For decades, the sentence you heard across the Arab and Muslim world was: we have no quarrel with Jews; our quarrel is with Zionists. Israel was the Zionist entity. The formula was often a fig leaf – I will not pretend otherwise. Plenty of men said it while meaning the older, uglier thing, and the distinction let them keep their reputations. It was a load-bearing fig leaf: imperfect, sometimes cynical, yet consequential. But embedded within it was a distinction that mattered.

A distinction that survives in a language leaves a door open in the mind, and people walk through doors that are left open. It was the difference between a politics and a hatred. It was, in the strict sense, the thing that protected Jews in our streets. It separated a faith and its adherents from a political project and its policies. That distinction is now collapsing, and the chief architects of its demolition are not the antisemites of the far right or the street protesters of the Global South. They are the very institutions that claim to speak for Jewish safety.

Israel’s systematic conflation of Zionism with Judaism – the insistence that the two are inseparable, that to criticize one is to assault the other – is not protecting Jews. It is painting a target on their backs.

Consider the parallel that Muslims know all too well. Islam is a faith practiced by nearly two billion people. Islamism is a political ideology embraced by a fraction of them. When Western governments, media outlets, and populist demagogues collapsed the distinction between the two after September 11, the consequences were catastrophic.

Sikh men were murdered for wearing turbans. Mosques were firebombed in Arkansas and Birmingham. A fourteen-century-old civilization was reduced to a security dossier. Muslims understood, viscerally, the cost of conflation: when a religion is made synonymous with its most politicized expression, every believer becomes a suspect.

Jews are now enduring a version of this same lethal logic – only this time, the conflation is being engineered not by their adversaries but by those who claim guardianship over their........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)