Do Jewish Communities Worldwide Deserve to Be Collateral Casualties?
Everybody is responsible for their own racism. Yet, that shouldn't be the end of the conversation but the beginning.
In my previous piece, I ended with a line I want to come back to: “Everybody is responsible for their own racism.”
I meant it, and I still do. But I’ve noticed it may not clearly relay and be interpreted either as a throwaway concession to avoid controversy, or as a quiet retreat from everything I’d just argued. It was neither.
Let me do some unpacking related to that.
We hold every individual responsible for their criminal acts, which is foundational to our judicial system. Nobody gets to mug someone and blame their postcode for it. Nobody gets to burn down a synagogue and point at a headline from Gaza. Criminal responsibility is personal.
But we also study what drives crime rates up or down. We map poverty to violence, unemployment to theft, social isolation to radicalisation. We architect entire policies around the understanding that while individuals choose to commit crimes, environments shape how many individuals make that choice. No serious person looks at a spike in burglaries and says, “Well, each burglar is personally responsible, so there’s nothing systemic to examine.” That would be wilful stupidity. You’d be laughed out of any criminology department on the planet - and deservingly so.
And yet, when it comes to antisemitism, that’s exactly the posture we’re asked to adopt. Every flare-up is treated as a spontaneous eruption of ancient hatred — disconnected from policy, from rhetoric, from the deliberate choices of political leaders who know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care what it costs.
The Middle Ground
People imagine prejudice as binary. You’re either a racist or you’re not. You either hate Jews or you don’t. But that’s not how it works. Prejudice exists on a spectrum, and a dangerous number of people sit somewhere in the murky centre — not hateful enough to act, but not secure enough in their tolerance to resist when the current shifts.
These are the people who would never vandalise a synagogue but might share a meme that edges close to a stereotype. The people who would never assault a Jewish neighbour but might, after the fifteenth news cycle about civilian casualties, start to let "Israel" and "Jews" blur together in their heads. The people who befriend Jewish colleagues and neighbours without a second thought — because so far, nothing has happened to make the prejudice they didn't know they carried rise to the surface. Until something does, and they shed Jewish friendships.
Yet, this is the persuadable middle. And what a responsible government does — what any government with an ounce of strategic sense does — is work to keep that middle stable. You don’t get to hand ammunition to the worst voices in society and then act stunned when the ammunition gets used.
Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care. Not because he’s oblivious — he’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them — but because the calculus is purely domestic. Every diplomatic rupture, every international protest, every wave of outrage feeds the siege mentality that keeps his coalition intact. The worse Israel looks abroad, the more his base feels vindicated: See? The whole world hates us. We need a strongman. It’s a perpetual motion machine of grievance, and the fuel is Jewish safety everywhere else.
The Jews in Marseille, in Melbourne, in Montreal — they don’t factor into the equation. They’re externalities. Acceptable losses in a domestic political game they never consented to play.
Other Policies Think Systemically
Consider how we handle any other social problem. Drug addiction: we hold users and dealers accountable, yes, but we also examine the pharmaceutical companies that flooded communities with opioids, the economic despair that made people vulnerable, the policy failures that let it spiral.
Domestic violence: we prosecute abusers, but we also study the conditions — economic stress, social isolation, normalised aggression — that predict higher rates. Nobody seriously argues that systemic analysis lets individuals off the hook. If anything, it’s the opposite: it’s how you prevent the next thousand individuals from making the same choice.
Antisemitism deserves no less.
Bigotry Is a Virus
If standing up against antisemitism and developing smart strategies to fight against it don’t convince you because it’s the right thing to do, this should:
Bigotry doesn’t stay in its lane. It never has. When antisemitism gains traction in a society, it doesn’t politely confine itself to hatred of Jews. It cracks the door, and everything else follows. Misogyny. Homophobia. Anti-immigrant hysteria. Anti-Black racism. Islamophobia. Hatred of the disabled, the poor, the different. Contempt for anyone who doesn’t fit the narrowing definition of who belongs. Even if you’re lucky enough not to fall into any of these categories, someone you care about eventually will.
Every society in written history that has let one form of bigotry take root has watched others flourish beside it. Weimar Germany didn’t just target Jews — it came for Roma, for gay men, for the disabled, for political dissidents, for anyone the state decided was less than. Jim Crow didn’t just subjugate Black Americans — it sustained a hierarchy that kept poor whites in their place, that policed gender roles, that punished any deviation from the prescribed order. Apartheid South Africa didn’t stop at oppressing Black South Africans — it built an entire architecture of classification and control that sorted every human being into a box and punished them for stepping outside it.
The mechanism is always the same. Bigotry eats empathy. Not selectively — wholesale. Once a society accepts that one group can be dehumanised, the muscle that resists dehumanisation atrophies. The capacity to see someone unlike you as fully human — that’s not a toggle you flip on and off depending on the target. It’s a practice, a habit, a communal discipline. And when it erodes for one group, it erodes for all of them.
Empathy is the connective tissue of every functioning human community. It’s what makes strangers cooperate, what makes neighbours tolerate difference, what makes democracy possible at all. When bigotry spreads — when it becomes normalised, entertaining, politically useful — it dissolves that tissue. And once it’s gone, the damage doesn’t stop at the group that was first targeted. It metastasises.
This is why “everybody is responsible for their own racism” is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. Yes, individuals choose. But societies also choose — through their leaders, their institutions, their willingness or refusal to confront what’s happening in the middle, where most people live.
Containment Is a Choice
Every government on Earth understands the logic of containment in other domains. You contain infectious disease. You contain financial contagion. You contain wildfires. The principle is simple: act early, act strategically, and don’t do the thing that makes the problem spread faster.
The Israeli government, under Netanyahu and his coalition partners, has done the opposite with antisemitism. Every time they equate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, they hand actual antisemites a recruitment tool. Every time they invoke the Holocaust to shut down policy debate, they cheapen the memory that should function as a firewall. Every time they insist on speaking for all Jews everywhere, they paint a target on communities that never asked to be represented.
Governing isn’t about telling yourself your country is doing the “right” thing. It’s about pursuing a strategy that works at the lowest possible cost. Netanyahu talks endlessly about the first and shows little interest in the second. Then tribalism does what tribalism always does. Of course Israelis will rally together if they’re convinced their country is the victim and that everyone else is to blame but their own leaders. Human beings evolved that way, and populists know it. From Iran to Hungary, from Russia to Turkey, authoritarian-minded politicians keep exploiting the same instinct. Turks know this pattern so well that there’s even a saying: Turks have no friends but Turks. Because they’re convinced that everything is everyone else’s fault — that Turks are victimised for being Turks, descendants of Ottomans who once ruled the region, and that Turkey always does things right and questioning it is treason. Sound familiar?
Governments everywhere make choices that either inflame or contain prejudice against different groups. What makes this case distinctive is the scale of the claim. No other government on Earth asserts the right to speak for an entire global diaspora. No other government binds itself so tightly to a religious and ethnic identity that criticism of its policies becomes, in its own framing, an attack on a people. That’s why the fallout is so vast.
And the people sounding this alarm aren’t Israel’s enemies. They’re Israeli journalists, Jewish scholars, diaspora community leaders — people who understand that the current trajectory threatens not just Israel’s standing, but Jewish safety worldwide. When the people inside the house are telling you the foundation is cracking, you don’t dismiss them as self-hating. You listen.
Consequences of Not Caring
The hardest part of this argument is also the simplest: Netanyahu and his political allies don’t bear the cost of what they’re doing. They sit in Jerusalem, insulated by security details and domestic approval ratings, while Jews in other countries absorb the shockwaves. The feedback loop is broken. The people making the decisions never feel the consequences, and the people feeling the consequences have no power over the decisions.
It’s true at the individual level. But it lets the architects of the system off the hook. It treats antisemitism as a series of isolated moral failures rather than what it partly is: the predictable result of a political strategy that treats Jewish identity as a shield for government policy and Jewish safety as someone else’s problem.
The fix isn’t complicated in theory, even if it’s nearly impossible in the current political climate. Stop claiming to speak for all Jews. Stop treating every criticism as bigotry. Stop using the Holocaust as a silencing device. Stop conflating a government with a people. These aren’t radical demands — they’re the bare minimum of responsible statecraft.
And remember — only failed governments blame everything on the foreign allies that turned their backs on them. Maintaining those alliances is the government’s job, and pursuing strategies that drive them away isn’t the world’s failure. But when your voters rally behind you harder the more you rail against an unfair world, why change an otherwise failing strategy and stop treating Jewish communities worldwide as collateral casualties?
Great article. As an American of Jewish decent, I am shocked at how much support there is within the country for Netanyahu's policies (even though the man himself is quite unpopular). The peace movement (which I keep track of) is completely sidelined and derided. Reports of atrocities are not believed.
I went there on business in 2001 and the siege mentality there needs to be experienced first hand to really comprehend it.
A small correction, Weimar ended in 1933.