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| Photo by mana5280 |
Back in the middle of January 2026, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent out a message to its subscribers asking them, “How has the rise in antisemitism affected the community where you live?…What has changed in your daily life, your sense of belonging, or your relationship to the spaces you move through – at work, on campus, in public, or within Jewish communal life?” Once Haaretz has what the editors consider a sufficient number of answers they will use this data to create “a readers-focused piece for Haaretz Insider.”
There is something typically incomplete about this request. To be sure, an Israeli newspaper would be interested in documenting the lives of Jews abroad at a time of rising antisemitism. However, in doing so they do not pose the question, “why should antisemitism be on the rise over the last several years?” And, what sort of answers to this question might their readers have?
There are always multiple reasons for the rise of racism within a community: xenophobia, scapegoating, etc. Thus, if you are focusing on the rise of one form of racism, such as antisemitism, it is important to try to define specific triggers.
Not wanting to wait till the editors of the newspaper try to answer this question (that time may never come), I have decided to do it for them. So let’s see if we can figure out why antisemitism seems to have been on the rise.
An Answer to What is Left Out
There has been much hoopla over the great ability of web-based AIs to answer informational questions in great detail. So I took the inquiry to Google’s “AI mode.” Here is the question I asked: “Is there a correlation between the growth of antisemitism in the US and the episodes of Israeli military violence, particularly against Palestinians?” Here, at length and italicized, is the AI’s answer:
Historical Trends
Rigorous analysis shows that for over three decades, no factor has explained increases in U.S. antisemitism more significantly than Israel engaging in violent conflict with its neighbors. Between 2001 and 2014, total antisemitic incidents rose by an average of 24% during weeks of Israeli military operations.
Recent Surges (2023–2025)
Following the October 7, 2023 attack and subsequent war in Gaza, U.S. antisemitic incidents “skyrocketed” to unprecedented levels.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 incidents, the highest in 46 years. For the first time, a majority (58%) of these incidents were related to Israel or Zionism.
FBI data for 2024 confirmed this trend, reporting a 5.8% year-over-year increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes even as overall U.S. hate crimes slightly declined.
Mechanisms of Influence
The link between Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians and domestic antisemitism is driven by several key factors:
Proxy Attribution: Many Americans hold the “working assumption” that American Jews are blameworthy for the actions of the Israeli government, regardless of their personal views.
Dual Loyalty Tropes: Recent conflicts have seen an intensification of the trope that American Jews possess a “dual loyalty,” prioritizing Israeli interests over American ones.
Geographic Centers: Antisemitic hate crimes increasingly occur in politically progressive urban centers (e.g., New York, California) where opposition to Israeli policies is most vocal.
Ideological Shifts: While traditionally a far-right phenomenon, recent data suggests that a vast majority of Israel-motivated antisemitic incidents are now perpetrated by activists on the political left or unidentified individuals.
Public Perception & Safety
As of 2026, the ongoing conflict has significantly impacted Jewish Americans’ sense of security. By 2024, the percentage of American Jews reporting they felt less secure rose to 73%, up from 42% in 2019. Meanwhile, American sympathy for Israelis reached an all-time low in 2025, falling below 50% for the first time in 25 years.
Resistance and Repression
Most Israelis would not be able to accept this correlation. Indeed, many of them would say that proposing the connection was itself antisemitic. Why is this so?
This denial is testimony to the power of education within an apartheid society. Most Israeli Jews have never interacted with Palestinians except perhaps the maid or taxi driver. What they know of them is defined by the “us vs. them” narrative they have been taught and had reinforced throughout their lives. In this narrative, Israeli Jews are always the victims and the Palestinians are a group to be feared.
Inculcated with a nationalism infused with historical and religious immediacy, most Israeli Jews also believe that all of what constituted biblical Israel rightfully belongs to the modern Israeli state. Therefore, for many, expansion is not colonialism or imperialism. The absorption of Gaza and the West Bank is a process of unification of the homeland, originally begun with the conquest of part of Palestine in 1948.
The Palestinians have not sat in silence in the face of the Jews “coming home.” They have resisted, often quite violently. In the last forty or so years, much of this resistance centered in Gaza. The Israeli response was to isolate (ghettoize) the Gaza Strip, control everything that entered and exited, and slowly de-develop the territory. The closest comparison within Jewish history is the Warsaw Ghetto. And just as happened in that bit of Jewish history, some of the Gaza Palestinians, faced with economic and psychological strangulation, decided to break out. That is what happened on 7 October 2023.
The Israeli reaction to this breakout was an incredible mimicking of the behavior of their own past persecutors. This was demonstrated through Israel’s mass destruction of the Gaza Strip (the Nazis utterly destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto) and the genocidal killing of tens of thousands of its civilian population. Along the way, the Zionists abetted the destruction of international law—the only international legal code that helped hold antisemitism at bay. That is alright with the Zionists. Their attitude is the more antisemitism the better because it allegedly spurs on Jewish immigration into Israel.
Conclusion
In this day and age, it is difficult to commit genocide on the sly. Of course, you might pick a target that is relatively obscure, so that most of the world’s population doesn’t pay close attention. That is the case of genocidal action against the Rohingya in Myanmar. There are other examples as well. The case of Israeli genocide against Palestinians is different. This struggle has been going on long enough to draw worldwide attention, particularly from Western Jewry. However, for many of them the awareness comes with an increasing amount of cognitive dissonance. Thus, what might have been automatic support of Israel is now conflicted by the criminal level of Israeli violence. This situation is further complicated by growing episodes of (1) the actions of real antisemites who hold their bias whether or not there is a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However, now they are set free to act out against the general background of conflict generated protest. (2) Israeli and US government propaganda that pictures support for the Palestinians as itself antisemitism. This is a particularly unwarranted and convoluted accusation, if for no other reason then the fact that many supporters of the Palestinians are Jews. It is this confusion of support for the Palestinians with antisemitism that has driven up the raw numbers of alleged antisemitic actions in the West.
Because you can literally google the relevant information for Jews who would bother to subscribe to an Israeli newspaper, it is likely that the Haaretz already knows the general answer to its question. The only unknowns are how many Western Jews have noted the correlation described above and how many of those who are subscribers are willing to say it out loud to the newspaper. Finally, what will Haaretz do if a good number of responses do cite the correlation?
I assume that, if it turns out this way, the paper will faithfully report it. This will anger the rightwing Zionists and the present Israeli government will have yet another item to add to their case to close down Haaretz for good. The destruction of the most outspoken liberal Israeli newspaper is an aim of Netanyahu and his allies, just as is the destruction of Arab Gaza and the West Bank. The future calls for all the Palestinians to be forced out of Palestine. At the same time, we can expect an ever-increasing number of liberal Jews to emigrate out of Israel. Pretty soon, there will be no one left but the troglodytes.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.
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