Since 7 October 2023, I have encountered antisemitism at a level I had never known before. It appears through every possible channel: social media, news outlets, professional groups, business conversations, university campuses, and comments from people who have never bothered to learn the facts. The message almost always arrives in the same packaging. Israel is cast as the aggressor, the Israel Defense Forces as an army intent on harming civilians, and the war against Hamas as “genocide.” This lie is no longer an extreme opinion at the edge of public debate. It has become a global product with a budget, a distribution network, and a public relations machine.
I am accustomed to criticism of Israel. I too criticise Israeli governments, political decisions, and military failures. Criticism is a right and, at times, a duty. What has happened since the massacre is not criticism. It is a systematic abandonment of facts and their replacement with a verdict written in advance. People who remained silent while Israeli civilians were murdered, raped, burnt, and abducted suddenly discovered a powerful moral voice when Israel began to defend its citizens. In their world, Jews are permitted to be victims. The moment they fight back, they become the accused.
The European record also demolishes the attempt to dismiss this as exaggerated Israeli sensitivity. A 2026 review by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights shows a sharp and sustained rise in antisemitic incidents after 7 October. In Germany, 2,616 incidents were recorded in 2022, compared with 8,627 in 2024. In Italy, the number rose from 241 to 874, and in Denmark from 9 to 207. The European Union itself described the level recorded after the massacre as unprecedented since its establishment. This is not a feeling. It is a documented reality.
The most effective weapon in this campaign is the word “genocide.” It was chosen because it does more than describe. It convicts. It makes military, legal, and moral discussion appear unnecessary before that discussion has even begun. Yet genocide is not a synonym for a brutal war, widespread destruction, or the tragic deaths of civilians. International law requires a specific intent to destroy a group as such. At the time of writing, proceedings before the International Court of Justice remain ongoing, and no final judgement has been found that Israel committed genocide. Provisional measures are not a conviction, and an allegation repeated millions of times does not become a legal fact.
The suffering in Gaza must not be ignored. Civilian deaths are a tragedy, every operational error deserves examination, and every credible suspicion of unlawful conduct requires investigation. Acknowledging suffering, however, does not require accepting a libel. A war may be devastating, decisions may be disputed, and individual cases may justify investigation without the war becoming genocide. Hamas spent years constructing a battlefield inside a densely populated civilian environment. It used civilians as cover, held hostages, and operated infrastructure from within civilian surroundings. Erasing this reality from the debate is not compassion for Palestinians. It is immunity for a terrorist organisation.
The Palestinian propaganda machine finds it easy to present Palestinians only as helpless victims and to portray the IDF and the State of Israel as an occupier seizing their land. Palestinian suffering is real, but this picture ends precisely where responsibility begins. On 7 October, Hamas and its partners invaded Israel of their own initiative to massacre innocent civilians, rape, burn, and abduct them. The world remembers every Israeli strike yet finds it convenient to forget the invasion that began the war and the declared purpose behind it. This is how the reversal works: the aggressor plays the victim the moment the attacked party returns fire, while Israel is expected to apologise for refusing to be slaughtered quietly.
As a former IDF commander, I can testify to what online slogans cannot capture. The morality of an army is not measured by whether it never makes mistakes. No such army exists. It is measured by its orders, command culture, oversight mechanisms, and the price it is prepared to pay to reduce harm to innocent people. In the IDF, plans are changed, operations are postponed, and soldiers are placed at greater risk when civilians may be harmed. I lost friends in situations where that concern shaped the operation and increased the danger to our forces. Those who lecture me about morality from the safety of a screen in Europe do not know what it means to make such a decision under fire.
How does a baseless allegation become an apparent consensus? Through money, repetition, and distribution. Qatar has spent years perfecting an effective combination of capital, media, institutions, and influence. It hosted senior Hamas figures, cultivated the status of mediator, and invested enormous sums in academia, research institutes, and media influence in the West. After 7 October, the United States Treasury sanctioned a Hamas financial facilitator based in Qatar. Authorities in the United States and Britain have repeatedly acted against online fundraising networks that served Hamas.
This does not mean that every person protesting against Israel receives a cheque from Doha or that every Qatari contribution finances terrorism. Some funds transferred to Gaza were intended for civilian needs and moved with the knowledge of international and Israeli authorities. That is precisely why careful distinctions and complete transparency are necessary. But the claim that the entire protest wave, its uniform language, and its synchronised distribution emerged spontaneously is naive at best. Money does not have to buy every protester. It only has to fund institutions, provide platforms, shape incentives, and ensure that one story is heard so often that the public struggles to imagine another.
Alongside the Qatari system are Palestinian organisations, solidarity groups, charities, campus groups, and content channels that distribute messages at an industrial pace. Some conduct legitimate civic activity. Others deliberately blur the line between supporting the Palestinian population and legitimising Hamas, raising funds, and spreading propaganda. When authorities identify a fundraising network or an online channel as serving a terrorist organisation, it cannot be allowed to hide behind the words “human rights.” Freedom of expression is not a licence to finance terrorism, and humanitarian language cannot exempt money from scrutiny over its source and destination.
The algorithm completes the job. A graphic image is circulated without context, date, or source. An unverified number becomes a headline. The headline becomes a video, the video a slogan, and the slogan an indictment. The correction arrives days later and receives a fraction of the exposure. This creates a market in which outrage is rewarded, complexity is punished, and antisemitism is branded as social justice. The Jew is once again required to prove his innocence, this time within fifteen seconds and before an audience that has already pressed the share button.
The line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism is not as complicated as its defenders pretend. Every Israeli government may be criticised as any other government is criticised. But when Jews around the world are required to apologise for Israel’s very existence, when synagogues, restaurants, and Jewish students are attacked over a war they are not conducting, when a massacre is described as “resistance,” and when the only right consistently denied is the right of the Jewish state to defend its citizens, the line has been crossed. It is antisemitism, even when draped in a keffiyeh, an academic badge, or the language of human rights.
European antisemitism did not begin on 7 October. It merely changed clothes. Many European states collaborated with Nazi Germany, handed over Jews, barred the path of refugees, or stood aside while their neighbours were sent to their deaths. Guilt does not pass from parents to children, but states and institutions carry memory and responsibility. There is therefore an intolerable audacity in governments from that same continent preaching morality to Israel while it fights on several fronts to protect its citizens from brutal enemies that openly call for its destruction. The old far right has not disappeared. It has been joined by a strange alliance of the radical left, Islamist movements, and politicians frightened of both the street and the ballot box. Europe knows how to lay wreaths on the graves of dead Jews. It is far less comfortable with living Jews who refuse to die quietly.
Large-scale immigration without genuine civic integration has helped create centres of pressure in which Islamist ideologues can set the boundaries of public debate. This is not an accusation against Europe’s Muslims as a single bloc. Many fled extremism themselves and seek to live in peace. It is an accusation against governments that lost control of immigration policy, abandoned meaningful demands for integration, and fear confronting extremists because of possible unrest or lost votes. In countries that maintained firmer control over their borders and the authority of the state, leaders retained more room to resist pressure from the street. They too are not immune, because the old nationalist strain of antisemitism remains alive.
No democracy confronting terrorism should regard this as a remote argument between Israel and Europe. The method is portable: after a major terrorist attack, the perpetrators are recast as victims while the state defending itself is placed in the dock. It can be deployed against any country confronting cross-border terrorism or an organisation supported from abroad. If the word “genocide” becomes a marketing label instead of a legal term, no democracy fighting terrorism is safe.
Governments should demand complete transparency over foreign funding of campuses, research institutes, media bodies, and political organisations. They should investigate links between online campaigns and extremist groups, defend freedom of expression without turning it into a shelter for incitement, and refuse to accept slogans in place of evidence. Defending Israel from libel does not require agreement with every Israeli decision. It requires the basic fairness to distinguish criticism from libel, self-defence from extermination, and human rights from propaganda that serves terrorism.
I am prepared to confront, personally and on any platform, every claim to the contrary. Bring facts, the laws of armed conflict, orders, timelines, and specific cases. Do not bring an edited clip, a recycled slogan, or a judgement that was never delivered. Israel seeks no immunity from criticism. It must examine its failures and punish violations when they are proved. But it will not accept the removal of its right to defend its citizens through a global show trial backed by substantial funding.
The old blood libel claimed that Jews murdered children for ritual purposes. The new blood libel claims that the Jewish state deliberately kills children as part of a programme of destruction. The packaging has changed. The mechanism has not. This time, the libel has donors, studios, algorithms, organisations and cowardly politicians. It also has opponents prepared to dismantle it fact by fact. I am one of them.