Anti-Zionism and the End of Empathy

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

Planned anti-Hamas protests in Gaza fizzled out over the weekend. Those who participated despite Hamas’s threats and suppression took a brave stand made braver by the fact that Western media largely ignored them. The fact that this abandonment was fully expected highlights the difference between “supporting Palestine” and “supporting Palestinians.” That same distinction can be understood not as a failure of empathy but a complete lack of it.

 

Anti-Zionism is, by its very definition, a worldview of opposition to the existence of something or someone, in this case sovereign Jews. The entirety of the “Free Palestine” movement in the West is organized along the same principle: It is not for anyone; it is merely against the Jewish state. Advocating for Palestinians would look much different than advocating for a “Free Palestine,” because such a movement would seek first and foremost to improve the lives of Arabs living in Palestinian-governed enclaves in the Middle East.

 

There is no such movement in the United States.

 

Anti-Hamas Palestinians—that is, Palestinians who want to be free—are seen as a grave threat by anti-Zionist activists. Like their heroes in the “resistance,” anti-Zionist activists use Palestinians as human shields.

 

The question becomes, then: Why don’t Western activists want to see Palestinians freed from their oppressors?

 

This is where the concept of empathy and its Orwellian manipulation enter the conversation. On paper, the activist left would appear to have an organizing principle of aiding the weak against the strong. But that is only true within the fantasy framework of “anti-colonialism.” Which, again, is a movement organized against something, not for something.

 

The suffering of the oppressed is of no interest to this industry. What we are told is motivated by empathy is actually motivated by something else entirely: malice.

 

When Zohran Mamdani raged against Jewish donors as “monsters,” even his erstwhile defenders were uncomfortable with the level of malice he was demonstrating. But his lack of empathy is visible too. When Rep. Dan Goldman’s daughter needed to use a coffee shop’s bathroom, the congressman bought a beverage to show his appreciation. In return, the owner of the coffee shop gave Goldman an anti-Semitic tarring and feathering on social media.

 

Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, should have been incensed. But he, too, wanted Goldman to lose his primary challenge to a Mamdani-backed candidate, and so he refused to denounce the anti-Jewish vigilantism that was done on his chosen candidate’s behalf. This is not a person who has empathy for some and not for others; he is a man devoid of empathy. One does not demonize Jews and encourage anti-Semitic vigilantism out of concern for the Palestinians. The Palestinians are absent from Mamdani’s thought process. He is only thinking about the Jews.

 

Since then, another crazy coffee shop incident has come to light, and this one arguably demonstrates the point better than the previous example. On Facebook, the owner of a Portland, Oregon, café called Heretic Coffee, Josh White, announced that he was rejecting a grant check he received from the Jewish Federation: “Jewish Federation, we ripped up your grant check and it’s in the trash. We want none of your blood money.” The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland was, naturally, inundated with calls.

 

What happened here? Judah Ari Gross, editor at eJewishPhilanthropy, got the full story:

 

The check that the coffee shop had received did not, in fact, come from Portland’s Jewish federation. It came from the Jewish Federation Bay Area, and it was not a grant in the common understanding of the word. The funds came from the holder of a donor-advised fund that the San Francisco federation operates. (As White bills himself as a journalist, these answers should not have been too hard to find.)

 

The purpose of the gift? “According to the Bay Area federation, the DAF holder, whose name has not been released, had learned of Heretic Coffee’s work providing food to those in need and wanted to support it.”

 

Again, think what you might about the war in Gaza and the wider conflict, but this is completely insane behavior—and it is spreading. Fueling these and other such incidents, which happen routinely now in America, is not empathy. A person with empathy does not reject charity to feed the poor from a Jew in California who directed the gift through his local Jewish Federation.

 

To the anti-Zionist movement in the West, Palestinians do not exist. Only Jews exist. And they are the object of nothing but pure malice from these supposed humanitarians.