering) hostages at the
1972 Munich Olympics, the attacks were spectacular
and brutal,
designed for debate
and maximum
news coverage. Once these had generated a sufficiently high international
profile, the Palestinian militias refocused their violence on Israeli and
Jewish communities, keeping the compelling nature of the
attacks but placing their Western audiences out of harm’s way. These groups
have degraded their regional alliances and exhausted the goodwill of the Arab
states that once fought alongside them, destroying their chances at a
conventional victory. But they have succeeded in exporting the fight to Western
societies, and that is a bell which cannot be un-rung.
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