The Vocabulary
Antisemitism is rising. Antisemitism is being weaponised. Jews pay the cost.
Antisemitism is rising in Britain. The Community Security Trust documented a record number of antisemitic incidents in 2024 and 2025.¹ Synagogues have been firebombed. Hatzola ambulances were torched in Golders Green in March.² The Kenton United Synagogue was attacked in April.³ Two Jewish men were stabbed in the street on 29 April.⁴ The threat level was raised to severe.⁵ None of this is in dispute, and none of it should be relativised. British Jews are afraid for reasons grounded in observable fact, and that fear is legitimate.
And antisemitism is being weaponised. Not by everyone, not always cynically, but systematically and to documented political effect. The charge is being deployed to silence Palestinian advocacy, to discipline Jewish dissent, to delegitimise protest under counter-terrorism law, and to manufacture consent for a domestic crackdown on speech and assembly. The Forde Report, commissioned by the Labour Party itself, concluded as much in 2022.⁶ The High Court found the proscription of Palestine Action unlawful in February 2026.⁷ The Metropolitan Police Commissioner is currently the subject of a formal legal complaint for false claims about Palestine march routes.⁸ These are not fringe assertions. They are findings of record.
Both things are true at once. And here is the harder truth that neither side of the argument is willing to say plainly: the second feeds the first. The weaponisation of antisemitism increases antisemitism. The cycle is self-reinforcing. The people most harmed by it are ordinary Jews — the people in whose name it is conducted, and on whose fear it depends.
The cycle’s operators are not, in fact, hiding the logic. In May 2026, a poster appeared on a lamppost in midtown Manhattan, circulated approvingly on X by the Israeli writer Uri Kurlianchik. It read: “The more you attack Jews around the world, the more you prove Israel must exist.”⁹ The text was rendered with a Star of David and addressed not to Jews but to the world — a public instruction in how to read the rising attacks on Jewish life. Read it again. The argument requires antisemitism to keep rising in order to justify the Israeli state. It is not a case for Israel. It is a case for keeping diaspora Jews afraid forever. The people most harmed by that calculation are the Jewish people in whose name it is made.
This essay is about the language that holds the cycle together. Not the conflation itself — that has been documented elsewhere. Not the institutions that profit from it — those have been named. This essay is about the working vocabulary: the specific verbal moves, deployed live and in real time, that keep the dissenting Jewish voices off the table and the cycle running. From Hannah Arendt to Peter Beinart, from Avi Shlaim to Omer Bartov, the Jewish dissenting tradition has been trying to break this cycle for a century. The vocabulary exists to make sure they can’t.
The Cycle
The cycle has six steps. They are observable in the public record, they have been operating for at least two decades, and they have accelerated since October 2023.
Step one: antisemitism rises. The causes are real and overlapping — the radicalisation of online conspiracy ecosystems, the displacement of class anger onto ethnic targets, the resurgence of explicit fascism on the European right, and the spillover of rage about the Gaza war onto Jewish communities who are not the Israeli state. The CST data is not invented. The Heaton Park attack in October 2025 was real.¹⁰ The Kenton firebombing was real. The Golders Green stabbings were real. Jewish institutions have hardened their security to a degree that should embarrass any country that calls itself civilised.
Step two: institutions and pro-Israel commentators respond by collapsing all criticism of Israel into antisemitism. The mechanism is the IHRA working definition and its accompanying examples, which equate certain forms of criticism of the Israeli state with hatred of Jews. The mechanism is also rhetorical: the slippage from “anti-Zionism” to “antisemitism” in mainstream discourse, the redefinition of opposing the existence of the State of Israel as opposing Jewish existence as such, the systematic conflation of a 19th-century European political project with a 3,500-year-old religion. Each individual instance is indefensible on its own terms, but each is institutionally excused. The cumulative effect is a discursive trap in which any argument with Israeli policy becomes an argument with Judaism itself.
Step three: the conflation lands, and the public fractures. Those who began with sympathy for Israeli civilians watch protesters criticise an actual Israeli government — its settlement expansion, its bombing of Gaza, its assassinations in foreign capitals, the Jewish supremacy and Arab hatred that B’Tselem itself has named, the wholesale dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims with Arab Christians lumped without distinction into the category of “Muslim terrorist,” the propaganda and the lies, war crimes of insurmountable scale committed in response to war crimes of lesser scale, the disproportionality, the flagrant violations of international law — and watch all of it reclassified, by the institutions, as antisemitism. Some deny the criticism outright. Others conclude it is dishonest.
A second audience reacts differently. Those whose sympathies were with Gaza, or with Palestinians more broadly, watched the same conduct on their screens for two years. They were then told that the only acceptable framework for what they had seen was one that classified them as antisemitic for having seen it. They concluded the institutions were not merely dishonest. They concluded the institutions were captured. Either way, their trust in mainstream institutions collapses.
Both audiences look elsewhere for explanations. “Elsewhere” is where actual ethnic and cultural racism and antisemitism lives. The conspiracy theorists, the explicit racists, the people who really do think Jews control the world. The institutional refusal to distinguish good-faith critique from ethnic hatred drives ordinary people — from opposite starting points, by different routes — toward the precincts where ethnic hatred is on offer.
Step four: the conflation also licences existing antisemites. If every critic of Israel is by definition antisemitic, then antisemites can recast themselves as merely critics of Israel. The far right has noticed this. Tucker Carlson has noticed this. The very people most hostile to Jewish people in their own countries can now wrap their hostility in the language of anti-Zionism, because the institutional definition of anti-Zionism has been stretched wide enough to accommodate them. The conflation, designed to protect Israel, has provided cover for the people most threatening to diaspora Jews.
Step five: antisemitism rises further. The genuine kind — graffiti, harassment, assault, arson — increases because the discursive environment has been deliberately confused. The strategically useful kind — the kind that justifies legislation, march bans, terrorism designations — also increases, because every act of conflation is registered as antisemitism in the data even when the underlying conduct is political speech. The CST counts “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic in its incident reporting. So does the Met. The phrase, in its mirror form, has been Likud party policy since 1977 — “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” — and remains in the Likud platform of 1999, has been quoted by Netanyahu, Uri Ariel, Gideon Sa’ar, and Tzipi Hotovely, and has never been rescinded.¹¹ One version, chanted by a Londoner protesting for freedom and self-determination for Palestine, is logged as a hate crime. The other, voted into the platform of the governing party of Israel, is policy. The numbers go up. The fear goes up. The political case for emergency measures goes up.
Step six: the rise in antisemitism is then deployed to justify the next round of weaponisation. Marches must be banned because antisemitism is rising. Speech must be policed because antisemitism is rising. Palestinian advocacy organisations must be proscribed because antisemitism is rising. Jewish dissenters must be marginalised because antisemitism is rising and they are giving cover to it. The cycle closes, and the next iteration begins from a higher baseline of fear and a narrower aperture of permissible speech.
This is not a theory. It is a process operating in plain sight, documented across police statements, government legislation, court rulings, journalism, and the testimony of the dissenting Jewish tradition. The Palestine Action proscription, ruled unlawful by the High Court after 2,787 arrests for holding placards, is a perfect specimen.¹² The Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s claim that Palestine Solidarity Campaign marches “set out with intent to march near synagogues” — false on the documented record, currently the subject of a formal legal complaint — is another. The reclassification of the Golders Green attacker’s first stabbing victim, the Muslim man Ishmail Hussein, as a personal dispute within hours, while the second and third stabbings of two Jewish men were declared antisemitic terrorism on the same timetable, is a third.¹³
Each instance is institutionally excused in isolation. The pattern is the indictment.
But a cycle running this consistently across decades, jurisdictions, and political regimes is not held together by accident. It is held together by language. Specific words, deployed at specific moments, perform specific functions. They take voices off the table. They foreclose argument before argument can begin. They mark certain speakers as illegitimate so that the substance of what they say never has to be answered.
That language is what this essay is about.
The Vocabulary
On 5 May 2026, Einat Wilf posted to X: “Motion to replace the term ‘self-hating Jews’ with ‘Pick Me Jews’. (I think it reflects the underlying psychology and incentive structure far better).”¹⁴
Wilf is not a fringe figure. She is a former Knesset member for the Israeli Labour Party, a Cambridge PhD, an intelligence officer who served in Unit 8200, the founder of the Oz Party, and the author of seven books defending Zionism.¹⁵ Her phrase is not careless. The word she chose was motion. A motion is a piece of formal procedure — something tabled, debated, and adopted by a deliberative body. It is the language of a community deciding, in session, who counts and who does not. The phrase she proposed for adoption, “Pick Me Jews,” is borrowed from a misogynistic internet pejorative — the “pick me girl,” a woman who performs anti-feminism for male approval — and applied to Jewish anti-Zionists, recasting them as performatively betraying their own community for outsider applause.¹⁶
The motion was not new. It was the most recent specimen of a procedure that has been running, under different names, for more than a century.
The progenitor was Theodor Herzl. In The Jewish State, published in 1896, Herzl described his Jewish opponents — the Jews who would not endorse his political project — as “disguised antisemites of Jewish origin.”¹⁷ The construction is worth pausing on. The dissenter is not engaged. The dissenter is reclassified. By Herzl’s formula, a Jew who opposes Zionism cannot be a Jew acting in good faith from inside the tradition; he must be an antisemite wearing Jewish clothes. The Jewish opponent is, by definition, not really Jewish — or not really opposed for Jewish reasons. The argument is removed before it can be made.
Two years later, the formula was used against Herzl himself. The Viennese journalist Karl Kraus, an opponent of Zionism, observed that Herzl shared with the antisemites of his day a preoccupation with Jewish difference and a desire to remove Jews from Europe.¹⁸ But Herzl’s coinage proved more durable than Kraus’s reply. Within three decades it had been compressed into a single phrase. The Viennese writer Anton Kuh used the term Jewish self-hatred in the aftermath of the First World War; the philosopher Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthass — Jewish Self-Hatred — popularised it.¹⁹ Lessing was, at that point, a recent convert to Zionism. He used the term against academics opposed to it.
By the post-war period, “self-hating Jew” had become standard issue. It is the workhorse of the vocabulary — the most-deployed, longest-running specimen. It performs its function with elegant efficiency. It does not engage the dissenter’s argument. It pathologises the dissenter. The dissenter is not wrong; the dissenter is sick. The dissenter does not believe what he says; he says it because he hates himself. The argument cannot be answered, but it does not need to be answered, because the speaker has been removed from the category of speakers whose arguments must be answered.
What Wilf understood — and her precision deserves credit here — is that “self-hating” had aged. The pathologising frame still worked, but its psychiatric register had grown stale. “Pick Me Jews” updates the move into the vocabulary of contemporary internet discourse. It replaces the clinical with the contemptible. The dissenter is no longer pitied as ill; the dissenter is mocked as a sycophant. The function is identical. The packaging is younger.
The catalogue extends from there. Each item is a different procedure, deployed in different settings, but each performs the same operation: it takes a voice off the table without engaging what the voice was saying.
There is kapo — the most aggressive specimen in the vocabulary. Originally the word for prisoners conscripted by the SS to police other inmates in Nazi camps, it has been deployed against anti-Zionist Jews since at least the 1980s.²⁰ The deployment is not metaphor; it is accusation. The dissenting Jew is being charged with collaboration in the murder of his own people. The charge is absurd on its face — a Jewish dissenter from Israeli policy is not a concentration camp guard — but absurdity is not the point. The point is that no argument survives the comparison. To answer “kapo” is to descend into a debate about the Holocaust on terms set by the accuser. Most dissenters decline. The voice is removed.
There is as a Jew. This is the inverse procedure. Where “self-hating” and “kapo” remove dissenters by reclassifying them as not really Jewish, “as a Jew” removes them by reclassifying them as performing their Jewishness — making the identity itself the ulterior motive. A dissenter who opens a sentence with “as a Jew, I oppose…” is treated, by the operators of the vocabulary, as having confessed to the deployment of identity for political effect.²¹ The framing is symmetrically perverse: the Jews who endorse Zionism speak as Jews and are heard as Jews, while the Jews who dissent are accused of merely invoking Jewishness instrumentally. The procedure turns the dissenter’s identity into evidence against the dissenter’s argument.
There is anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. This is the macro-procedure — the parent claim under which most of the others operate. Its function is epistemic capture. Once the equivalence is established, every act of criticism of the Israeli state becomes, by definition, an act of hatred against Jews; and every Jewish dissenter from that state becomes, by definition, an antisemite. The phrase is not an argument; it is a definitional move. It does not establish that anti-Zionism causes antisemitism, or that anti-Zionists are antisemitic in their conduct. It simply asserts that the two are the same thing, and proceeds as though the assertion were a finding.²²
Beneath the macro-procedure, the institutional machinery codifies the move into law. The 2016 IHRA working definition of antisemitism — drafted under different auspices a decade earlier by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern — is the codification.²³ The definition itself, taken alone, is uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”²⁴ The eleven illustrative examples that accompany it are not. Seven of the eleven concern criticism of Israel rather than hatred of Jews.²⁵ Adopt the examples and the move is made: certain forms of criticism of the Israeli state become, definitionally, antisemitism. Stern, the lead drafter, has spent the last decade publicly objecting to the institutional adoption of his text. He has called its weaponisation “an attack on academic freedom and free speech.”²⁶ The man who wrote the definition says it is being used for purposes he never intended and explicitly opposes. The institutions that adopted it have not noticed.
Beneath the codification, the criminalisation. The phrase from the river to the sea is now logged as an antisemitic incident in the data of both the Community Security Trust and the Metropolitan Police.²⁷ The phrase globalise the intifada was, until 29 April 2026, treated as potentially incitement to terrorism — the basis on which the 80-year-old Anglican priest Peter Tatchell was arrested for holding a placard. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case that day, on the eve of trial, having concluded there was no realistic prospect of conviction.²⁸ The dropping of the charge did not undo the chilling. It clarified what the charge was for. The charge was not meant to convict. The charge was meant to remove a voice from the public square for the time it took the case to be dropped.
And beneath the criminalisation, the asymmetry. The vocabulary’s most revealing feature is not what it covers but what it exempts. The institutions most active in policing anti-Zionist speech as antisemitism have shown no comparable interest in policing the actual antisemites operating openly on the political right. Elon Musk can endorse a Great Replacement post — the same antisemitic theory cited by the Tree of Life synagogue shooter — by replying “You have said the actual truth” to his 163 million followers, and twelve days later be personally welcomed to Israel by the Prime Minister and given a guided tour of Kfar Aza, broadcast live on the same platform from which the endorsement was issued.²⁹ The Republican base from which Donald Trump draws his political power is, on every available measure, more antisemitic than the British or American left;³⁰ yet the institutional vocabulary that polices anti-Zionism on the left has been remarkably restrained when it confronts antisemitism on the right. The asymmetry is not random. It tracks utility. Antisemitism that can be useful to the Israeli state — antisemitism that frightens diaspora Jews into closer political dependence on Israel — is treated with a different procedure than antisemitism that cannot.
Step back and look at what we have. The vocabulary is not a collection of insults. It is a working operating system. Every item in the catalogue is a procedure, and not one of them is an argument. Each of them performs the same operation: it removes a voice from the conversation without engaging what the voice was saying. The cumulative effect is the foreclosure of the argument the cycle cannot survive — the argument that the conflation of political Zionism with Judaism is the project’s deepest danger, not its protection. That argument has, for a century, been made most clearly by Jews. The vocabulary exists to make sure they are not heard making it.
The Voices the Vocabulary Was Built to Silence
A vocabulary this elaborate is not built to police casual antisemites. Casual antisemites do not need to be named with this much precision; they can be ignored, or refuted, or — when they are politically useful — quietly tolerated. The vocabulary is built for harder targets. The targets it was calibrated to remove are the people whose arguments cannot be answered and whose standing cannot be denied. Those people are, almost without exception, Jews.
Among the people who would have to be classified as “Pick Me Jews” under Wilf’s proposed motion are the witnesses without whom the post-war Jewish intellectual tradition cannot be reconstructed.
Hannah Arendt warned in 1948 that the project of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, defended by force against an Arab majority, would, if it were not careful, become the kind of nationalism it had escaped from in Europe.³¹ She was the philosopher who gave the world the analysis of totalitarianism. Her warning was specific, technical, and based on her own life’s work. The vocabulary in its 1948 form had a name for her — the precursors of “self-hating Jew” had been in circulation for half a century by then — and that name was applied. Her warning has been substantially borne out. The vocabulary’s reply, eight decades later, is to call her a “Pick Me Jew.”
Martin Buber, the philosopher of I and Thou, proposed binationalism — a single state in which Jews and Arabs would share political power. He was ignored.³² Albert Einstein declined the Israeli presidency in 1952, partly on the grounds that he could not endorse the direction of the political project.³³ Judah Magnes, the founding chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, opposed the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state and advocated for a binational solution until his death in 1948.³⁴ These are not figures who can be removed by the vocabulary. They were removed anyway. Their arguments — which the vocabulary’s contemporary operators decline to engage on substance — were placed outside the boundary of legitimate Jewish thought.
The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, born in Baghdad, raised in Israel, knighted in the United Kingdom, is the foundational scholar of the 1948 war. His work on the documentary record of that war is canonical.³⁵ Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — drawing on declassified Israeli archives — forced Israeli academic acknowledgement of Plan Dalet, the systematic expulsion of Palestinian villages in 1948.³⁶ The Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg, both Israeli, both of whom built their careers on the rigorous scholarship of genocide, have published in the past two years explicitly identifying Israeli conduct in Gaza as genocide.³⁷ Bartov is one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Holocaust. When he uses the word genocide of Israeli conduct, the vocabulary’s response is not to engage his argument; it is to apply the procedure.
Gideon Levy of Haaretz has reported from the West Bank and Gaza for forty years.³⁸ The IDF veterans of Breaking the Silence have published more than a thousand testimonies of conduct they witnessed in uniform.³⁹ Auschwitz survivors signed a public letter against the Gaza war in 2024.⁴⁰ Peter Beinart, raised in the American liberal Zionist tradition, edited The Forward and now edits Jewish Currents; his book The Crisis of Zionism marked the breaking of the American liberal Zionist consensus, and his more recent writing has argued that the safety of American Jews depends on America being a country that distinguishes them from a foreign state.⁴¹ Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine, declared in her 2024 Passover address that “our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate” — the equation of Jewishness with Zionism, in her telling, being among the deepest threats to Jewish life in the diaspora.⁴² Norman Finkelstein, the son of two Holocaust survivors, has spent his career documenting the political instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory.⁴³
And in July 2025, two of Israel’s most prominent human rights organisations — B’Tselem, the country’s foremost Israeli–Palestinian rights group, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel — published reports concluding, after 22 months of war, that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.⁴⁴ B’Tselem titled its report Our Genocide. The pronoun is the argument. An Israeli institution, staffed by Israelis and Palestinians, looked at the conduct of the Israeli state and named the conduct as belonging to its own society. “Nothing prepares you,” said B’Tselem’s Executive Director Yuli Novak at the press conference, “for the realisation that you are part of a society committing genocide.”⁴⁵ This is not the voice of a foreign critic. It is the voice of Israelis refusing to be the alibi.
These are the names. The list is not exhaustive. Beneath the named figures sit the institutional voices: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in the United States; Jewish Voice for Labour, Yachad, Na’amod, and the Jewish Socialists’ Group in the United Kingdom; the anti-Zionist Haredi communities of Neturei Karta. Each of these is a Jewish organisation. Each holds positions closer to the actual range of Jewish opinion in its host country than the institutional voices the press treats as authoritative.⁴⁶ Each is, by the procedure of the vocabulary, a “Pick Me Jew.”
The argument these voices share is not unanimous on every question. Beinart’s liberal Zionism is not Pappé’s anti-Zionism. Bartov’s careful scholarly distinctions are not Finkelstein’s polemic. Klein’s broad analysis is not Levy’s daily reporting. The Auschwitz survivors are not the Haredi anti-Zionists. The disagreements among them are real. But they share a single observation, made from inside the tradition, and made with the standing only the tradition can confer: the conflation of political Zionism with Judaism is not the protection of Jews. It is the project’s deepest danger, and Jews are the people who pay the cost.
Beneath that observation sits a deeper one, and it is the premise the vocabulary works hardest to suppress. Nation states do not have a right to exist. People do. A state is a political instrument — a particular constitutional arrangement, with a particular set of borders, a particular flag, a particular legal framework — assembled at a particular moment in history for particular purposes. Such instruments come into being and pass out of being. They merge, dissolve, partition, federate, and reconstitute. The Soviet Union had no right to exist. The Ottoman Empire had no right to exist. Yugoslavia had no right to exist. Czechoslovakia had no right to exist; the Czech Republic and Slovakia have no right to exist either; and the people of all those countries continue to exist regardless of which state, or no state, they live under. Rights inhere in persons, not in administrative arrangements.⁴⁷
The conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism depends on smuggling this premise past the listener. It treats the State of Israel as having the moral standing of a person — its existence framed as something the world has a duty to protect — rather than as the political instrument it is. Once the premise is named, the conflation collapses. To question whether a particular state should exist in its current form, with its current borders and constitutional arrangements, is not to question whether the people living within those borders should exist. The two questions are entirely separate. They have always been entirely separate. The vocabulary exists to make sure they cannot be asked separately.
This is the argument the vocabulary exists to remove from circulation. Not because it is weak. Because it is strong. The vocabulary’s procedures do not engage the argument — none of them does, none of them needs to, that is the point — they remove the speaker, on the grounds that no Jew who makes that argument can be a Jew making it in good faith.
The cycle requires this. The conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism cannot survive a credible Jewish voice that refuses to make it. So the vocabulary marks every credible Jewish voice that refuses, in advance, as not-credible. The procedure is older than Wilf and older than her formulation. It is older than “self-hating Jew” and older than Lessing. It is older than the State of Israel. It begins with Herzl, in 1896, and it has been running, in updated forms, ever since.
The vocabulary does not work on the people it removes. It does not need to. Arendt did not stop being Arendt because she was called the precursor of “self-hating Jew.” Bartov is not less a Holocaust scholar because Wilf’s followers will call him a “Pick Me Jew.” The vocabulary works on the public — on the listener who needs a quick reason to discount the dissenter without engaging the dissenter’s evidence. The vocabulary provides that reason. It is the procedural instrument by which the discussion is kept narrow enough for the cycle to keep running.
The cycle is broken when the vocabulary stops working. The vocabulary stops working when the listener notices what it is.
What This Requires
Naming the vocabulary is not the same as dismantling it. The vocabulary has institutional momentum. It has political backing. It has the rhetorical advantage that any attempt to describe it can itself be described as antisemitism — the procedure defending itself, in real time, against the act of being named. Anyone who writes this essay will be accused of antisemitism. That is not a failure of the essay. It is the vocabulary working as designed.
Three things are required to refuse it, and none of them are easy.
First, the real thing must be acknowledged without qualification. Antisemitism is rising. British Jews are afraid for reasons grounded in observable fact. The arsons are real. The CST data is real. The Heaton Park attack was real. The Golders Green stabbings were real. Anyone who attempts to relativise this is conceding ground that does not need to be conceded. The honest observation about weaponisation gains nothing by minimising the underlying harm and loses everything by appearing to.
Second, the weaponisation must be named with equal directness. The Forde Report is public. The High Court ruling on Palestine Action is public. The legal complaint against Mark Rowley is public. The Mahmood quote about “the eyes of the state on you at all times” is public.⁴⁸ The £240 million Palantir contract is public.⁴⁹ The reclassification of the Hussein attack is public. None of this is hidden. The institutional incentive is to treat it as separate from the discussion of antisemitism. It is not separate. It is the second half of the same picture, and pretending otherwise is what allows the cycle to continue.
Third, the vocabulary itself must be refused. Each time “self-hating Jew” is deployed against a Jewish dissenter, the listener should hear it as what it is: not an argument, but the foreclosure of one. Each time “Pick Me Jew” is offered as a more contemporary update, the listener should notice the procedure beneath the new packaging. Each time “kapo” is hurled at an Israeli historian of the Nakba, the listener should ask why no answer is being offered to the historian’s documentation. Each time “as a Jew” is treated as a confession of identity-deployment rather than as a statement of standing, the listener should ask whose Jewishness is being treated as transparent and whose is being treated as suspect. The vocabulary works because the listener does not yet see it. It stops working the moment the listener does.
And the listener should see what the deployment of the vocabulary actually is. To tell a Jew that her dissenting Jewish voice is not really Jewish — that she is self-hating, that she is a Pick Me Jew, that she is a kapo, that her invocation of “as a Jew” is performance rather than identity — is to deny her right to be Jewish on her own terms. It is to make Jewish identity conditional on political compliance with a foreign state. It is to insist that there is only one acceptable way to be a Jew, and that Jews who refuse it are not Jews at all. By any honest definition of antisemitism, that is antisemitism. The IHRA working definition itself includes the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination as an example of anti-Jewish hatred. The vocabulary, deployed at every dissenting Jewish voice, denies that right to individual Jews daily. The institutions that police antisemitism by deploying it are, in this exact operation, committing it. They protect a state by abusing its people.
This is the most that one essay can do. It cannot dismantle a system that has been operating, in updated forms, since 1896. It can put a name on the procedure, identify the specimens, foreground the voices the procedure was built to silence, and trust that the next reader who encounters the vocabulary in the wild will recognise it.
The cycle is not unbreakable. It is being held together by institutional pressure, by media compression, by political incentive, and by a vocabulary that has been doing its work for so long that most listeners no longer hear it as procedure. Once the procedure is named, it can be refused. Once it is refused, the voices it was built to silence can be heard. And once they are heard — Arendt, Buber, Einstein, Magnes, Shlaim, Pappé, Bartov, Goldberg, Levy, Klein, Beinart, Finkelstein, Breaking the Silence, the Auschwitz survivors, B’Tselem — the conflation that powers the cycle cannot survive.
Both things are true at once. Antisemitism is rising. Antisemitism is being weaponised. The second feeds the first. The people most harmed by the cycle are the Jewish people in whose name it operates, and whose dissent has been marked, in advance, as not-Jewish, so that the cycle does not have to answer them.
Refusing to hold both is not balance. It is complicity in a system that has been failing the people it claims to protect for more than a century. The first refusal is the one this essay attempts: to name the language, identify its function, and trust the reader to do the rest.
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
Banner image: Stephen Kapos at UCL, May 2024. Photo: Alisdare Hickson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2024 and Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025.
² “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” CNN, 24 March 2026; Hansard, “Hatzola Ambulance Attack,” 23 March 2026.
³ “Two teens arrested over arson attack at Kenton United Synagogue in north London,” ITV News, 20 April 2026; “Kenton synagogue targeted in suspected arson attack,” Jewish News, 19 April 2026.
⁴ “Golders Green attack,” reported across UK and international press, 29 April 2026.
⁵ UK Government statement raising the national terrorism threat level from substantial to severe, 30 April 2026.
⁶ Martin Forde QC, The Forde Report, Labour Party, 19 July 2022.
⁷ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin), 13 February 2026.
⁸ “Legal complaint filed by Palestine activists against Met Police chief over synagogue remarks,” Middle East Eye, 6 May 2026.
⁹ Uri Kurlianchik (@VerminusM), post on X, 7 May 2026.
¹⁰ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, 2 October 2025.
¹¹ Likud Party Platform, 1977; revised 1999 platform. See The Nation, “It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of ‘From the River to the Sea,’” 22 November 2023; Mondoweiss, 25 January 2024; Al Jazeera, 3 November 2023.
¹² R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin); “UK appeals High Court ruling that granted Palestine Action a victory,” Al Jazeera, 28 April 2026.
¹³ “Legal complaint filed by Palestine activists against Met Police chief over synagogue remarks,” Middle East Eye, 6 May 2026.
¹⁴ Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf), post on X, 5 May 2026.
¹⁵ Wikipedia, “Einat Wilf”; JNS, “’Shape the Future’: Einat Wilf Outlines Her New Party’s Manifesto,” 4 December 2025; The Times of Israel, “Einat Wilf: Fall of Iran an opportunity to uproot ‘Palestinianism’,” 10 March 2026.
¹⁶ The Atlantic, “The ‘Pick Me Girl’ Trend, Explained,” 2022.
¹⁷ Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, 1896); Lev Topor, “A Short History of Jewish Self-Hatred,” San Diego Jewish World, 12 August 2024; My Jewish Learning, “Self-Hating Jews.”
¹⁸ Karl Kraus, response to Herzl, 1898; Paul Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton University Press, 2012).
¹⁹ Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930); Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.
²⁰ Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist (Pluto Press, 2012); Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso, 2000).
²¹ Bret Stephens, “The Progressive Assault on Israel,” New York Times, 2019; Peter Beinart, “Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism,” Jewish Currents, 7 March 2019.
²² Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Antisemitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16 (Fall 2004); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012).
²³ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016.
²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Kenneth S. Stern, “A Bad Deal,” Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University; The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.
²⁷ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Reports 2024 and 2025; Metropolitan Police public statements, 2023–2026.
²⁸ “CPS drops case against Peter Tatchell over ‘globalise the intifada’ placard,” The Guardian, 29 April 2026.
²⁹ Elon Musk, post on X, 15 November 2023; Time, “Elon Musk Calls Antisemitic Post on X ‘The Actual Truth,’” 16 November 2023; CNN, “Elon Musk visits Israel, meets Netanyahu in wake of antisemitic post,” 27 November 2023; Rolling Stone, “Netanyahu Welcomes Elon Musk to Israel After Antisemitic Post,” 27 November 2023.
³⁰ Anti-Defamation League, Antisemitic Attitudes in America: Topline Findings, annual surveys 2022–2024.
³¹ Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There Is Still Time,” Commentary, May 1948; The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (Schocken, 2007).
³² Martin Buber, A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Oxford University Press, 1983).
³³ Albert Einstein, letter to David Ben-Gurion declining the Israeli presidency, 18 November 1952; Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
³⁴ Judah Magnes, Like All the Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes, ed. William M. Brinner and Moses Rischin (SUNY Press, 1987); Arthur A. Goren, Dissenter in Zion (Harvard University Press, 1982).
³⁵ Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W.W. Norton, 2000); Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld, 2023).
³⁶ Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006).
³⁷ Omer Bartov, “Infinite License: The World After Gaza,” The New York Review of Books, 24 April 2025; Amos Goldberg, “Yes, It Is Genocide,” The Palestine Project (Medium), April 2024.
³⁸ Gideon Levy, The Punishment of Gaza (Verso, 2010); ongoing column in Haaretz.
³⁹ Breaking the Silence, Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000–2010 (Metropolitan, 2012).
⁴⁰ “Holocaust survivors call for an end to Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza,” open letter, The Guardian, 15 February 2024.
⁴¹ Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012); Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025).
⁴² Naomi Klein, “We need an exodus from Zionism,” The Guardian, 24 April 2024.
⁴³ Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000).
⁴⁴ B’Tselem, Our Genocide, 28 July 2025; Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide, 28 July 2025; CNN, “For first time, two leading Israeli human rights groups accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza,” 28 July 2025.
⁴⁵ Yuli Novak, B’Tselem Executive Director, press conference, Jerusalem, 27 July 2025; Democracy Now!, “’Our Genocide’: Israeli Human Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Destroying Palestinian Society in Gaza,” 29 July 2025.
⁴⁶ Survation polling for the Jewish Chronicle, 2015–2024; Forde Report, 2022.
⁴⁷ UN Charter, Article 1.2; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1; UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 (XXV), 1970; “Does Israel have a right to exist? The impact of Statehood,” Pearls and Irritations, 22 December 2024.
⁴⁸ Shabana Mahmood in conversation with Tony Blair, January 2026; “Britain’s Home Secretary wants AI so the eyes of the state can be on you at all times,” Boing Boing, 26 January 2026.
⁴⁹ “Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign against the FDP,” The Lowdown, 1 April 2026.