Author’s Note: Why This Essay, and Why Now
Something has shifted in Western public discourse. Rhetoric that would have been considered plainly antisemitic twenty years ago: conspiracy theories about Jewish power, dehumanizing characterizations of Jewish institutions, demands for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state; these now circulate freely in universities, on social media, and in mainstream political conversation. Under new branding: anti-Zionism, decolonization, resistance. The branding is new. The hatred is not.
I am not writing this as an outside observer. I have lived in Arab countries, speak the language, and have close ties within these communities. With deep familiarity in the Quran and Hadith, I have heard private perspectives that never reach the public sphere. There is a version of this conflict constructed for Western consumption, and there is the version understood internally. They are not the same. This essay is about the gap between them.
I want to be clear about what this analysis is and is not arguing. It is not arguing against Arabs or Muslims. It is not arguing that Palestinian suffering is not real: it is real, and the Palestinians are in many ways the true victims of a situation not of their making. It is arguing against the Western commentators, mostly European and American, who have no idea what they are talking about, who have never lived in the region, do not speak the languages, and have no access to the internal conversations, yet who speak with absolute certainty about a conflict they understand only through the lens of post-colonial theory, which is the wrong lens entirely.
This is a polemic, not a diplomatic exercise. The moment demands clarity more than it demands politeness.
The Epistemological Crisis Beneath the Political
1.1 The Collapse of the Information Environment
The explosion of antisemitic discourse does not exist in isolation. It is one symptom of a broader collapse in the quality of public epistemics: the shared standards by which societies evaluate claims, weigh evidence, and arrive at judgments. The democratization of information production has been, on balance, a mixed blessing. The mechanisms that allow anyone to publish also allow anyone to radicalize, recruit, and spread disinformation at industrial scale.
YouTube, TikTok, podcasting platforms, and social media have produced a new information ecosystem in which reach correlates not with accuracy but with engagement. Outrage, conspiracy, ideological confirmation: these drive watch time. Nuance, uncertainty, and evidence-based reasoning do not. The algorithm selects for compelling falsehood over boring truth. And antisemitic ideas are, from an algorithmic standpoint, highly engaging: they offer simple explanations for complex problems, identifiable villains, and the satisfying feeling of seeing through what others cannot.
1.2 The New Influential Voices and Their Reach
Figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Joe Rogan command audiences in the tens of millions. Their power derives not primarily from accuracy or expertise but from performing authenticity: speaking in an unfiltered, conversational register that feels honest to audiences who have lost trust in traditional institutions. This is not a trivial achievement. It is also not a morally neutral one.
These voices have, with varying degrees of intent and awareness, platformed, amplified, and in some cases personally embraced antisemitic tropes. They have done so under the cover of asking questions, challenging orthodoxies, and speaking truth to power. The effect is the same regardless of the framing: antisemitic frameworks enter the mainstream and become normalized. A conspiracy theory can reach a billion people before fact-checking has even begun. Once it is embedded in someone’s worldview with social reinforcement from their online community, correction becomes nearly impossible.
The most striking recent example is Tucker Carlson. When the United States joined Israel’s campaign against Iran, Carlson declared publicly: “This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war.” The framing was not new for him. In the months preceding the Iran conflict, Carlson had attributed the American invasion of Iraq, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and a succession of other military engagements to Israeli manipulation of American foreign policy: a narrative he developed with increasing explicitness and shrinking qualification. On his podcast, guests went further still: a former senior national security official suggested, without any supporting evidence, that Israel may have been behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Carlson provided the platform and offered no challenge.
Candace Owens has proceeded with less ambiguity. YouTube suspended her channel for claiming that Jewish people control the media. She has publicly described the United States as being “held hostage” by Israel, blamed Israel for the September 11 attacks and the Kennedy assassination, called Israel a “demonic state” and a “cult nation,” directed her audience to a nineteenth-century antisemitic pamphlet, and claimed that Jews orchestrated the transatlantic slave trade. She was named Antisemite of the Year for 2024 by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism. A study by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that from mid-2025 onward, approximately three-quarters of her videos mentioning Jews were classifiable as antisemitic by the IHRA definition. She has more than five million YouTube subscribers.
Joe Rogan, the most-listened-to podcaster on the planet, defended Kanye West’s song titled “Heil Hitler” and hosted a Holocaust revisionist without challenge. When asked about Jews and money in 2023, he said it was “ridiculous” to doubt the association. His influence operates differently from Carlson’s: less ideologically driven, more a function of scale and a studied incuriosity that treats all positions as equally worth airing. The effect on normalization is identical.
What unites these cases is not political ideology but a common rhetorical structure: Israel, and Jews by extension, are presented as the hidden hand pulling the strings of American power. Each figure reaches their conclusion through different language and emphasis. The underlying accusation is identical. And it is not new. It is the oldest accusation in the Western antisemitic tradition, updated for the podcast era.
1.3 The Selective Conscience Test
One of the most revealing features of contemporary anti-Israel discourse is its selectivity. The large majority of those who express the most intense opinions about Israel and Palestine comment on virtually no other international conflict. They are not engaged with Turkish treatment of Kurds, Chinese policy in Xinjiang, Russian conduct in Ukraine, Saudi actions in Yemen, or the dozens of other ongoing situations involving occupation, displacement, and civilian casualties.
This selectivity is diagnostic. If the animating concern were genuinely about occupied peoples, proportionality in warfare, or the rights of stateless populations, we would expect to see consistent engagement across cases. We do not. The singularity of focus on Israel: one country, one conflict above all others, points toward something other than consistent humanitarian principle. It points toward a particular animus that predates the specific policy disputes it claims to be about. When people also march carrying signs that read “Gas the Jews” or “Hitler should have finished the job,” the subtext becomes text. These are not coded positions. They are explicit genocidal incitement, tolerated within movements that claim the moral high ground.
1.4 The Convergence: Where Two Traditions of Hatred Meet
What we are witnessing is not simply a revival of antisemitism. It is a fusion: a historically unprecedented merging of two distinct traditions of anti-Jewish hatred that have, until recently, operated in largely separate registers. Understanding this fusion is the key to understanding both why the new antisemitism is so potent and why Western liberal societies have been so slow to recognize it for what it is.
The first tradition is the European one, codified in its most virulent modern form in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: the Tsarist-era fabrication that presented world Jewry as a conspiratorial network engaged in a secret plan for global domination. The Protocols were debunked within years of their first circulation and exposed as a plagiarized forgery assembled from earlier non-Jewish sources. They were nonetheless distributed in millions of copies across Europe and America, translated into dozens of languages, and explicitly endorsed by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. They formed a cornerstone of Nazi ideological preparation. They remain in active circulation today, and their core architecture: the claim that Jews secretly manipulate governments, control finance and media, and orchestrate conflicts for hidden purposes, is the direct template from which Carlson’s “Israel controls American foreign policy,” Owens’s America “held hostage” by Israel, and the broader conspiracy ecosystem descend. The vehicle has been updated. The logic is identical.
The second tradition is far older, and has been almost entirely invisible to Western analysts. It is the theological tradition of the dhimmi, the Islamic legal framework discussed at length in Part II of this essay, which held that Jews, as a protected but constitutionally subordinate people, occupied a specific and permanent position beneath Muslims in the divinely mandated social hierarchy. Jewish subordination, in this tradition, was not incidental to the order of things. It was constitutive of it. It was, theologically speaking, what Jews were for. The creation of the State of Israel: a Jewish sovereign entity governing Muslims in Dar al-Islam, represented in this framework not merely a political problem but a cosmic inversion of the natural order: an affront of the first magnitude that demanded, by doctrinal logic, reversal.
These two traditions have now fused, and Israel is the point of fusion.
The European conspiratorial tradition provides the mechanism: Jews control things secretly, from behind the scenes, manipulating events that appear to have other causes. The Middle Eastern theological tradition provides the grievance: Jewish sovereignty over Muslims is a violation of divine order that cannot be legitimate and cannot be tolerated. Together, they produce a uniquely potent synthesis. Israel is simultaneously cosmically illegitimate and secretly omnipotent. It controls Washington while occupying Arab land. It pulls the strings of Western governments while constituting an affront to God’s established hierarchy. The two frameworks do not merely coexist: they mutually reinforce each other, each supplying what the other lacks.
This synthesis explains something that puzzled observers of early twentieth-century Arab nationalism: why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion found such ready soil in the Arab world, a region with no prior tradition of European Jewish conspiracy theory. The Protocols arrived and were embraced: not because Arab populations had been primed by centuries of European-style antisemitism, but because the structural logic mapped perfectly onto a pre-existing theological framework. Jews were already understood as a people who must not hold power. The Protocols explained, in secular conspiratorial language, how they had managed to do it anyway. The fit was immediate and it was deep.
The fusion also explains what the dhimmi framework alone cannot: why this theological grievance has generated such extraordinary resonance in the West, among populations with no stake in Islamic jurisprudence and no knowledge of the jizya. The Western progressive who has never heard of Surah At-Tawbah still absorbs the conspiratorial logic, now laundered through anti-colonial theory and the language of decolonization, and arrives at essentially the same destination: Israeli power is inexplicable by ordinary means, and must therefore be explained by hidden manipulation. The language is different. The conclusion is the same.
This is what makes the present moment different from prior waves of antisemitism, and more dangerous. Prior eruptions drew on one tradition at a time. European antisemitism was European. Middle Eastern hostility to Jewish sovereignty operated within its own theological framework. This one draws on both simultaneously, in a media environment that allows them to blend at industrial scale and reach hundreds of millions of people before any corrective intervention is even conceivable.
The fusion is the story. It is what the Western liberal commentariat has almost entirely failed to see.
What Western Analysis Cannot See: The Theological and Civilizational Dimension
2.1 The Dhimmi Framework and Its Centrality
European political culture approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the conceptual vocabulary of post-colonialism: settler vs. indigenous, oppressor vs. oppressed, European privilege vs. non-European marginalization. This framework, developed to understand European overseas colonialism, is fundamentally ill-suited to the Middle East. It misses the most important thing.
For centuries, Jews and other non-Muslims lived under Muslim rule as dhimmis: a legally defined status of protected inferiority codified in Islamic law. The theological foundation of this system is explicit and undisputed in Islamic jurisprudence. Its primary scriptural basis is Surah At-Tawbah (9:29), the Quranic verse that explicitly mandates the jizya tax and the political subjugation of non-Muslims:
Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold forbidden that which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.— Quran 9:29 (Surah At-Tawbah)
The Arabic phrase in this verse, wa hum saghirun, meaning “while they are subdued” or “humbled,” is not incidental. It is the doctrinal core of the dhimmi system. The payment of jizya was not merely a tax. It was a ritual enactment of subordination. Classical Islamic jurists were explicit about this. The eighth-century Hanafi scholar Abu Yusuf wrote in Kitab al-Kharaj:
The wali [governor] is not allowed to exempt any Christian, Jew, Magian, Sabean, or Samaritan from paying the tax, and no one can obtain a partial reduction. Their lives and possessions are spared only on account of the payment of the poll tax.— Abu Yusuf, Kitab al-Kharaj (8th century)
The practical restrictions codified for dhimmis were equally explicit. The Pact of Umar, the foundational legal document governing relations between Muslim rulers and their non-Muslim subjects, specified in the voice of the dhimmis themselves the conditions of their existence:
We will not sound the bells of our churches, except discretely, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims, nor raise our voices at our funerals… We will not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims… We will not build houses overtopping the houses of the Muslims… We will not strike a Muslim. These are the conditions that we set against ourselves and followers of our religion in return for safety and protection. If we break any of these promises, then our Dhimmah is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.— Pact of Umar, c. 637 CE / 9th century canonical form
This was not a temporary wartime measure. It was a permanent theological ordering of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims living in Muslim-governed lands. The Hadith literature reinforces the structural subordination. In Sahih Muslim, the Prophet Muhammad is recorded as instructing his commanders:
When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.— Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Hadith 4294
The Jews of the Middle East were not strangers to the Arab world. They had lived there for millennia: in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, and throughout the Levant. Arab Muslims knew exactly who the Jews were. They had traded with them, taxed them, and coexisted with them, always within this hierarchical framework. This is not a history of ignorance or indifference. It is a history of structured, theologically grounded coexistence within a divinely sanctioned hierarchy: one in which Jewish subordination was not incidental but constitutive.
What the creation of the State of Israel represented, therefore, was not merely a territorial dispute. It was a profound inversion of this divinely sanctioned social order: a dhimmi people, historically defined by their subordination, by their payment of jizya, their prohibition from bearing arms, their requirement to feel themselves “subdued,” had achieved sovereignty and were now governing Muslims in Dar al-Islam. To much of the Arab and Muslim world, this was not simply a political problem. It was a theological affront of the first order. Every Arab Muslim in the region understands this intuitively. Western analysts, with no framework for it, systematically miss it entirely.
This is the foundational fact from which everything else in this conflict flows. The Palestinian national identity, the behavior of Arab states, the ferocity of the opposition: none of it is fully intelligible without it. This is not conjecture or interpretation. It is what people say, directly and without qualification, in private conversation, in internal media, in religious discourse, when they are not speaking for a Western audience.
2.2 Jews as Indigenous: The Erasure at the Heart of the Colonial Narrative
The anti-colonial framing of Israel depends on a historical fiction so fundamental that the entire structure collapses without it: the fiction that Jews are European newcomers, foreign transplants imposed on an Arab land they had no prior connection to. This fiction is not merely wrong. It is the precise inversion of the truth.
Jews are not strangers to the Middle East. They are among the most ancient populations in the region, with continuous historical presence in the Levant predating the Arab conquests, predating Islam, and: critically: explicitly recognized within Islam’s own foundational texts. The Quran does not treat the Jews as a people alien to the region. It treats them as a people deeply embedded in it. You cannot simultaneously accept the Quran’s account of Jewish history and claim that Jews have no authentic connection to the Levant. The two positions are logically incompatible.
Furthermore, the largest demographic constituency within Israel is not descended from European Holocaust survivors. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi: Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Syria, and across the Arab world, expelled or forced to flee in the years following Israel’s establishment. Approximately 850,000 Jews were displaced from Arab countries between 1948 and the early 1970s. These were communities with roots in the region stretching back thousands of years. Their expulsion: a mass displacement of indigenous Middle Eastern people by Arab states, goes almost entirely unmentioned in Western progressive discourse, because it demolishes the colonial-settler narrative at its foundation.
The colonial framework requires a European population displacing an indigenous one. The actual demographic reality, in which the majority of Israeli Jews are themselves Middle Eastern people displaced from Arab countries into the one state that would take them, makes that framework incoherent. And so it is simply not discussed. This is not an oversight. It is a suppression, whether conscious or structural, of inconvenient historical fact in service of a narrative that cannot survive contact with it.
2.3 The Yazidi Parallel
A useful parallel is the fate of the Yazidis in Iraq. When ISIS rose to power, the Yazidis: an ancient, insular religious minority, were subjected to mass murder, enslavement, and systematic cultural erasure. The world was shocked. It should not have been. The Yazidis, like the Jews, occupied a position of religious otherness in a region with a long and specific tradition of how such communities are to be treated when the established hierarchies break down.
ISIS justified its treatment of the Yazidis by appeal to the same doctrinal framework discussed above. Because Yazidis were not People of the Book, they were afforded no dhimmi status at all. The violence against the Yazidis was not an aberration. It was the most extreme expression of a continuum. The Jews of Israel, in establishing a sovereign state, triggered the same underlying logic: that minorities do not rule; that the natural order had been violated. One need not endorse this worldview to recognize its explanatory power. Western analysts who refuse to engage with it are choosing ignorance over understanding.
2.4 Pakistan and the Comparative Logic
The Pakistan case is sometimes raised as a parallel to Palestinian national identity: a Muslim population that defined itself against rule by a religious other, in that case Hindu-majority India. The parallel is instructive, but not in the way critics intend. Pakistan reinforces the central thesis: it was explicitly formed so that Muslims would not be governed by Hindus. The theological logic is identical. The refusal of dhimmi-status-in-reverse, meaning minority religious governance over a Muslim majority, is the same principle operating in a different geography.
The Construction and Weaponization of Palestinian Identity
3.1 A National Identity Forged as an Instrument
The people now known as Palestinians did not historically identify as such. For centuries, the Arab population of the Levant understood themselves in terms of their religious community, their clan, and their region: most commonly as part of Greater Syria. The term “Palestinian,” as a distinct national identity, was largely a product of the mid-twentieth century, crystallizing politically around the founding of the PLO in 1964.
Critically, this identity would never have developed as it did had the Jews not been a dhimmi people seen as attempting to rule over Muslims in Dar al-Islam. The identity was not forged against a generic foreign invader. It was forged specifically against the inversion of the theological-social order. This is why it carries the intensity it does, and why it has proven so resistant to resolution through ordinary political negotiation. The grievance is not merely territorial. It is civilizational.
This is not to diminish the genuine suffering or the real existence of this population. It is to point out that the Palestinian national identity was, in significant part, forged as an instrument: a weapon in the hands of Arab states that were ideologically committed to reversing the existence of Israel but increasingly unable to do so through direct military means.
3.2 The Behavior of Jordan and Egypt
The behavior of the neighboring Arab states is the clearest evidence of the weaponization thesis. Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950. Rather than integrating its Arab population into a unified Jordanian state, it maintained them in a kind of suspended political limbo. Egypt, which controlled Gaza from 1948 to 1967, never extended Egyptian citizenship or passports to Gaza’s Arab population. When Egypt negotiated the return of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel, it explicitly did not seek the return of Gaza.
These were not oversights. They reflect a calculated decision to keep the Palestinian question open: to preserve a wound that could be used to delegitimize and destabilize Israel indefinitely. The Palestinians were left in deliberate suspension: useful as victims, inconvenient as citizens. The Arab states that claimed to champion Palestinian rights were in practice using Palestinian suffering as a strategic instrument.
The Recycling of Classical Antisemitic Conspiracy Frameworks
4.1 Jewish and Israeli Control of American Politics
One of the most persistent classical antisemitic tropes: the claim that Jews secretly control governments, finance, and media, has found new life in the form of claims about Israeli control of American political institutions. These claims circulate across the political spectrum: from far-right actors who speak explicitly about Jewish power, to progressive voices who frame it in terms of AIPAC’s influence and the Israel lobby.
The pattern is identical in both cases. A lobbying organization or political donor network associated with Israel or Jewish identity is treated as uniquely sinister, uniquely powerful, and uniquely corrupting in ways that no comparable interest: the Saudi lobby, the defense industry, pharmaceutical companies, is ever subjected to. The double standard is not incidental. It is the antisemitism.
What Carlson, Owens, and their ecosystem have done is take this trope, previously confined to the explicit far right and the conspiratorial margins, and route it into the mainstream through the language of America First nationalism and anti-interventionism. The argument is no longer that Jews are conspiring for world domination in some abstract sense. It is specific, current, and plausible-sounding: Israel dragged America into this war. Netanyahu pulled the strings. The lobby owns Congress. The hidden hand is visible, if you know where to look. The classical trope has been given contemporary dress and a news hook. The underlying accusation is unchanged.
4.2 Israel as the Universal Explanation: JFK, the USS Liberty, and Beyond
The logical endpoint of the Jewish control framework is the incorporation of Israel into virtually every major conspiracy theory. Israel is now routinely implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, despite the fact that Israel in 1963 was an impoverished, diplomatically isolated young state with no plausible motive or capacity for such an operation. Israel is blamed for deliberate attacks on American military assets, orchestrated global financial crises, and the engineering of American foreign policy at every level. In 2025 and 2026, this logic extended to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with prominent voices on Carlson’s own platform suggesting Israeli involvement without a shred of supporting evidence.
The function of these conspiracy theories is not to explain specific historical events. It is to position Israel, and by extension Jews, as the hidden hand behind all that goes wrong. This is structurally identical to the classical antisemitic frameworks that preceded the Holocaust. The vehicle has been updated. The logic is the same. The purpose is the same.
4.3 The Anti-Colonial Framing as Historical Distortion
The most intellectually influential vehicle for contemporary antisemitism is the framing of Israel as a European colonial project imposed on indigenous people. This framing has achieved something close to axiomatic status in progressive academia. It is also historically wrong in ways that matter enormously.
Jews are not European colonial settlers. They have continuous historical presence in the region predating Islam, are explicitly recognized in the Quran and throughout Islamic historical tradition, and lived alongside Arab and Muslim populations for centuries. The Jewish connection to the land is not a nineteenth-century European invention. What the establishment of a Jewish sovereign state represented, and what genuinely provoked the conflict, was not European colonialism but the emergence of Jewish political sovereignty in territory where Muslim political dominance had been the theological norm. That is a real historical tension. It is not colonialism.
Misrepresenting it as such is not merely an error. It is a distortion that serves a specific political purpose: to delegitimize Israeli existence at its root while simultaneously laundering a theologically-rooted hostility into the respectable language of progressive politics. The academic left provides the intellectual cover. The podcast right provides the conspiratorial superstructure. Between them, they have constructed a pincer movement around the same target.
4.4 The Nazi Parallel
Invoking Nazi-era propaganda as a point of comparison is not hyperbole when the comparison is structurally accurate. The Nazis did not invent antisemitism. They inherited a centuries-old tradition of scapegoating: the use of Jews as a universal explanation for social dysfunction, economic crisis, and political failure. What the Nazis did was industrialize it.
Contemporary discourse is not Nazism. But it is performing the same function: taking a large, diverse population, Israelis, Jews, Zionists, the terms blur deliberately, and positioning them as the explanatory variable for everything that is wrong. The forms differ. The structure does not. And the fusion of European conspiratorial antisemitism with Middle Eastern theological hostility to Jewish sovereignty has produced a version of this scapegoating that is, in certain respects, more resilient than either tradition on its own: because it can speak simultaneously to the nationalist right, the progressive left, and the Muslim world, in each case in language that feels locally authentic.
The Geopolitical Realignment: Arab States Have Moved On
5.1 The Abraham Accords and What They Reveal
Something has shifted in the Arab world. The Abraham Accords, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties, and the ongoing Saudi-Israeli normalization track all point to the same underlying reality: the Sunni Arab states have concluded that the Palestinian cause, as a strategic instrument, has become a liability rather than an asset. Having spent decades cultivating the narrative of Palestinian victimhood as a tool against Israel, they are now quietly trying to extricate themselves from the consequences.
These states no longer want to use Palestinian statelessness as a weapon. They want stability, economic development, and a counterbalance to Iranian regional ambitions. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and in quieter ways Egypt and Jordan, now see Israel as an economic powerhouse and a strategic partner. They are, in effect, stuck with a problem they helped create and no longer wish to sustain. The direction of travel among Arab governing elites is unmistakable.
5.2 Iran: The Last Stakeholder in Permanent Conflict
The Iranian revolutionary Shia regime is now the primary external actor invested in keeping the Palestinian conflict alive and unresolved. Iran funds Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad not out of solidarity with Palestinian people: Iran is Persian, Shia, and historically in tension with Arab Sunni populations, but because Palestinian suffering and anti-Israel sentiment are strategically useful. They destabilize Israel, undermine moderate Arab governments that Iran views as rivals, complicate American regional influence, and provide Iran with a claim to pan-Islamic leadership that transcends its sectarian limitations.
The irony is acute. The Sunni Arab states fashioned the Palestinian cause as a weapon against Israel. That weapon has been seized by their principal regional rival. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are nodes in an Iranian-aligned axis that directly threatens the stability of the same Sunni Arab monarchies that once claimed Palestinian leadership. The Saudis, Emiratis, and Egyptians now find themselves in the extraordinary position of quietly aligning with Israel against the forces nominally fighting for Palestine.
5.3 October 7th and the Timing Question
The timing of the October 7th Hamas attacks: launched precisely as Saudi-Israeli normalization appeared imminent, was almost certainly not coincidental. Derailing that normalization was in Iran’s direct strategic interest. Hamas may have been acting as much as an Iranian instrument as a Palestinian one. The Sunni Arab states understood this clearly, which is why the regional reaction to October 7th, beneath the obligatory public statements of solidarity, was far more ambivalent than Western observers expected. They were watching Iran play a card they recognized.
What Naming It Requires
The Palestinian question is not what it appears to be from Brussels, London, or New York. It is the residue of a theological order disrupted, a set of national identities constructed for strategic purposes by states that have since changed their calculations, and a conflict whose primary current driver is a Persian Shia power using a Sunni Arab cause as a proxy in a regional cold war.
The people living in Gaza and the West Bank are real, and their suffering is real. But they are victims primarily of the Arab states that created and sustained their statelessness, and of the Iranian regime that now exploits it. Understanding that suffering, and any prospect of ending it, requires dispensing with the colonial-liberation narrative and engaging honestly with the far more complex reality underneath it. The Arab states that created this situation know it. The Israelis know it. The Iranians are exploiting it. And a growing number of Sunni Arab governments have quietly accepted it and moved on.
This analysis does not argue that Israel’s policies are beyond criticism. No state’s policies are. It argues something more specific and more uncomfortable: that a large and growing portion of what presents itself as criticism of Israel is not criticism at all. It is antisemitism wearing contemporary clothes. It is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in podcast form, amplified by the reach of Carlson and Owens to audiences their authors could never have imagined. And it is the dhimmi framework: the ancient conviction that Jews must not rule, that Jewish sovereignty is a theological affront, translated into the secular language of decolonization and indigenous rights for consumption by Western audiences who have no idea they are receiving a medieval theological argument in progressive packaging.
The people spreading it, whether they are media personalities with massive platforms, university professors with institutional credibility, or protesters in the street, are doing something that history will not judge kindly. Some know exactly what they are doing. Others have simply absorbed a framework without examining its origins. The result, in either case, is the same.
The willingness to say so clearly, at this moment, when saying so carries real social and professional costs, is not a trivial act. It is a necessary one. Antisemitism has always depended on the silence of people who should have known better. This essay is an argument against that silence.