This was never about Gaza — nor about the Palestinians

We are told the protests are about Gaza. That this wave of outrage is about human rights, freedom, and justice. But anyone watching closely knows the truth: this has never truly been about Gaza. It’s not even really about the Palestinians. At its core, this is about something far older and more sinister: antisemitism, and the refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Let’s be honest. If it were about human rights, where are the marches for the Uyghur Muslims in China, detained in camps, sterilized, and re-educated? Where are the boycotts of Iran, where dissidents are hanged in public and women are jailed for removing their headscarves? How come we didn’t see “rage days” when Palestinians killed Palestinians? Where is the outrage over the Druze being kidnapped and killed in Syria right now?

The double standard is impossible to ignore. Israel is held to a level of scrutiny that no other country on earth is subjected to. Not because it is perfect—no state is—but because it is Jewish.

Antisemitism today doesn't always wear a swastika. It doesn’t always shout racial slurs. Sometimes it marches under the banner of “human rights,” chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Zionists are not welcome.”

These aren’t calls for justice, they’re calls for erasure. “From the river to the sea” refers to the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, all of Israel. What kind of peace includes the destruction of an entire nation?

This is joined by accusations using words like genocide, starvation, and colonialism, that recall blood libels against Jews from previous centuries, in the form of spreading diseases and poisoning wells.

The irony is that Zionism, the very word now being spat out with such venom, is simply the Jewish people’s national movement. No different in principle from 19th-century European movements, Zionism sought a homeland for Jews in their ancestral land. It emerged as a response to centuries of exile, persecution, pogroms, and genocide. To deny Jews this right while defending it for others isn’t justice, it’s bigotry.

And we see it everywhere. In the past year alone synagogues have been attacked in Australia, France, and last week in Chile. These weren’t protests against military action. They were acts of hate against Jewish communities thousands of miles away from the conflict.

When a synagogue is firebombed during Shabbat services, when Jewish schools need armed guards, when Orthodox Jews are being beaten in the streets of Canada, when graffiti reads “Death to IDF” or “Kill Zionists,” this isn’t activism. It’s terrorism in the language of protest.

Even cultural artifacts aren’t safe. The Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century Jewish manuscript preserved from the Nazis, has been co-opted by the pro-Palestinian director of the national museum of Bosnia Herzegovina, seeking to signal his opposition to Israel. He has been using it not as a bridge of interfaith solidarity, but as a tool to elevate the “good Jew” who rejects Zionism and condemn the “bad Jew” who supports Israel.

Meanwhile, the actual conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is deeply complex. It’s not reducible to hashtags or TikTok clips. It involves a horrible massacre conducted by a Palestinian terror organization that is also functioning as the elected government in Gaza. It's about history, religion, geopolitics, trauma, and competing national aspirations.

But instead of engaging with that complexity, too many have chosen the simple narrative: Israel is the villain. Palestinians are the victims. Everything else is noise.

This black-and-white framing isn’t just intellectually lazy, it’s dangerous. It fuels violence against Jews everywhere, conflating Israel with Jewish identity, and then punishing Jews globally for Israel’s existence. That’s not criticism, that’s hatred.

Criticize Israel’s policies? Absolutely. Israelis do it every day. That's the nature of democracy. But denying the country’s right to exist? Demanding that it be dismantled “from the river to the sea?” Calling for the death of its soldiers, banning Zionists from public spaces, attacking Jews for their beliefs—that’s not anti-colonialism. That’s antisemitism.

And let’s not kid ourselves: today’s coalition of anti-Israel forces includes far-left ideologues, radical Islamists, and traditional anti-Semites, strange bedfellows united by a common obsession with Jewish power, real or imagined. They pull in well-meaning young people, many of whom don’t understand the history, the conflict, or even the slogans they chant, into a movement that cloaks hatred in the language of justice.

This isn’t just about foreign policy. It’s about whether Jews have the same rights as every other people: to live freely, safely, and with sovereignty in their historic homeland. That is what Zionism is. And that is what’s under attack.

We can’t let antisemitism hide behind the mask of activism. We have to call it what it is. Because when people say “Israel shouldn’t exist,” what they’re really saying is: Jews shouldn’t have power. And that is not a foreign policy position. That’s hate.

We’ve seen this before. The faces change. The flags change. But the target remains the same. What has changed is one thing: the Jewish people now have a state to defend them.