On October 7, 2023, Hamas committed the deadliest massacre of Jews against Israel since the Holocaust. One would have thought that such a historical shock would provoke, in Western societies, a clear reflex of empathy towards the victims. The opposite has often happened. Rapidly, well beyond the initial moderation, an anti-Semitic word was released with an intensity that many had not anticipated.

Perhaps the most worrying thing is that, even after fighting in Gaza had subsided, the surge had not abated. It was therefore not just about the emotion of the moment. It revealed something deeper, more rooted, more lasting. The real question is no longer whether October 7 triggered a temporary outbreak, but whether it merely revealed a pathology already embedded in the Western social body.

I. October 7 as a revelation, not as an origin

The first mistake would be to believe that October 7 produced the anti-Semitism we have since observed. In reality, he did not create it. He exposed it. For years now, anti-Semitic acts have been on the rise in both Europe and North America. October 7 only lifted the veil.

What struck in the days and weeks that followed was the speed of moral reversal. In part of the public debate, victims have ceased to be perceived as victims and almost immediately become secondary culprits. As if mass murder could be relativized, contextualized, absorbed into a broader narrative where the Jew, or Israel, always ends up becoming the main accused again.

This mechanism is nothing new. It is based on ancient reflexes: the Jew is perceived as powerful, manipulative, and dominant and therefore always suspicious, even when hit. What our era has changed is not the essence of the mechanism. It is its vocabulary. Today, it is no longer always spoken in the raw language of traditional hatred. He dresses in morals, decolonialism, absolute anti-Zionism, and militant rhetoric. But the underlying impulse is often the same.

II. A now-cross-cutting phenomenon

The other major fact is that contemporary anti-Semitism no longer allows itself to be locked in a single camp. It is no longer just a matter of caricatural margins that we knew how to identify. It overflowed its old tanks to circulate in much wider environments.

On the far right, it remains, of course, in its classical forms. In Islamist circles, it remains explicit, sometimes brutal. But the problem does not stop there. On the left, he often reformulates himself in the form of an anti-Zionism that has become so total that he no longer criticizes Israeli policy: in reality, he denies any political legitimacy to the very existence of a Jewish state. In some intellectual circles, it appears as a permanent dissymmetry: a maximum moral requirement for Israel and almost automatic understanding for those who strike it. In part of the well-to-do classes, it merges into a selective humanitarianism where some sufferings are mobilized immediately, while others are relativized or made invisible. In some popular segments, especially where frozen community narratives have accumulated, he expresses himself more frontally, without even seeking the euphemism.

What connects these very different universes is not a common doctrine; it is the same symbolic function. The Jew—or Israel as a substitute for the Jew in public debate—continues to serve as a point of fixation for anger, frustrations, hatreds, and very diverse fantasies. Justifications change. The target, however, remains remarkably stable.

III. Why does this phenomenon not disappear with the end of the fighting

This is precisely why the military recession in Gaza has not led to an equivalent decline in social terms. Because what we observe does not depend solely on a war. It is due to deeper mental structures.

First of all, anti-Semitism retains a simplification function. It offers an identifiable leader to diffuse anxieties: demotion, cultural divides, loss of bearings, crises of confidence towards the elites, and feeling powerless in the face of the world. As long as these anxieties remain, the temptation of the scapegoat persists.

Then, social networks changed the scale of the phenomenon. They did not invent hatred, but they disinhibited it, accelerated it, and made it commonplace. What once remained in a hushed tone is now circulated in the open; it is shared, validated, and normalized. Once this word is installed in the public space, it becomes much more difficult to push it back to its margins.

Finally, we must face the weakness of the institutions that are supposed to oppose a clear moral framework. Universities, parties, unions, media, cultural institutions: many have hesitated, bypassed, minimized, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of calculation, sometimes out of conformity. But refusing to clearly name antisemitism when it appears is not to remain neutral. It’s letting the idea sink in that it would be excusable depending on the context, or acceptable depending on the target.

October 7 did not give rise to contemporary anti-Semitism in the West. He offered her a moment of unveiling and, in some spaces, a new form of legitimization. That is why the relative end of hostilities in Gaza has not resolved anything on substance.

What has since appeared is not a passing accident. It is the manifestation of a more ancient evil, deeper and more transversal than we wanted to admit. An evil that changes its language according to the times but that keeps a disturbing continuity in its mechanisms. Lucidity requires saying it bluntly: we are not facing a simple cyclical surge but facing a lasting social reality that October 7 has revealed in all its scope.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)