The Weaponisation of the Jewish Question

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

When I first wrote about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s external planning, I focused on something that many preferred to treat as an outlier: the patient, methodical “mapping” of Israeli and Jewish presence across Western states as part of a wider operational architecture. I did not mean “mapping” as metaphor, but as the unglamorous mechanics of target development - reconnaissance, selection, prioritisation, and the building of deniable pathways by which intimidation can become violence. In the years since, open-source analysis and official material have converged on precisely this direction of travel: Iranian operational leaders, particularly within the IRGC and MOIS, increasingly leverage criminal networks as proxies to create distance between Tehran and operations on European soil, a shift that is documented in detail by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism.  UK government action against the Sweden-based Foxtrot network, sanctioned for involvement in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on Iran’s behalf, illustrates the same method in policy form: deniability by design, pressure by proxy.

 

But what I believe we still understate - and what 7 October and its aftermath made brutally visible - is that the operational layer is only half the strategy. The other half is cognitive. The chants, the manipulation, the inversion of values, the resurrection of libels in fresh packaging, and the speed with which Israel was cast as a metaphysical evil were not simply “reactions” to events. They were the activation of a frame that had been prepared long in advance, and not prepared accidentally. My argument is straightforward: the hatred did not need to be invented after 7 October; it merely needed to be licensed. The permission structure already existed, cultivated through years of psychological and social conditioning - conditioning that made antizionism feel not merely permissible but righteous, and antisemitism, once laundered through the word “Zionist,” feel like civic virtue.

 

I do not claim that every person shouting a slogan is an agent, nor that outrage cannot be sincere. I claim something more unsettling and, I think, more accurate: that hostile actors have spent years shaping the interpretive environment in which outrage is processed, framed, and weaponised. European institutions now formally conceptualise this domain as Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference - FIMI - precisely because deception, polarisation, and the erosion of trust have become organised instruments of statecraft, not mere propaganda in the old sense. When a society’s information environment is degraded, moral language becomes a battlefield and institutional procedure becomes a lever. The most effective campaigns are those that do not look like campaigns at all, because they flow through the incentives and reflexes of the host society.

 

This is why I insist that what we witnessed after 7 October was not simply a public mood swing. It was a trigger pulled into a prepared chamber. The Community Security Trust’s reporting is instructive here, because it notes the immediacy and scale of the surge in anti-Jewish hate following 7 October, including the rise occurring before any extensive Israeli military response in Gaza could plausibly be offered as a causal explanation. That does not mean events in Gaza are irrelevant to public discourse; it means the animating energy of post–7 October antisemitism was not contingent on a later battlefield narrative. It was already latent, already normalised, already waiting for an opening.

 

I also believe we misread the relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Muslim Brotherhood - derived networks when we treat it as a simplistic alliance of identical ideologies. The more dangerous truth is that theological differences do not prevent operational convergence. Iran is a Shia Islamist state; the Brotherhood is Sunni. Yet, where strategic utility exists, the relationship behaves like a pragmatic partnership whose centre of gravity is anti-Israel and anti-Western leverage. Hamas - born of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch - is the obvious junction point. The European Council on Foreign Relations describes Iran’s ties to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a “marriage of convenience”: not puppetry, but evolving sponsorship grounded in shared enemies and mutual need. The Washington Institute’s analysis likewise argues that Tehran has played a long-term role in Hamas’s military development and has navigated deep ideological rifts in order to sustain effective sponsorship.

 

What emerges from this is an ecosystem rather than a command chain. Tehran’s comparative advantage is state capacity: external operations culture, deniable proxies, money, weapons expertise, cyber reach, and the intelligence mindset that thinks in terms of leverage and pressure across borders. Brotherhood-derived activism, at its most potent, offers something different: social infrastructure and moral language that can travel through civic life - mosques, charities, student politics, campaigning organisations, and the broader milieu of “movement” mobilisation. These do not need to coordinate in a conspiratorial sense to reinforce one another. They simply need to pull in the same direction. Iran can sharpen the spear; Brotherhood-linked networks, and the broader Islamist influence ecology that sits around them, can prepare the ground into which the spear is thrown.

 

Western states have not been blind to these dynamics, but they have often been conceptually timid, which amounts to the same thing. The UK’s own review of the Muslim Brotherhood - whatever debates one wishes to have about its framing - made a core point that remains relevant: parts of the Brotherhood have an ambiguous relationship with violent extremism, and association with or influence by the Brotherhood should be considered a possible indicator of extremism. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Vidino’s “Verbatim” report for GWU’s Program on Extremism collates what a range of European security services have said about Brotherhood-related networks in Europe - an attempt, at minimum, to map concern as expressed by state agencies rather than leaving the field to polemic.  France, too, has wrestled publicly with this question: a Reuters account of a government-commissioned report presents the claim that Brotherhood-linked actors pursue gradual, non-violent influence through schools, mosques, and local NGOs, while also noting criticism from Muslim leaders and academics who argue the framing risks stigmatization and lacks proof of intent to establish an Islamic state. I cite this not to sanctify the report, but to illustrate the dilemma that hostile ecosystems exploit: democracies hesitate, argue with themselves, and grow afraid of naming networks, while those networks remain unafraid of naming their targets.

 

Now, to the heart of my analysis, and to the point I have tried - painfully - to convey: attacks on Jews in the diaspora are not merely about killing Jews. They are about manufacturing a diplomatic crisis between Israel and the West by turning Jewish life abroad into a pressure point, and by turning the West’s commitment to equal citizenship into an exhausted performance.

 

This is why the Iranian threat cannot be treated as episodic. The UK Parliament’s December 2025 research briefing describes Iranian threats as wide-ranging - physical, espionage, offensive cyber, and political interference - and explicitly frames Tehran’s objectives in terms that include weakening UK relations with the United States and Israel. That is not rhetorical flourish; it is the strategic logic written plainly in an official format. When the state itself tells you that the threat actor thinks in integrated terms, it is a mistake to analyse physical intimidation as “security” and narrative manipulation as “culture.” They are fused.

 

Here is how I understand the intended mechanism. As intimidation and violence against Jews and Israelis in Western states increase - whether through direct plots, deniable proxies, or the more common everyday harassment that makes communal life feel like walking through a minefield - governments face a stress test: can they protect Jewish citizens without hedging, moral bargaining, or quiet suggestions that Jewish visibility is the problem? In a healthy democracy, the answer is simple. In a democracy whose institutions have been conditioned to interpret Jewish fear as political manipulation, the answer becomes complicated, and in that complication lies the opening. Jews grow frightened not only of attackers but of abandonment. Israel grows angry not only from solidarity but from state logic: the Jewish state cannot regard diaspora vulnerability as someone else’s domestic inconvenience, because Jewish history is the story of what happens when protection becomes discretionary.

 

At that point, the secondary effect begins: “Western fatigue.” It often starts as sympathy. It curdles into impatience, particularly if Jewish communities insist - annoyingly, stubbornly - on naming what is happening to them. It then converts into resentment: why is this minority always “bringing trouble”? Why must we keep hearing about it? The coward’s alchemy turns fear into blame, and blame into a demand that Jews make themselves smaller. In the final inversion, Jewish resilience becomes the provocation. The accusation is not only that Jews are targeted, but that Jews, by existing and persisting, are the reason society is made tense. This is how an external threat actor extracts strategic value from domestic social dynamics: it does not need to convince everyone; it needs to make protection politically expensive.

 

The reason I call this “sick” is that it is not improvisation. It is the reactivation of an ancient European pathology, made newly scalable by modern institutions and modern media. And it is here that antizionism performs its most corrosive function. Antizionism, in its ideological form, does not merely criticise Israeli policy; it recodes Jewish peoplehood and Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. Once that recoding is normalised, Jews in the diaspora are placed in an impossible position: they are demonised where they live and told that their national home is a criminal anomaly. They are left, psychologically and politically, with nowhere to run. The subtext is barely hidden: you are tolerated only if you are powerless and apologetic; you are safe only if you are invisible.

 

When I say that “the ‘Jewish question’ is a tool,” I am not resurrecting the language as a legitimate frame; I am naming what extremists are doing with it. They have learned that the fastest way to strip the West of its soul is to persuade it - slowly, plausibly, and with moral vocabulary - that one minority can be treated as an exception to the rules. The West’s claim to moral seriousness rests on universals: equal citizenship, minority protection, due process, evidentiary standards, and a refusal to dehumanise. If those universals can be suspended for Jews, they can be suspended for anyone. The attack on Jewish legitimacy becomes a rehearsal for the broader demolition of liberal democracy’s ethical spine. This is why Jews so often appear, historically, as the canary in the civilisational mine: not because Jews are the centre of Western life, but because a civilisation’s treatment of Jews reveals whether it believes its own principles.

 

I also think we underestimate how institutional capture works because we keep looking for uniforms and directives. Capture in the West is usually bureaucratic and reputational. It happens when language is redefined - when “harm” means “disagreement,” when “safety” means “silence,” when “context” means “excuse,” and when “genocide” becomes not a legal claim requiring rigour but a moral annihilation label used to end conversation. It happens when journalists, academics, and civic leaders learn - often unconsciously - that there is professional safety in repeating fashionable frames and professional risk in questioning them. It happens when institutions treat intimidation as “activism,” and when they treat the targeted minority’s fear as a public relations inconvenience.

 

If I wanted a single image for this, it would not be the loudest march; it would be the meeting room where a university or a charity or an editorial board decides, quietly, to avoid “controversy” by excluding Jewish concerns or by laundering antisemitism as politics. This is the point at which the West stops merely being attacked and begins participating in its own undoing.

 

Finally, I want to underline that hostile actors are also thinking beyond the Middle East in operational terms. The West Point CTC’s October 2025 analysis of Hamas plots in Europe argues that Hamas has long plotted externally even if it has not executed a successful attack outside Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza, and it discusses weapons caches and law enforcement attention in European countries. Whether one accepts every inference in that analysis or not, it aligns with the wider point: diaspora space is increasingly treated as an arena for leverage.

 

So my conclusion is not despair; it is a demand for strategic clarity. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Brotherhood-derived ecosystems do not need perfect unity to produce synergy. They need only a shared utility in the delegitimisation of Israel, the intimidation of Jews, and the corrosion of Western moral confidence. We fail when we treat this as a series of disconnected controversies rather than an integrated campaign that uses violence, deniability, institutional pressure, and information manipulation as one system. And we fail, most dangerously, when we allow fear of being misunderstood to become an excuse for refusing to understand.

 

If the West is to resist being stripped of its soul, it must relearn the discipline of universals. It must protect Jewish citizens not as a favour or as a “community issue,” but as a test of whether citizenship still means what it claims to mean. It must treat antizionism’s ideological core - where it functions as a vehicle for antisemitism - not as a fashionable moral pose, but as a corrosive force that degrades democracy from within. And it must stop granting hostile actors the victory they seek: the transformation of liberal societies into places where truth is negotiable, principles are conditional, and minorities are protected only when it is convenient.