“Antisemitism” is antiquated. Not the pathology or symptoms of Jew-hatred, but rather the word itself. This has become increasingly apparent as discourse rages on the Iran war, with people deploying paranoid, nonsensical anti-Jewish rhetoric when discussing Israel, while also denying being antisemitic. Legitimate critiques of Israel can be made, but many are accusing Israel and Zionists of “controlling” the US government and forcing it into war with Iran, despite the Iran war being squarely in US geopolitical interests. And this is not even the most ridiculous anti-Israel conspiracy theory. The anti-Israel ideology we see today is not merely Jew-hatred, but a variation which deserves a clearer name: “geopolitical Judeophobia.”

Historically, “antisemitism” has become too closely associated with its most extreme expression in the twentieth century—Nazism—and thus, anything short of genocidal, systematic racism may seem to fall outside of the definition. Semantically, “antisemitism” simply makes no sense in the twenty-first century. The term itself was popularized by a nineteenth-century German journalist, Wilhelm Marr (founder of the League of Antisemites), as a scientific-sounding ideology based in an eighteenth-century theory of language groups. Marr stood in firm opposition to the assimilation of emancipated Jews in Germany, arguing that the “Germanism” of Indo-European language-speakers (“Aryans”) must be protected against influence and infiltration by peoples of West Asia (“Semites”). But within this arguably arbitrary linguistic framework, Arabic is included as a Semitic language, just like Hebrew. Therefore, the term, as has often been noted, literally applies equally to racism against Arab people as it does to racism against Jewish people. Moreover, more than half of the world’s Jews have returned to Israel in West Asia and speak Hebrew, posing no threat to dilute the languages of non-“Semitic”-speaking people with foreign “Semitism.” For these historical and semantic reasons, “antisemitism” has lost its core meaning. 

This lexical failure has been addressed by numerous authors, but it continues presenting a roadblock to productive discourse in 2026. We should therefore abandon the term “antisemitism” in favor of a clearer, more precise one. “Judeophobia” is the best option, coined by Leon Pinsker, an early Zionist leader and survivor of the Russian pogroms, in his 1882 treatise called Auto-Emancipation. The term “Judeophobia” better conveys the characteristically emotional paranoia inherent to the phenomenon of Jew-hatred, and the target of it: the Jewish descendants of Judea. 

Nevertheless, one can attempt to dismiss accusations of Judeophobia while simultaneously harboring unparalleled resentment toward Israel, the Jewish state, honestly believing themself to merely be critical of a government rather than exhibiting irrational hatred or paranoia of a particular people. Yet anti-Israel rhetoric consistently exhibits extreme vitriol and a delusional fear of Israel controlling or taking over the world, as well as having bloodlust against children, replicating the typical Judeophobic tropes of the past. UK Parliament Member Zarah Sultana posted on X about an Israeli strike in Lebanon saying: “They love killing kids.” Tucker Carlson said in a recent interview with journalist Saagar Enjeti about the Iran war: “The point, of course, is to build Israeli empire to replace American empire, which is dying.” Meanwhile, Candace Owens is relentlessly saying that the US government is under the control of Zionists she calls “satanic pedophiles.” All of these conspiracy theories are coalescing with Jeffrey Epstein’s horrible criminal operations and baseless claims that he worked on behalf of Israel to blackmail American politicians. Some even reach back in time, accusing Israel of having executed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (the president who ended the US weapons embargo on Israel), without any evidence for believing so aside from a letter expressing a desire for more transparency on Israel’s nuclear program.

This attitude toward Israel is merely falling prey to the psychological sickness of a newly evolved form of Judeophobia, which has always primarily been a malcontent reaction to perceived forces of evil in society. The Jewish people have tragically served as the outlet for this discontent in every generation for at least the last twenty centuries, nearly everywhere they found themselves in their forced diaspora (except in India). Now that Jews have a state for ourselves, in a globalized time in which all nations feel relatively close to one another via the internet, the State of Israel is serving as a similar psychological outlet for the world. 

Of course, theological and political hatred against Jews as individuals still exists. When targeting Israel, it is merely a relatively new expression of perennial irrationalism that can be called, more accurately than “antisemitism” or “Judeophobia”: geopolitical Judeophobia.

The disproportionate hatred and fear of Israel that we see today eerily manifests as passionate conspiracy theories and apathy, if not support, for the massacre, rape, and hostage-taking of Israelis. It should be understood as a psychological inclination to irrationally scapegoat and ostracize the only Jewish state as an evil pariah in the word. This is the same thing that has been done to the Jewish people for centuries, but with the target being a geopolitical entity: the Jewish state.

Unlike political Judeophobia, which is an irrational hatred of Jews for purported domestic political reasons, or theological Judeophobia, which is an irrational hatred of Jews for religious reasons, geopolitical Judeophobia is an irrational hatred of the existence of a Jewish state based in issues of international affairs, sovereignty, and geographical location.

Ironically, Israel was created because of the entrenchment of political and theological Judeophobia in Europe. Despite being an early advocate of assimilation for emancipated Jews in Europe, Pinsker and other early Zionists started the movement for Jewish statehood after witnessing the popular, oft-academic and media-endorsed massacres in Russia. Irrational Jew-fear and Jew-hatred would not simply vanish along with the institutionalization of Enlightenment values and even the abandonment of Jewish practices. The phenomenon that shocked Pinsker and other emancipated, assimilated European Jews was not merely an expression of the preexisting medieval Judeophobia, but rather a newly emergent version of it—modern political Judeophobia—which manifested in passionate financial conspiracy theories throughout Europe and general apathy, if not support, for the massacres of Jews in Europe. The Jewish people were made into a symbol of the oppressive forces of the diametrically opposed movements of capitalism and communism, against which violence could be justified as resistance.

Since the inception of the modern state of Israel as the only Jewish state on Earth, it has filled the role perennially served by the Jewish people themselves: a scapegoat-pariah of the world. Just as the Jewish people for centuries have been the scapegoat of all the world’s wrongs, the Jewish state, in modern times, has become what has been called “the Jew of the nations.” The legal emancipation and assimilation of Jews in nineteenth century Europe and the Ottoman Empire resulted in the emergence of modern political Judeophobia, which caused the birth of “political Zionism,” which led to the creation of the Jewish State, which has led to the emergence of “geopolitical Judeophobia.” It is merely an evolved form of classically understood antisemitism with the object of its scapegoating and ostracization transferred from a people to a state.

The relative success of anti-racism and tolerance in the twenty-first century has made it unthinkable for many to demonize a “people,” such as the Jews, as individuals and communities with shared culture and history. So a natural yet still fallacious and dangerous replacement is to simply demonize a nation-state, which in the free world is always seen as a reasonable object of skepticism and critique. Thus, in the international neighborhood of the twenty-first century, in an increasingly globalized world governed by nation-states, the only Jewish state, Israel, is seen and treated as “the Jew” of the nations.

For geopolitical Judeophobes, Israel is uniquely treated as being liable not only for particular injustices seen in context, but for generally perceived oppressive evils writ-large. Geopolitical Judeophobia, as opposed to mere rational critiques of Israel, leads people to use Israel as the representative example of imperial colonialism, racial segregation, war crimes, and even genocide—arguably the worst crimes of humanity. In the process, Israel is consistently characterized in classic Judeophobe fashion as being both the crowd-facing puppet and secret puppeteer of the world’s oppressors, and of course as having infinite power to achieve its ends. Just as Judeophobes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries blamed Jews for perceived injustices of the transnational ideologies of capitalism and communism, so too, geopolitical Judeophobes blame Israel for perceived injustices of neocolonialism and war. Evidence to the contrary does not sway geopolitical Judeophobes because they are psychologically entrenched. 

Yet the proliferation of geopolitical Judeophobia is strategic. In the twentieth century, geopolitical Judeophobia became the focal point of modern pan-Arab, Palestinian, and Islamist nationalism, which of course are each ideologically at odds with one another, through the respective leaderships of Grand Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini. Each of these leaders and movements hinged on their opposition to European colonialism and US foreign policy, for which they chose to hold the Jewish state liable. Palestinian nationalism, pan-Arabism, Islamism, and their ideologically shared geopolitical Judeophobia were supported and expropriated by the deeply Judeophobic Soviet Union. Now, geopolitical Judeophobia is spreading throughout Europe and the United States through universities and the media.

As Israel succeeds in its war against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, Israel is increasingly being accused and treated as a product of European or American imperial colonialism. But the impetus of political Zionism to create a modern Jewish nation-state was the emergence of modern political Judeophobia, which itself emerged in reaction to the Emancipation of Jews throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. The instigation for political Zionism was not the Holocaust, as many think, but rather the massacres of Jews in Russia in the 1880s and the popular vitriol surrounding Jewish-conspiracy theories in France in the 1890s. The Judeophobic targets of hatred and fear were suddenly no longer the insulated ultra-religious communities of Jews. The targets of Judeophobia became the assimilated Jews. Medieval theological Judeophobia (dating back to the establishment of Jewish communities in Italia, Iberia, and northern Europe, following the destruction of Jerusalem and their expulsion by the Romans), characterized a period when Jews were collectively hated and feared by the European masses as a scattered, ghost-like stateless people lingering from the Iron Age, huddled in shtetls and ghettos all the way until the Emancipation of Jews following the French Revolution .

Additionally, because Christians could not charge each other interest, Jews were often employed to serve as the money lenders and tax collectors of European royalty and nobility (and who were also generally held liable for the ancestral deicide of Jesus). These roles simultaneously created a hatred of Jews, because, in the same paradox as viewing Jews as both controlling and serving American forces, Jews were viewed as being both the puppet and puppeteer of royalty in the process of taxing the masses. In turn, this use of certain Jews as financial intermediaries developed an expertise amongst those Jews in financial matters, building wealth within jewish communities, which in turn, caused yet more animosity toward the Jew. ​Modern political Judeophobes thus came to see the newly emancipated Jews as enjoying disproportionate financial success in modern capitalism. Yet, as some Jews developed capital wealth, other Jews simultaneously began to occupy a disproportionate number of leadership positions in Communist parties. Judeophobia then developed even further, as the Jew was viewed as the force behind capitalism (via their financial success), and at the same time, the nation bent on destroying modern capitalism (via leadership in the communist movement). 

Judeophobia thus transitioned from the demonopathy of its medieval predecessor, focused on the insulated Jew as an external collective threat that must be punished for its sins, to instead a focus on the assimilated Jew as an internal collective threat whose success must be kept at bay. Blood libels (manufactured allegations that Jews consumed the blood of Christian children, which again is paradoxically a violation of a core tenet of Judaism) that stirred the masses against a perceived Jewish threat to the community became political libels in modern times, stirring the masses against a perceived Jewish threat to the nation or state. Political libels then became racial. Assimilation and even conversion to Christianity were not only insufficient solutions for Jews, but in fact exacerbated the problem of political Judeophobia. Jews thus found themselves in an impossible position. Gaining sovereignty through a nation-state emerged as a natural solution in the context of nineteenth-century nationalism, thereby also manifesting the deepest desire of the Jewish people since being conquered and dispersed from their ancestral holy land. 

Now, in the twenty-first century, deciding to eliminate the Iranian regime, Hamas, and Hezbollah in the face of international opposition and outcry is an affirmation of Zionist self-determination. The tacit, if not explicit, support of “resistance” in the form of terror against Israel affirms the Jewish people’s need for sovereignty and self-defense. Looking at the historical patterns of Judeophobia, the current geopolitical Judeophobic uproar could become a global movement to destroy Israel, less like boycott-divest-sanction and more like a full-scale, unprecedentedly supported invasion—one which, but for the current war, may ultimately have included Iranian nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, geopolitical Judeophobia is giving rise to a form of solidarity with the Jewish nation that transcends the Jewish people itself. In the same way that the emergence of political Judeophobia gave rise to the movement of political Zionism, the emergence of geopolitical Judeophobia is giving rise to what could be called “geopolitical Zionism”: a global, principled Zionist identification with the existential right and cause of the Jewish state as a triumphant decolonized democracy facing the frontier of radicalism, fundamentalism, and despotism, while simultaneously suffering from the perennial irrationality that has been known only too well by the Jewish people since it was dispersed, but not erased, by the Roman Empire. Defeating the Iranian regime will be the latest triumph not only of the US-Israel alliance, but of geopolitical Zionism.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)