The dehumanization of Jews now visible across Western protest movements, campus discourse, and isolated but lethal acts of violence is not the product of anti-Zionism alone, and it is not the product of antisemitism alone. It is the product of their confluence.

Anti-Zionism supplies the moral architecture that makes violence against Jews feel justified rather than merely tolerated — the framework in which persecution, real or claimed, licenses the response.

Antisemitism supplies the content that fills the resulting vacancy: a centuries-deep schema of Jewish subhumanity that stands ready, in Western cultural memory, the moment a mind reaches for something to dehumanize a Jew with.

Neither mechanism produces what we are currently watching on its own. Anti-Zionism without antisemitism produces political opposition, sometimes fierce, rarely eliminationist. Antisemitism without a live political conflict to attach to produces prejudice without an outlet. Together, they produce a Columbia University crowd chanting “Death to Jews” and “F the Jews,” a tenured professor calling the murder of twelve hundred people “awesome” and “incredible,” a gunman outside a Jewish museum in Washington shouting “Free, free Palestine” over the bodies of a couple who were, days from now, going to be engaged — and, on October 7 itself, violence that made no distinction between combatant and infant, and that included mutilation and sexual assault serving no military purpose at all. That last fact is the clearest evidence in the entire pattern, because rape and mutilation are not things done to an enemy regarded as human; they are what a population becomes capable of once the target has already stopped registering as one.

What Dehumanization Requires

Psychologist Albert Bandura’s account of moral disengagement identifies the stages by which ordinary people come to accept or commit violence they would otherwise recognize as wrong: moral justification of the act by appeal to a higher cause, euphemistic relabeling of the violence itself, displacement of responsibility onto leadership or circumstance, minimization of the actual consequences, and — the final and most consequential stage — dehumanization of the target, so that harming them no longer registers as harming a full human being. Most of these stages require no ethnic content whatsoever. A soldier can morally justify an act, euphemize it, and diffuse responsibility for it about almost any adversary in almost any war, with no prejudice against that adversary’s ethnicity required at any step.

Dehumanization is different. It cannot be manufactured from nothing in the moment; it requires a pre-existing schema — some pool of imagery that already carries the message these people are less than fully human — for the disengaging mind to draw on. For most conflicts, the available schema is thin and generic: “the enemy,” “the occupier,” “the regime’s people.” For the Jewish target specifically, the available schema is neither thin nor generic. It is the oldest continuously operating dehumanization schema in Western civilization — vermin, disease, poison, subhuman cunning, collective guilt inherited by blood rather than earned by act — sitting fully assembled in cultural memory, available to be reached for whether or not the person reaching for it could articulate its provenance. This is the precise point at which latent, persistent antisemitism enters the mechanism: not as the reason political anger at Israel exists, but as the reason that anger’s dehumanizing register, once triggered, reaches for this content instead of the........

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