A follower reached out to me with a question I’d been turning over for months. He’d been thinking about the parallels between the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the rise of the antizionist movement today — and wanted to know how, exactly, the Klan was eventually marginalized. What pulled the hood off? What can we learn from it?

It’s a thoughtful question, and I want to do my best to answer it. First, an important clarification: the KKK is not a direct parallel to today’s antizionist movement, and nothing here suggests they are the same. Full stop. But as hate movements that once operated comfortably within social norms, there are macro-level similarities worth examining — and a real strategic playbook hiding inside the Klan’s decline.

A Hate Movement That Didn’t Look Like One

The 1920s Klan initially positioned itself as a civic and moral reform movement — anti-bootlegging, anti-adultery, pro–public school, pro–Protestant values. Broad, appealing language that framed participation more as community service than as anything hateful. Not anti-immigrant, just pro-American. Not anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, or anti-Black — just pro-Protestant Anglo-Saxon.

Most importantly, the Klan provided a sense of belonging. It was a social club, with meetings and events, rituals and regalia, somewhere for small-town folks to go. It was politically ambitious, with multiple governors and congressmen representing its interests. It nearly tore apart the 1924 Democratic National Convention in a floor fight over whether to condemn the Klan by name — which Democrats narrowly voted not to do.

What the Klan understood very well was that people don’t join movements they perceive as hateful. They join movements that make them feel righteous and embattled on behalf of something worth defending. The Klan gave millions of Americans a way to act on ethnic and religious prejudice while feeling like heroes of justice.

The parallels write themselves — right down to the fight over the DNC. A few others worth naming. The 1920s Klan tolerated violence at the fringes; antizionists not only tolerate it but call it “resistance.” The KKK was legitimized by government and churches; antizionism by academia, media, and students. The Klan recruited where the white middle class socialized; antizionism recruits where progressives, minorities, and Gen Zers socialize.

And like the Klan, antizionism does not brand itself as hate. It brands itself as social justice, human rights, and progressivism. It sells moral righteousness, community, belonging, and the intoxicating feeling of fighting evil — all while focused entirely on what Vanderbilt professor Shaul Kelner has called the “intellectually justified, socially acceptable othering of Jews.”

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We’re all familiar with the narrative by now. A young Jew, typically between eighteen and thirty-five, often a day-school or Jewish-summer-camp grad, announces themselves as a member of the anti-Israel crowd through social-media posts or conversations with family and friends. Sometimes they don’t fully announce it at all, wary of the backlash they’ll get from their childhood communities. More often than not, these aren’t the people wearing masks and keffiyehs and harassing Jews on the street. More often than not, they identify strongly as Jewish, just without any connection to Israel. To us, that sounds like a contradiction. To them, it isn’t.

Usually, this particular kind of anti-Israel Jew is of Ashkenazi descent. They’re at least second-generation American, usually third or more. They were raised Conservative or Reform and aren’t especially observant now. They aren’t meaningfully connected to Jewish life day to day — they don’t go to temple, they aren’t involved in communal programs or on Jewish boards, or tied to legacy Jewish organizations. They don’t have children.

And yet they have strong Jewish roots. They’re Jewishly literate. They know the holidays, the prayers, the songs, the customs. They were bar and bat mitzvahed; they had Jewish wedding ceremonies. They’ve never been to Israel, or went only with family or as a student, and usually not recently.

To call these folks anti-Jewish or self-hating is to misunderstand them entirely — and to fall for the very binary being weaponized so effectively against mainstream Jews by our enemies. You’re either pro-Israel or a self-hating antisemite. As usual, the truth is far more nuanced.

Tennessee and the Pink Pony Club

Let me illustrate with a concrete example: “Pink Pony Club,” by Chappell Roan, an outspoken anti-Israel recording artist herself, which makes the parallel almost too perfect (and, full disclosure, the song’s been stuck in my head for years). It tells the story of a young, free-spirited, queer Gen-Zer who leaves behind the traditional Tennessee upbringing she still openly loves and thinks about constantly, in order to join the world of the Pink Pony Club — a special place where everyone’s a queen every single day. It’s where she belongs.

In this analogy, Tennessee is the childhood Jewish community of our young anti-Israelers. It represents their parents, teachers, synagogues, family friends — a community they share bonds of love and history with, but one they left some time ago and no longer engage with day to day. Not out of shame or spite or any fault of the hometown, but simply because it’s not the Pink Pony Club. It’s no longer their core community. It’s no longer where they belong — and there’s nothing inherently wrong or malicious about that.

The Pink Pony Club represents the leftist progressive community in which they’ve been building their adult lives. We love the term “echo chamber,” with its decidedly negative connotation, to describe people who surround themselves entirely with others who think and act as they do. But if we’re being honest, another way to say “echo chamber” is “friend group” — or “community.” Most of society works this way. You’re not a sheep or an idiot because you and your friends share values, priorities, and ideas. If your friends are heading to a restaurant, are you a sheep for going along, because you enjoy their company and trust they picked somewhere good that accounts for what you like?

As usual, when there’s discord and misunderstanding, it’s because we aren’t talking to each other. We aren’t asking questions and listening to the answers. We’re making assumptions from our own vantage point instead of discovering the truth of theirs. And the truth is that while anti-Israel Jews are obviously seen as an extreme fringe minority within the mainstream Jewish world — Tennessee — that world simply isn’t of great importance to the Pink Pony Clubbers anymore. Who matters to them are the girls and boys inside the Club, their real community. And within that circle, they’re the majority.

So when mainstream Jews wonder how these young people are standing against their own community, remember: they aren’t. Your community is not their community anymore.

How an Anti-Israel Jew Is Made

And here lies the actual problem — one that’s too late to solve at scale for the current crop, but that must be urgently corrected for the generation just behind them, and forever after. Beyond the profile I’ve already sketched, two more things have to be true for this specific kind of anti-Israel Jew to exist.

The first is estrangement: they must already be removed from the day-to-day life of the mainstream Jewish community. If there’s nothing Jewish about you except the way you were raised, that’s essentially the same as being born in Oklahoma and living in Japan. It’s where you came from, it’s a part of you, and it always will be — but it has very little to do with how you spend your time, prioritize your life, or move through the world.

The second condition is linked to the first: to be an anti-Israel Jew, you must, by default, be uneducated about what Jews are, what Israel means to Jews, and the reality of life on the ground in Israel. Anyone of any background who is genuinely educated in those three areas cannot possibly be anti-Israel. They can be anti—the current government, as enormous numbers of Diaspora and Israeli Jews certainly are. But once you have all the facts, you cannot remain against the entire country in the face of them, unless you truly are an anti-Jewish racist who wants to see us destroyed. And as we’ve established, that is not the MO for this particular group of Jews.

The Binary Trap

You might be wondering: if these Jews aren’t actively connected to the community and only know this conflict through cherry-picked facts and the privileged lens of assimilated American Jewish culture, why are they weighing in at all? It’s the right question — and the answer is exactly what I’ve discussed before. Contemporary society and the pervasiveness of social media have given people the false sense that they’re both obligated and entitled to weigh in on the topics of the day, regardless of their actual capacity to do so meaningfully.

In other words, people who — as we’ve established — know little about Israel and aren’t connected to mainstream Jewish life feel a social responsibility to weigh in on the former as representatives of the latter. And with that microphone thrust upon them, and no ability to engage deeply or with nuance, they get backed into a corner: pick a side. They know they can’t possibly be on the side of the group killing Gazan children on their TikTok feeds, so they must be on the other side. That’s the binary trap. Even if they believe — as many of these anti-Zionists do — that Israel does deserve its own sovereign state (which would, in fact, make them Zionists, but tomato, tomahto), they still consider themselves part of the anti-Israel camp, because they can’t possibly be “pro” if “pro” means siding with the army bombing babies.

I’ve come back to this point a hundred times: people with no grip on the subject dumping low-information opinions into the public sphere, with seemingly no desire to get it right, which is precisely the case. These are folks with no skin in the game, so there’s no incentive to put in the time and effort it takes to actually get it right. In their circles, they’re already right. The extra homework requires intention and effort; they simply don’t care enough to spend — if they did, they’d have done it already.

Careless People

A year ago, I met with some people from Search for Common Ground, a global conflict-resolution organization that works on the ground with key stakeholders to break geopolitical stalemates like this one. The idea that stuck with me from that meeting: it’s almost always the people least involved, least touched by a conflict, who form the most rigid opinions — and who are least helpful in bringing it to an end.

That’s our well-meaning but woefully misguided anti-Israel Jews. They remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby — “careless people” who smash things and then retreat into their carelessness, leaving others to clean up the mess.

It’s maddening. It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible. It’s shameful. But it isn’t nefarious. It isn’t Jew-hatred, it isn’t self-hatred, and honestly, it isn’t that hard to understand. These are disconnected, uneducated people, surrounded by like-minded peers, all reinforcing one another in a disconnected, uneducated worldview — one they’re not especially invested in anyway, and focus on only because progressive society says they’re supposed to.

What We Do Now

So what do we do about it? We deal with the present, and we deal with the future.

For the present, we need to stop being hypocrites. You don’t want to be painted as a baby-killer simply because you’re a Jew who naturally supports Israel. So don’t paint every anti-Israel Jew as a self-hating Hamas supporter because they don’t like watching children starve or get crushed under buildings. We need to talk to the anti-Israel Jews in our lives — using my four C’s of difficult conversation, of course, which I’ve laid out before. Communication leads to understanding, and with understanding, there’s at least room to breathe, to stay connected, to keep love and respect. The changing-of-minds part, if it happens at all, can only come after there’s mutual respect, trust, and understanding. You have to pave the road before anyone can meet you on it.

As for the future, we need to address this a few clicks upstream. The problem isn’t that disconnected, uneducated Jews are turning against Israel. The problem is that we’re failing to stop our children from becoming disconnected, uneducated Jews. The onus falls on both parents and Jewish institutions.

Jewish children must understand that we are a people — an ancient tribe — for whom religion is only one facet of all we share. It’s much harder to disconnect from your family than from your shul. They must know that Jews are not rich white Europeans, but that the world is full of Jews of every color, country, and socioeconomic background — and that even the ones who present as white do so only conditionally.

Jewish teens must know the history of our people — not just the Bible, and not just the Holocaust, but everything in between. They must understand that they stand on a single point along a long line of resilience in the face of unceasing persecution. They must know what happened to us in England and France and Spain and Russia and North Africa. They must know the ins and outs of ’48 and ’67, the fall of the Shah, the Farhud, the Intifadas, and every other pivotal moment in Israeli history — from every angle.

If all we teach them is holidays, songs, and tikkun olam, we can’t be surprised when the only things they know about being Jewish are holidays, songs, and tikkun olam.

✦ ✦ ✦

We can fix this. We have to fix this. And we will. If there’s one thing Jews know how to do, it’s endure. So we beat on, boats against the current — but we always find a way.

This article is adapted from an episode of Jonah’s award-winning show, Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. To watch the video monologue, click here. To listen to this article, click here: Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

That’s not an accident. It’s a strategy.

And antizionism — the modern-day anti-Jew hate movement masquerading as social justice — runs almost entirely on it. The whole thing is built on libels: a handful of buzzwords propped up by pseudo-social science, the fudging of details, and the purposeful flattening of complex realities into oversimplified, incorrect, easily debunked lies.

So let’s debunk them and get you on the right side of history.

First, How Libels Actually Work

Libels succeed because they’re built on bits and pieces of truth — then distorted, misrepresented, and mashed together with blatant falsehoods until you’ve got a repeatable, unbeatable slogan that trades reality and nuance for stupefying simplicity.

That tiny kernel of truth is the whole trick. It’s what gives the libel its sheen of authenticity.

Think of it like this. I give you a point, and you mix it up with a bunch of other points and flatten them all into a line. Yes, my point is technically in there somewhere. But all you see is a line — and at that point, my point is besides the point.

You get the point.

Libels are also an inversion. Not only is Israel not guilty of them — the Arab enemies who invented them are. So each libel does double duty: it’s a demonizing attack on Jews and a distraction that dupes the dupable into overlooking the actual evil being perpetrated upon Jews by their very accusers.

F’ed up, right?

And they make for terrific slogans because they obey Brandolini’s Law — the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. It’s far easier to say something misleading, lazy, or wrong than it is to dismantle it with facts, context, and precision.

That’s why libels win. They beat lengthy explanations. They travel faster than corrections. The person spreading them looks confident; the person debunking them looks defensive. Add the availability heuristic — whatever’s loudest and easiest to recall feels most true — and a dash of inattention blindness — missing the complexity nobody framed for you — and you’ve got yourself a solid foundation for a hate movement.

Libel #1: Apartheid

First up, alphabetically at least.

The term comes from South Africa: a systematic, intentional, and permanent domination of one racial group over another, codified through law, policy, and state power — where the subordinate group has to be retained for the dominant group’s system to keep functioning.

It’s a mouthful. But that’s the legal bar.

And here’s what I’ve found: when people accuse Israel of apartheid, they almost always fall into one or more of three camps. They don’t actually understand the term. They don’t know anything about life on the ground in Israel. Or they don’t even know which slice of land “from the river to the sea” they’re talking about.

Because that land is three distinct places: Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank — also called Judea and Samaria, or the Occupied West Bank, depending on who you ask. Let’s take them one at a time.

Israel. Anyone who’s spent ten seconds here knows the apartheid charge is ridiculous. It’s one of the most racially diverse places on the planet.

More than 20% of the country isn’t Jewish. Everybody comes from everywhere. Everyone shares the same civil rights under the same law — everyone votes, everyone can run for office, everyone litigates in the same courts.

The inclusion of Arab minorities is just that: inclusion. People seeking their ancestral home, or economic opportunity, or democracy, or LGBTQ rights. That is the opposite of a system designed to retain a laboring underclass.

Now the kernel of truth: yes, there’s structural discrimination and inequality in Israel. Why? Because it’s a country with multiple ethnic groups — and like every such country (America, India, France, Japan, Estonia, Malaysia), it’s got issues.

But only Israel gets the apartheid treatment. I wonder what’s different about that one Jewish country surrounded by 57 Arab ones.

And here’s the inversion: it’s the Arab states across the Middle East and North Africa that have come closest to actual apartheid. They suppressed and segregated Jews as dhimmis for centuries, then ethnically cleansed nearly a million of them out of communities thousands of years old — through legal strangulation, asset seizures, denationalization, and good old-fashioned violence — cutting the region’s Jewish population by 99%. But you don’t hear about that on social media.

Gaza. It doesn’t even resemble apartheid. Before the war, there wasn’t a single Jew in the territory — not since Israel pulled out unilaterally in 2005.

It’s hard to run “two laws for two peoples” when only one people is allowed inside. Talk about the blockade. Talk about airspace. Talk about whatever you want. But you can’t talk about apartheid, because it flat-out doesn’t apply.

The West Bank. Now we’re in the weeds. The Oslo Accords split it into three zones meant to be temporary — and technically still are, 30 years later.

Area A — administered and secured by the Palestinian Authority — holds the major cities like Ramallah and Nablus, where most Palestinians live.

Area B — administered by the PA, secured by Israel — covers the smaller towns and villages where the next big chunk of people live.

Area C — full Israeli civil and military control — is where most Israeli settlers live, alongside less than 5% of the Palestinian population.

It’s only in Area C that you get the thing critics point to: Israelis under Israeli civil law, Palestinians under Israeli military law. Two laws, two peoples.

And yes — that’s the closest any of this comes to one element of apartheid. But this is exactly how libels work, because it is distinctly not apartheid under the actual legal definition.

The Israeli forces there aren’t a state government, because the West Bank isn’t part of the state of Israel. The dual legal systems aren’t about race, and they aren’t about retaining a permanent labor force. They exist because settlers are civilians of an occupying power and Palestinians are not.

Are there real problems with this setup? Absolutely. But apartheid isn’t one of them.

And because we’re forever getting hit with the vilifying shortcut, we never actually get to talk about what’s really happening. We just get stuck in “it is” / “no it isn’t” — which entrenches everyone, demonizes only Israel, and gets us nowhere fast.

Libel #2: White European Colonizer

Three bad words in a row. This is the easiest one to debunk, because it’s so ludicrously untrue.

Start with “white.” Jews aren’t white. We’re not really a “race” at all — we predate and exceed that Western social construct. And most of Israel’s population doesn’t even present as white: Ethiopians, Moroccans, Yemenites, Algerians, people from Asia, from South America, from everywhere. Spend five minutes on the Tel Aviv tayelet and you’ll see it.

Now “European.” Jews aren’t from Europe. Jews are from Judea — which is modern-day Israel.

You cannot colonize a place you are from.

There is no other land Jews are collectively connected to. Every Muslim holy site in the land is literally built on top of a Jewish one. A state founded by an indigenous people — already living there or returning from exile, with no mother empire, mostly arriving as refugees fleeing for their lives — does not meet the definition of settler colonialism by any stretch.

Arabs, on the other hand, are from Arabia. Which, I probably don’t need to tell you, is not in Israel. There’s a reason there are 57 Muslim-majority countries stretched across Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Now that’s effective colonizing.

And there’s a second inversion here, because this libel lets white Westerners scratch the itch of their own white guilt — taking their shame out on some Jews thousands of miles away.

These lost leftists have been convinced they’re personally on the hook for the colonialism of centuries ago, for slavery, for things their great-great-great-grandparents weren’t alive for. Even white-presenting Jews — whose families showed up as broke, Yiddish-speaking immigrants 100 years ago — somehow feel responsible for things that happened in countries their families weren’t even living in.

That’s why the progressive response to white guilt never gets past performance. It isn’t genuine, internally felt guilt. It’s external guilt, handed to them to satisfy somebody else’s gaze. So even the ones who want to do right, in the eyes of their peers, will only go so far.

And so you get millions of hypocrites calling Israelis “white European colonizers who should give back stolen land” — while they themselves are the white European colonizers actually living on stolen land.

The kernel of truth? It’s a stretch, but fine: about half the Jews present at Israel’s founding in 1948 came from Europe. Okay.

But here’s the thing —

Israel isn’t a colonial project. It’s the most successful decolonization movement in history. A return to sovereignty for an indigenous people robbed of it for thousands of years.

Libel #3: Baby Killer

This one’s newer — a social-media favorite haunting the comments of every Jewish account from bubbies to bagel shops.

“Baby killer.” Jarring even to type.

This time, I want to start with the kernel of truth, because this one matters.

As with every army in human history, some soldiers lose their way in the fog of war. Out of vengeance, immaturity, exhaustion, power, darkness — atrocities happen. I’m certain more than one innocent child has been killed by a rogue Israeli soldier in this war.

I don’t know how many or how. But I’m as sure as I’d be in any war that the number is more than zero. And anyone who does something unforgivable should be punished — on Earth and in Heaven. Nothing out of Gaza has been forensically verified, but probability tells me at least one of these accusations is true. Maybe ten. Maybe twenty. Maybe fifty.

If you want to talk about those incidents — fine. Let’s.

But branding the entire 400,000-person IDF — or all of Israel, or any random Jew anywhere who supports it — as “baby killers” isn’t an argument. It’s a punch below the belt, designed to demonize and ostracize Jews. Full stop.

So let me put two cultures side by side, and you tell me which one sounds more like baby killers.

One teaches its kids that the highest aim in life is to die killing their enemies. The other teaches that the point of life is to make the world better.

One sends its youth to blow themselves up to murder civilians. The other releases thousands of enemy prisoners to save a single life.

One starves its own people so it can resell aid back to them at a profit. The other has likely moved more aid to an enemy population during active combat than any army in modern history.

One stashes weapons in kids’ bedrooms, hospitals, and kindergartens. The other coordinates hundreds of thousands of polio vaccines for the very children it’s accused of hunting.

One army exists only to kill its enemies. The other — three-quarters of it reservists in their 30s and 40s who left their regular-ass jobs, spouses, and kids to serve — exists only to defend its own people.

If we’re talking about killing children as policy, one side actually does that.

Hamas fights by burying itself — and hostages, and weapons — directly underneath civilians. The entire point of the strategy is for their own people to die. They attack, draw fire, hide, force civilians to stay put, and wait.

They have 500 miles of tunnels. Enough to shelter every child in Gaza and then some. They don’t. Because they don’t want to.

They want the kids to die. So Israel looks bad. So people call them the baby killers.

And on October 7th? Hamas murdered every baby they could find — in cribs, in their mothers’ arms, in their mothers’ bellies. In cold blood.

The actual baby killers are the ones running the accusation. As a deliberate strategy. They get away with the exact horror they pin on Jews — and the denial of that is what makes this libel hurt the most.

The Big One: Genocide

A libel so pervasive, so perverse, and so destructive it gets its own section. It’s the number-one excuse people use to treat Jews like garbage anytime, anywhere — and feel righteous doing it.

You know the lines. “That’s what you get when you commit genocide.” “Have you tried not supporting genocide?” “You’re complicit.” “You can’t be in politics if you won’t call it genocide.” “I’m not anti-Jew, I’m just anti-genocide.”

It is far and away the most effective weapon antizionists have for removing Jews from society — and removing Israel, the Jew of nations, from the society of nations.

Here’s the inversion, and it’s a brutal one:

“Genocide” is a word invented to describe the systematic extermination of six million Jews.

That genocide was carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe — including the highest-ranking Muslim official in Palestine, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who lived in Berlin, recruited Muslims to the Nazi cause, and whose role in the Final Solution was called “not insignificant” at Nuremberg.

How’s that for inversion.

Start with common sense.

Why does anyone who thinks Gaza is a genocide think that? Because someone told them. That’s it. Hearsay, from sources they assume are reputable — not from weighing evidence against a legal definition.

How do I know it isn’t a genocide? The opposite. From the evidence, the actions, and the law.

So who told them? The closed loop. Anti-Israel “progressive” accounts, podcasters, legacy media, cable pundits, Arab propaganda outlets, UN officials, academics, tokenized antizionist Jews, and celebrities — all citing each other in a circle.

Here’s the loop in action. Hamas — bankrolled by Iran, Qatar, and friends — manufactures a lie. Your former friend hears it from her pottery class, who heard it from the teacher, who saw it on an actor’s Instagram, who heard it on a podcast that cited a TikTok that cited an antizionist Jewish group that cited “genocide experts” that cited a UN report that cited an Amnesty report that cited another UN report that cited a BBC report that cited UNRWA — which cited the Gaza Health Ministry, a.k.a. Hamas.

Rinse and repeat. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is.

Successful mass manipulation looks like masses of people being manipulated while you look on from a distance, in dismay.

Every link in that chain deserves its own takedown. A few quick ones:

Amnesty International. Its Middle East account, Secretary General, and UK Campaigns Manager tweeted 214 times about Gaza. 87% targeted Israel or focused on Palestinian suffering. Tweets calling for the hostages’ release: three. Tweets condemning Hamas for war crimes: one. Neither Amnesty’s main nor its MENA account posted a single tweet focused solely on Israeli victims, or an unqualified condemnation of October 7th. Human rights? More like anyone-but-Jew-man rights.

The UN. The body whose humanitarian affairs chief said “Hamas is not a terrorist group.” Whose General Assembly passed 17 resolutions against Israel in 2024 — and seven against the entire rest of the world combined. Which pushed out its own Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide for refusing to call this a genocide. That UN.

The “experts.” Anyone can join the International Association of Genocide Scholars for $30 — and plenty did, including Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and at least one dog. And the studies in their genocide resolution? Written by human rights orgs like Amnesty and B’Tselem — the token antizionist Jewish group — both of which openly redefined genocide to fit. Look it up: B’Tselem admits using a “broader analytical framework than the legal definition.” At least they admit it.

And don’t get me started on the Westerners citing Al Jazeera — Qatari-funded, and so openly extreme it’s been banned for inciting violence in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, the UAE, Bahrain, and the West Bank. Too extreme for the Palestinian Authority. Just right for your yoga instructor.

Now, the actual case.

Israel didn’t commit genocide — not because I want that to be true, but because it didn’t do the things you have to do to be guilty of it. The legal bar is incredibly high, and for good reason.

You don’t blow your own element of surprise with millions of leaflets, texts, calls, roof-knocks, and interrupted broadcasts warning civilians you’re coming — if you’re trying to commit genocide.

You don’t send your own young men and women in on foot, room by room, into IEDs and snipers and booby traps, for two years — if extermination is the goal.

You don’t coordinate hundreds of thousands of polio vaccines for the children you’re supposedly trying to wipe out. You don’t open humanitarian corridors, move millions of tons of aid, or negotiate ceasefires.

And you sure don’t negotiate ceasefires if you’re the victim of a genocide.

Here’s a number that stops me cold.

The Jewish birth rate during the Holocaust was zero. Statistically zero.

Because in an actual genocide, pregnant women and babies are slaughtered. Because there’s no privacy to conceive under a staircase, or crammed into a ghetto room with twenty sick people, or inside a van being pumped full of carbon monoxide.

The estimated birth rate in Gaza in early 2025 — the supposed peak of the supposed genocide? Around 130 babies a day. Lower than usual, sure. But not zero.

Lower means war. Zero means genocide.

Now the math. Take the highest death-toll estimate floating around — about 100,000, higher even than Hamas’s own count. Say it’s true.

Subtract natural deaths over two years at pre-war rates (~16,000), and you’re at 84,000. Subtract terrorist deaths at the most conservative estimate (~15% of the count, around 12,600), and you’re at ~71,400 — still higher than Hamas claims. A horrible, sickening number that never should have happened. Stay with me anyway.

Israel is estimated to have dropped 70,000 metric tons of bombs on Gaza. Which means that for a military supposedly running an extermination campaign — in one of the densest urban areas on Earth, whose own leaders locked civilians out of the tunnels, whose neighbor Egypt refused refugees — roughly one civilian died for every 2,200 pounds of bombs dropped.

2,200 pounds of explosives. One death.

Take the names off it. Is that what genocide by the most precise military on the planet looks like?

The legal part.

The 1948 Genocide Convention — written, of course, after the genocide of the Jews — defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” via one of five acts: killing, serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting destructive conditions, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children.

That’s the definition antizionists cite. What they don’t mention is that decades of cases at the International Court of Justice have refined it — because on its own it’s so broad it could mean almost anything.

Their favorite move is the phrase “in part.” To them, any number of Gazan deaths is genocide, as long as the “intent” is there — and they’ll point to the closed loop, or to some rabid official’s rhetoric, as proof.

But that ignores the “only reasonable inference” standard. For intent to count as genocidal, genocide has to be the only reasonable explanation — not a reasonable one. The only one.

Call me crazy, but: your territory invaded, 250 citizens kidnapped, 1,200 murdered in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — that seems like a pretty plausible reason a military might enter Gaza, after 20 years of staying out. (It also sounds a lot like an attempted genocide. Inversion number three.)

Then there’s the “substantial part” requirement — it’s not enough to target a part; it has to be substantial. Look at the scale of real genocides:

Holocaust: 40% of all Jews on Earth. Rwanda: 70% of all Tutsis, in 100 days. Armenia: ~55% of all Armenians. Gaza: a civilian death toll around 2% of Gaza’s population — about 0.5% of all Palestinians alive.

40%. 70%. 55%. Versus under 1%. That’s not “substantial” unless we’re redefining that word too.

And courts have held it’s not enough that conditions could lead to a group’s destruction — that has to be the sole intent behind creating them. So yes, Israel badly botched parts of the aid situation. But it also delivered more wartime aid to an enemy than ever before, with a legitimate aim: stopping Hamas from stealing and reselling it. That alone kills “sole intent.”

Why this libel really exists.

Look at how the word actually gets used, and the motive shows. It’s there to punish and “other” Jews for the crime of being Jews. Any hatred, anytime, at any level, gets a pass — because “genocide,” and because you, random Jewish person, did it by proxy.

Unless you publicly amputate from your identity the completely natural connection to the world’s only Jewish state — where most Jews live, around which our calendar, holidays, and liturgy revolve, the one place on Earth we’re actually indigenous to — you’re guilty.

This collective guilt, for a crime against humanity that didn’t even happen, applies to no other people on Earth. Not even people who actually committed genocide. Jews are no more responsible for the Israeli government — real actions or imagined — than the bigots throwing these charges are responsible for their own governments.

It’s one big hypocritical shit sandwich.

And the “ongoing genocide” thing.

Some say it’s been going on for decades. Some say it started the day after October 7th. Some pick other dates. Some insist it’s still happening, after the war officially ended.

That chaos is the tell.

You cannot name another genocide in history with no clear beginning and no clear end.

Rwanda, the Holocaust, Armenia, Bosnia, Srebrenica, Cambodia — even slow burns like Darfur — all have boundaries in time. Not this one. Because it isn’t one. It’s a libel laid over a real, ongoing conflict between two responsible parties, punctuated by sharp bursts of war.

As for “ongoing” — by Hamas’s own numbers, about 500 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes in the months since the October ceasefire. That’s roughly four a week. If four deaths a week is a genocide, the word means nothing. Any number of deaths, over any stretch of time, is simply not what genocide describes.

And here’s the cruel genius of it: defending yourself with death counts is macabre. You cannot look compassionate while saying “actually, only half that many civilians died.” It won’t win anyone over — because the goal was never the count. The goal is to other Jews, and someone who sounds like they’re rationalizing dead civilians is easy to cast out.

Worst of all? The smug, uninformed people burying their heads in the sand are the ones actually complicit in the Palestinian deaths they claim to mourn. By swallowing the propaganda and aiming their rage at Jews, they keep jihadist terrorists in business — guaranteeing more dead Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Civilians give Hamas physical cover. Westerners give it narrative cover.

That’s the worst inversion of all.

So What Do We Do?

Look — I know this is exhausting. That’s the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, live: they throw one word, and I have to write three thousand to take it apart.

Will the people who most need this read it? No. Would it change their minds if they did? Probably not. But if you’ve had doubts — if you’re surrounded by that closed loop, or love someone trapped inside it — I hope this puts them to rest.

So here’s what we do: fight back.

They’ve got propaganda. We’ve got the truth. They’ve never had to argue their case, because everyone around them just nods along. They don’t even realize their entire worldview is secondhand — never corroborated, never proven.

So make them prove it. With evidence. With case law. Not “because someone said so.”

And at the very least, take some courage from all of this. Don’t be afraid to tell them, flatly, that they’re wrong — and that no slogan is going to change that.

They’re the ones who’ve been lied to. They’re the ones who’ve been manipulated. Not you. You’ve got this one right. So as lousy as these libels feel, feel good about that.

This essay is adapted from the ‘ABC of Libels’ monologue of Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. The full audio and video are available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, and are available at beingjewishpodcast.com

This is what moral clarity feels like in 2026. At times, the advocate will be placed at odds with the majority. Told that they are brainwashed when, in fact, they have resisted the brainwashing. To be right in this work is to stand against a tide of people who are convinced you are wrong.

The Jeremiah Effect

Which brings us to the third and final pillar of the Mental Iron Dome — a concept worth naming The Jeremiah Effect.

The Book of Jeremiah can be found in the section of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, called Nev’im — the Prophets. Jeremiah lived during the final decades of the Kingdom of Judah, biblical Israel, and was present for one of the most catastrophic moments in Jewish history: the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

Jeremiah’s defining trait was his moral clarity in isolation. He warned Judah that its corruption would lead to destruction, while all the other leaders assured a future of peace and security. As a reward for his stance, Jeremiah was ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and ostracized by his own community — yet he refused to deny what he knew to be true, without expectation of success or popularity.

He remained steadfast in his compassion for his people, grieving their doom even as he warned them of it.

This is the experience of moral clarity in a manipulated world. Not arrogance. Not obstinance. Just the unbearable loneliness of knowing something true that everyone around you has been convinced is false.

The Oldest Inversion

One of the oldest inversions leveled against Jews is that we are a secret cabal of conspirators, plotting to control minds and take over the world. When in reality, it is our enemies who conspire — who work together to concoct and skillfully disseminate a malicious and demonizing narrative meant to turn the world against us.

Consider it objectively for a moment.

This inversion of reality — where the truth seems isolating and consensus seems false — is not accidental. It is the cost of refusing a lie that hypnotizes the many. This is what it feels like. And Jews engaged in this work must prepare themselves mentally to face that feeling without being thrown by it.

How Can So Many Be So Wrong?

The natural question is: how can this happen? How can so many people be so wrong on something so easy to get right?

Part of the answer, as explored in the previous installment of this series, is the closed-loop antizionist ecosystem. Social media and academia have been heavily and strategically pumped full of foreign money from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran. Why? Because those are the two arenas where young people spend all of their time. It is no wonder that Gen Z has become the most anti-Jewish generation in nearly a century.

On the other hand, there are institutions — the UN, legacy media outlets, human rights organizations — to which we mistakenly ascribe an aura of moral perfection. But institutions are, of course, just groups of people. Nothing more, nothing less. Flawed, biased, agenda-driven people. To treat such institutions as heavenly bodies incapable of wrongdoing is to be either naive or blissfully cocooned in the privilege of a life as yet untouched by the wicked machinations of these organizations.

But what about the people closest to us — friends, family, teachers, colleagues — who studied Nazi Germany in school, who know how dangerous and effective propaganda can be? How are they still falling prey to it?

The answer is a question: What do you think Nazi Germany looked like? What does it mean when we say that all the politicians, the intelligentsia, the academics, and the journalists all sang the same anti-Jewish tune?

It looked like this.

Because of the way our brains work, we are essentially only able to study history as spectators — never from the vantage point of participants in its next chapter. The reason for this is a set of cognitive biases that deserve naming.

The Three Cognitive Biases That Make History Invisible

Historical Exceptionalism

We arrogantly assume that our moment is fundamentally different from the past — even when structural conditions are basically the same and the warning signs are identical. We believe humans of the past were constrained by ignorance, primitive norms, or propaganda. But not us. We are enlightened, informed, and morally superior — totally removed from those other people, who were, by the way, basically our grandparents. As a result, we treat history as interesting, but not diagnostic.

Moral Self-Licensing

“Because I learned the history, I would never repeat it.” Or the “They Were Monsters” Fallacy: “If I were there, I would have acted differently.” History clearly teaches us, again and again, that our most catastrophic failures were carried out by ordinary people — not uniquely evil monsters from another world — acting entirely within societal norms, not outside them.

Temporal Distance Bias

Events far away in time are processed abstractly, while events close to us are processed emotionally and situationally. We analyze history at a remove, with a clear sense of causality and morality — while experiencing the present from inside it. Our brains resist collapsing those two modes into one, so the same pattern can be understood entirely differently, simply depending on when it occurs.

What This Feels Like — And What It Means

Those who hold to what is right and true will be told they are biased, emotional, reactionary, blinded by identity, or paid by AIPAC. They are not — unless, of course, they work at AIPAC.

The confusion, the isolation, the sense that reality has inverted — these are not signs of error. They are symptoms of rectitude.

The Jeremiah Effect names this experience. It is the third pillar of the Mental Iron Dome precisely because it must be understood before it is felt — or it will shake even the most clear-eyed advocate off their footing. Understand it. Expect it. Be ready for it.

The Mental Iron Dome Is Complete

Full comprehension and command of these three concepts will safeguard moral clarity in an impregnable fortress — one that no amount of propaganda, social pressure, or institutional authority can breach.

The Three Pillars — A Summary

1 Palestinianism. When the Palestinian leadership decides they want a state more than they want Jews not to have one, the conflict will end. Everything else is noise.

2 Antizionism is not a rational intellectual position. It is the Othering of Jews from the Left — a racist anti-Jew hate movement. Set it. Forget it. Slam that door closed.

3 The Jeremiah Effect. The confusion, the isolation, the sense that reality has inverted — these are not signs of error. They are symptoms of rectitude. You are not lost. You are early.

Armed with a Mental Iron Dome, the work becomes clear: get out there and reclaim the truth from those who seek to deny it.

There is no obligation to convince everyone. No obligation to win the internet. In fact, winning the argument is not the point at all. The point is to carry the armor — to withstand the fight, day after day, week after week, year after year.

Ignorance, laziness, and hate are their weapons. Clarity is ours.

And there is something worth remembering about that cartoon. The one figure standing before the sea of thousands. Truth has never needed a crowd. It has only ever needed people willing to stand still when the crowd moves.

When you feel alone — remember: You are not lost. You are early.
All of history’s great movements had to start somewhere. The only question is:

Will you be part of this one?

There is a version of antizionism that sounds reasonable on paper. It presents itself as a principled intellectual position — rooted in legitimate historical grievance, political critique, and concern for human rights. Walk through a pro-Palestine protest, however, or spend a few minutes on social media, and the gap between that stated premise and its actual practice becomes impossible to ignore.

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Antizionism, in practice, has as much to do with opposition to Zionism as antisemitism has to do with opposition to Semitism. Which is to say: nothing at all.

Operationally, antizionism is not a debate about the merits of a Jewish state. It is a coordinated effort to bar Jews — socially, professionally, culturally, and physically — from full participation in society.

Blocking Jewish college students from class. Defacing synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. Boycotting Jewish authors, artists, athletes, and musicians. These are the day-to-day activities of the antizionist movement — and none of them have anything to do with the geopolitics of the Middle East.

How Good People Justify Bigotry

The more interesting question is how people who genuinely consider themselves progressive and morally conscious are able to participate in — or tacitly endorse — behavior that is, by any honest standard, bigoted. The answer lies in the construction of a supervillain.

The figure of “the Zionist” has been built through decades of repetition into something so uniquely evil, so irredeemably demonic, that it no longer registers as human. Once a group has been sufficiently dehumanized, the violence and exclusion directed at them stops feeling like bigotry — it starts feeling like justice.

This is not a new strategy. It is, in fact, the oldest strategy in the history of antisemitism — and it has always followed the same logic.

The Pattern Across History

Medieval Period

The creed: Christianity

The blood libel painted Jews as murderous killers of Christian children — enemies of the faith’s most sacred values. Persecution of Jews was reframed as a righteous act of religious protection.

1930s Germany

The creed: Science and racial purity

The Nazis deployed pseudoscientific claims that Jewish blood was literally contaminating the German race. Antisemitism was reframed as a biological necessity — a matter of national survival.

Today

The creed: Human rights and social justice

Antizionism portrays Israel — and by extension, Jews — as the embodiment of everything the progressive world opposes: colonialism, apartheid, genocide. Jew hatred is reframed as antiracist advocacy.

The pattern is consistent across every era: take whatever moral framework a society holds most sacred, then construct a version of Jews as its perfect enemy. Persecution stops being unjust and becomes, instead, a noble undertaking — the defense of good against evil.

The libels change. The logic does not.

Worth noting: the accusations leveled at Jews and Israel — colonizer, apartheid state, perpetrator of genocide — are not only false. They are, in each case, far more accurately applied to those making them. Western antizionists often carry the legacy of genuine colonial histories and the displacement of indigenous peoples. The most extreme actors in the region, who on October 7th killed every child they encountered, are the ones invoking genocide as their cause. This inversion — accusing others of what you are actually doing — is a feature of the strategy, not a coincidence.

Why the Lies Feel True

The reason these libels gain traction is not because they are persuasive on the merits. It is because they are repeated, relentlessly, across every media environment in which people spend their time. Repetition, as cognitive psychology has established through decades of research, produces what is known as the Illusory Truth Effect: repeated statements feel more true over time, even when the listener knows they are false.

The scale of that repetition, when it comes to Israel, is not accidental.

6,656 vs. 80.

In the first nine months after October 7th, the New York Times published 6,656 articles about the war in Gaza. In the same nine-month window during America’s war against ISIS in Iraq, the same paper published 80. Syria’s civil war — 13 years of conflict — generated 5,400 articles in total.

More staff on Israel than Russia, China, and India combined.

The Associated Press — whose coverage determines what most other outlets run — employs more journalists to cover a country of 10 million people than it does to cover three countries with a combined population of over 3 billion.

This is not journalism responding to news. It is a volume strategy — and it works. Repetition does not require proof. It requires only presence and time.

How Antizionism Gets Its Credibility

Every mainstream iteration of Jew hatred throughout history has shared one feature: institutional legitimacy. Medieval blood libels were endorsed by the Church. Nazi racial theory had the backing of academics and scientists. Antizionism has college professors, Hollywood figures, UN officials, and human rights organizations.

These institutions form a closed feedback loop — each citing the others, each conferring credibility on the same set of libels and behaviors. As Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies professor Shaul Kelner has described it, the result is an intellectually justified, socially acceptable Othering of Jews whose social base is in the professional class.

Antisemitism vs. Antizionism — The Same Hatred, Different Packaging

Both forms of Jew hatred operate through the same mechanism — the exclusion and dehumanization of Jews — but they present themselves very differently depending on the political environment in which they operate.

Antisemitism — from the Right

• Low cultural register

• Jews are not white enough

• Jews must leave Europe

• The Nazis had the right idea

Antizionism — from the Left

• High cultural register

• Jews are too white

• Jews must go back to Europe

• Jews are the new Nazis

Since the Holocaust, Western education has focused almost exclusively on recognizing Jew hatred from the right. The left-wing variant has gone largely untaught — which is why so many Jews have walked directly into antizionist spaces, unaware that their inclusion was conditional and instrumental. It is worth remembering that Soviet antizionism successfully suppressed Jewish identity and community life less than a century ago. The mechanism is not new. Only the branding is.

What Antizionist Hate Actually Looks Like

Recognizing antizionist hate does not require expertise in Israeli history or Middle Eastern politics. It requires pattern recognition. The following behaviors are not political expression — they are expressions of anti-Jewish racism, regardless of how they are framed.

Libels — using terms like apartheid, colonizer, baby killer, ethnostate, or genocide to describe Israel and its people without a factual basis constitutes racist dehumanization.

Slurs — terms like “Isra-hell,” “Zio,” or “Zionazi” are racial slurs. Their use signals hate, not critique.

Dismissing Jewish voices — responding to any positive statement about Jews or Israel by claiming it is “paid propaganda” is a tactic to silence rather than engage.

Vandalism — defacing Jewish institutions, businesses, or personal property with political slogans is an act of targeted harassment, not protest.

Litmus tests — requiring Jews to denounce Israel or renounce their connection to Jewish peoplehood as the price of inclusion is a form of coerced identity suppression.

Explaining Jewishness to Jews — insisting on the authority to define what Jews are, what Zionism means, or who counts as a legitimate Jewish voice is a form of intellectual domination.

Calls for ethnic cleansing — chanting for the removal of Israelis from their land, or for violence against Jews globally, is incitement. It is not protected political speech.

Refusal of service — denying service to someone in an Uber, restaurant, classroom, or therapist’s office solely because they are Jewish or Israeli is illegal discrimination.

Mob harassment — masked groups targeting synagogues, hospitals, and campuses to intimidate Jewish communities is organized hate activity, regardless of stated political justification.

Physical violence — assaulting or killing Jews for being Jewish requires no further analysis. It is the endpoint of the dehumanization described above.

Mental Iron Dome — Pillar Two

Moral clarity requires closing the door to doubt — not out of arrogance, but out of certitude arrived at through honest examination. Antizionism is a racist anti-Jewish hate movement. The evidence supports no other conclusion. Once that is understood, it does not need to be relitigated each time it is encountered. It needs to be recognized and named.

The dissemination of anti-Jew ideas functions very much the same way. We are under a relentless barrage of anti-Jew, anti-Israel messaging, all day, every day, from all around us — but unlike Hamas rockets, this weaponry is invisible, and we don’t get an alert on our phones to warn us when it’s coming. Even one of these mental missiles getting through can cause extreme damage.

In order to stop them, we need to break their cloaking abilities, build up our own internal warning system, and safeguard our minds where truth and clarity reside.

Today, I’m here to help you build your own Mental Iron Dome — to provide you with the three essential, unassailable, missile-proof ideas that comprise the foundation upon which your impenetrable fortress of moral clarity is to be built.

We Have Enemies. And They Have a Strategy.

As Western liberal societies, we naively — arrogantly — ignorantly continue to believe that the entire world operates on our same fixed set of moral values. That everyone plays by the same rules we do.

They don’t. That’s not reality.

Our enemies — Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, supported by proxy militias and other opportunistic states like Turkey and Qatar — are united in destabilizing Western power, liberal norms, and Israeli sovereignty. This is not a conspiracy theory. Qatar invests billions of dollars in American education. Russia interferes in our presidential elections. China uses TikTok to sow discord. This is common knowledge.

Like it or not, we are living in an age of mass manipulation — our institutions, media, education, and culture are being subverted through the deliberate use of emotional triggers, identity framing, and narrative control to steer our perceptions and actions while preserving the illusion of independent judgment.

The Hidden Engine: Repetition

To understand how to protect ourselves, we turn to former KGB propaganda specialist Yuri Bezmenov and his concept of demoralization — whereby a society’s ability to recognize truth, defend itself, or believe in its own institutions is eroded by nefarious actors.

The hidden engine of demoralization is repetition.

1. What is repeated becomes familiar. What is familiar becomes credible. What becomes credible no longer needs to be defended. Repetition doesn’t require proof — only presence.

2. The Illusory Truth Effect: Repeated statements feel more true, even if they are known to be false. This is one of the strongest, most replicated findings in behavioral science. It works on experts. It works on people who have been lied to before. It works without argument.

3. Narrative entrenchment: Once a narrative has been embraced, to challenge it feels disruptive, annoying, or easily dismissed as partisan. This is why propaganda thrives on slogans, binaries, memes, buzzwords — the aim is not nuance or truth, just stuff that’s easy to repeat.

4. Pluralistic ignorance: When an idea appears ubiquitous, we assume everyone else believes it. Silence is interpreted as agreement, and public dissent feels risky and lonely — so even when many people privately know something isn’t true, they don’t speak up.

Pillar One: Palestinianism

Now that we’ve named what we’re up against, we’re ready to start building our Mental Iron Dome.

The first pillar we have to lock in is the understanding, without a shred of doubt, that:

If the Arabs wanted a Palestinian state more than they wanted to destroy the Jewish one, there would be a Palestinian state. Period.

This simple notion is what the entire Israeli-Arab conflict is about. Not because I said so, but because the Palestinians have said so, literally and openly for decades, supported by every action they have taken for the past 100 years.

The Evidence

Let’s look at the very first partition plan the Arabs were offered in 1937 under the Peel Commission — Britain’s initial attempt to deal with the mandate they had over the territory known as Palestine. The British plan offered Jews about 18% of the territory, with all of the rest going to the Arabs, minus a British-controlled corridor through Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Moreover, nearly every time peace has seemingly been on the table, the Palestinian response has been to initiate violence against the Jews. The War of Independence. The Second Intifada. The disengagement from Gaza.

Ask yourself: Are these the actions of people who just want a state if only they’d be granted one? Or the actions of people who want to eradicate Jews first, state later?

What Israel Actually Is

Israel was created the same way nearly every other country on Earth was created: by a nationalist religious or ethnic group — in the Jews’ case, both — building the foundations of statehood in the geographic location they’re connected to, and then having their new state recognized by other nations around the world.

Israel is a country. Not an experiment, not an ideology, not a project. It is a country, like all the others, and it is not getting reversed any more than any other country on Earth is.

What Isn’t the Reason

The existence of Israel is not the reason there’s no Palestinian state. Lack of financial or public support is not the reason. The Occupied West Bank is not the reason. Bibi Netanyahu is not the reason.

The only reason you consider any of these as legitimate explanations is because you’ve been distracted into doing so by mass manipulation. You have been conned into embracing repetition as reasoning.

Engaging with anything but the core idea is like shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The iceberg is Palestinianism — and until Palestinian society accepts the presence of Jews in some part of the land to which we are indigenous, there will be no two states.

Ideas like “from the river to the sea,” “right of return,” support for UNRWA, the generational inheritance of refugee status — these are the lifelines of Palestinianism. And our focus has to be on dismantling these ideas. Not just for the safety and security of the Jewish people — but for the Palestinians as well, who will never live in a state of their own as long as the Western World keeps their leaders doped up on billions in welfare and long-held dreams of Jewish extinction on life support.

It has never mattered what Israeli government is in power — right, left, or center. The Palestinians said no to all of them.

Mental Iron Dome — Pillar One

Next in this series

Part 2: Antizionism — the contemporary anti-Jew hate movement masquerading as social justice. And why is the only reason you’ve ever questioned whether the libels might be true repetition.

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