Mick Hartley

A powerful essay from Yuki Zeman at Quillette – The Menace of a Respectable Hatred. What remains of a person, an institution, or a civilisation that dishonours itself when Jews and Israel become the targets of hatred and violence?

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and its accomplices carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust: a cross-border invasion, ambush, and slaughter, maliciously directed at civilian life. These murders were qualitatively different to lives lost during a battlefield exchange or to collateral damage during a military operation. The victims were men, women, children, the elderly and disabled, foreign workers, festival-goers, and whole communities who were executed without discrimination or mercy. Sexual violence was not incidental to the massacre; it was part of the premeditated method of terror, cruelty, and humiliation. Homes were invaded, families were shattered, bodies were defiled, and the ordinary trust of civilian life was destroyed. They were raped and murdered where they slept, danced, and sought refuge. 

Nothing that has happened since can retrospectively convert those atrocities into an ordinary military encounter. Chronology matters. Before the arguments over Gaza, before casualty comparisons, before the machinery of equivocation began to grind, there was the original crime: the deliberate destruction and violation of civilians because of who they were, enacted under an explicitly annihilationist policy.

The dishonour that followed from those predisposed to sympathise with the Palestinian cause did not hide itself well. It appeared under the names of antizionism, decolonisation, liberation, and nuance. Criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism, we were reminded, and that is true as far as it goes—no state should be beyond judgment. Yet after the massacre, the antizionist rhetoric that spread across universities, activist networks, international organisations, and polite liberal society abandoned the grammar of ordinary political criticism almost immediately. 

That rhetoric recast Israel as a uniquely monstrous polity, the existence of which requires permanent moral justification. It allowed people to avoid saying “Jew” as they directed their appetite for accusation and contempt towards the only collective expression of Jewish nationhood and survival. A decent response to the atrocities of 7 October required no ideological sorting. Instead, much of the modern world paused before it contextualised, inverted, and excused.

Antisemitism and antizionism after 7 October marked a moral crossroads at which good people were asked to choose between betrayal and humanity. Too many right-thinking people chose the former, and they did so with righteousness. That is why I write about this topic, irrespective of my identity credentials. For what remains of a person, an institution, or a civilisation that behaves this dishonourably whenever Jews and Israel are the targets of hatred and violence?…

The problem after 7 October was never confined to the open antisemite, who is easy to recognise. The more disturbing spectacle was the behaviour of people and institutions that speak fluently about human dignity, trauma, minorities, safety, and historical injury, but then become evasive or excited when Jewish suffering enters the room. Those who demanded impossible proof before they would acknowledge that Israeli women and men had been sexually violated. Who tore down posters of hostages. Who described the massacre in southern Israel as legitimate resistance. Who converted grief into geopolitical argument before the bodies were cold. Some—but by no means all—of these voices refrained from celebration; instead, they lowered their gaze and their voices and waited for the topic of conversation to become less inconvenient.

This was not just a matter of psychology, it was also a test of conduct: could people mourn without qualification, tell the truth when it endangered their tribal affiliations or prior political commitments, protect Jewish students and colleagues with the urgency they would have shown toward other threatened minorities, reject slogans of erasure, distinguish criticism of Israeli policy from the fantasy of eradicating the only Jewish state? Could they speak up when silence had become a form of permission?

Many found they could not. And their conduct matters because antisemitism is not just a problem of fanaticism. It survives through the respectable coward, the procedural evader, the institution that waits for Jews to become less embarrassing, and the citizen who knows that something indecent has happened but prefers not to quarrel with the room. Antizionism now supplies much of the respectable language for this evasion. It allows many who would indignantly deny antisemitism to preserve their idea of themselves while behaving dishonourably toward Jews….

As Israelis mourned in the hours and days after the massacre, the dead and the abducted were folded into discussions of occupation, resistance, and proportionality. Antizionism supplied the conversion mechanism that allowed the denigration of Jewish victims and survival to present itself as political critique. The common defence of this position is that it merely denotes opposition to nationalism, ethno-states, occupation, militarism, or colonialism. This defence collapses under the weight of its own selectivity. 

If the objection were truly universal, Israel would be judged like every other state whose borders, wars, treatment of minorities, national myths, and political failures invite criticism. But Israel is not judged like those other states. Its founding is treated as uniquely contaminating. Its self-defence is treated as uniquely suspect. Its civilians are denied the ordinary presumptions of innocence. And its enemies enjoy the romance of resistance even when they rape, kidnap, and murder. In 2025, the UN General Assembly passed fifteen resolutions condemning Israel and only eleven against every other country in the world combined. The obsession is the confession.

Israel was marked as uniquely illegitimate long before 7 October. After the atrocities of the Second Intifada and every other war of elimination or terror campaign directed at the Jewish state, dead Jews were denied the innocence of victims before they were mourned as human beings; Israel’s very existence had already explained their deaths. The murdered Jew was then conscripted to testify against the survivors who sought to defend themselves. This is your fault, they were made to say.

This inversion of aggressor and victim was never confined to the street. It arose in universities, media outlets, arts organisations, professional associations, humanitarian NGOs, and human-rights spaces. The slogans varied a bit, but the conduct had a recognisable structure. Jewish fear was treated as a sham. Jewish grief was treated as ideological manipulation. Jewish attachment to Israel was treated as moral contamination. In some settings, Jews were acceptable only if they performed disavowal: of Zionism, of Israel, of the collective Jewish self-defence, sometimes even of Jewish particularity itself….