The worldwide frenzy against Israel
An obsession with the Jewish state has replaced rationality by lethal propaganda.
JNS
Jul 24, 2025

Hundreds
of protesters rally in Amsterdam against Israel and for more
humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza. Strip, on July 20, 2025.
Over the past few days, anti-Israel and
anti-Jewish feeling has been ratcheted up into an absolute frenzy. Every
few hours seems to bring a fresh outrage.
In London, a prominent Jewish broadcaster
was chased down the street by a man screaming, “fascist Zionist scum.” A
woman dining at a Jewish restaurant in the city was asked if she was a
Jew and then had food thrown over her.
On the Greek island of Rhodes, a mob armed with knives
attacked a group of Jewish teenagers. About 50 French Jewish children,
returning from a summer camp in Spain, were thrown off a flight at
Valencia airport after the children sang Hebrew songs, and their tour
leader was arrested and thrown to the ground.
The BBC’s obsession with
demonizing and delegitimizing Israel has reached pathological
proportions. This week, it gave pride of place on its flagship radio
show Today to ever-more twisted accusations and blood libels
casting Israel as an evil and murderous state, including the claim by a
British surgeon working in Gaza that the Israel Defense Forces were
playing a game in shooting Gazan boys in the food queues by targeting a
different part of their body every day.
The broadcasting behemoth could scarcely
contain its excitement as reporters and interviewees joined in chorusing
that “a reckoning was coming” with the imminent end of the war in Gaza,
after which Israel’s “war crimes” would be revealed, and the case for
declaring a Palestine state was therefore now overwhelming.
This propaganda onslaught consists of
three major libels: that the IDF is deliberately killing Gazans queueing
for food, that Israel is starving Gazans to death, and that “settler
violence” against Arabs is increasing in the disputed territories of
Judea and Samaria.
All three claims seek to turn Israel from
being the target and victim of genocidal attack into a murderous
criminal entity that doesn’t deserve to survive. It’s a propaganda
onslaught mounted by Hamas acting in concert with its allies in the
United Nations and the entire global humanitarian establishment, pumped
out through a media megaphone and parroted by politicians who are either
malevolent or clueless.
A moment’s thought suggests that to accuse
the IDF of deliberately killing Gazans queuing for food is absurd.
Since the Israelis helped set up and are policing the Gaza Humanitarian
Foundation in order to deliver food safely to these civilians, why
should the IDF want to kill them?
Where they have killed some
Gazans near the aid points, this has clearly been an unintended result
of the soldiers firing into the air to warn off these possibly
Hamas-infiltrated crowds if they look like they’re about to rush the
Israeli troops.
It is Hamas that has been deliberately
killing hundreds of Gazans to prevent them from gaining food from the
American-Israeli-run aid points, because it’s been through stealing this
aid for its own use that Hamas has remained in power.
In order to survive, it needs to have the
aid distributed instead by its U.N. ally. That’s why, as part of
ceasefire negotiations, Hamas is insisting that aid must be distributed
by the world body and the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
This week, the media published distressing
pictures of skeletal children as evidence of starvation in Gaza. But
the adults in these pictures were all conspicuously well-fed. Is it
likely that it’s only Gaza’s children who are being starved while the
adults are not?
The Israelis say that these pictures,
which have been regularly trotted out over the years with the false
claim that they represent Israeli brutality, are actually of children
suffering from wasting diseases or inherited medical conditions.
There may be increasing hunger in Gaza,
but to blame Israel for this is grotesque. The World Health
Organization’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has accused the
Israelis of an aid blockade. This is totally untrue.
The IDF’s aid division, COGAT, says that
recently, nearly 4,500 trucks entered the Strip with supplies, including
flour for bakeries, and 2,500 tons of baby food and high-calorie
special food for children.
The key point, however, is that 950 trucks
have been stuck inside Gaza because the United Nations and its agencies
are refusing to distribute the food and other aid they are carrying.
The GHF has implored the global agency to help distribute these supplies
around the Strip, but the United Nations has refused.
That’s because it’s working hand-in-glove
with Hamas, which is determined to cause deaths from starvation as a
weapon of war, just as it’s used Gaza’s civilians as human shields and
cannon fodder.
This hideous strategy rests on the
infernal calculation that the more Gazans who die, the more the West
will blame Israel. So the West’s baseless virtue-signaling against
Israeli “starvation” will, in fact, become the Gazans’ death warrant.
Now, the Israel delegitimization machine
has created another potent weapon in its arsenal: “settler violence.”
This demonizes Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria with the charge
that they attack and terrorize their Arab neighbors.
As ever, the opposite is mostly the case.
True, a minority of “hilltop” Jewish youth have acted in revenge and
committed unprovoked attacks against local Arabs—and they should be
dealt with. But the vast majority of the violence in these territories
is by local Arabs against Jewish residents, who suffer from such
murderous attacks almost every day.
According to a report by the NGO Regavim,
90% of incidents that the United Nations has classified as “settler
violence” were nothing of the kind. These cases included clashes between
Arabs and the IDF; where Jews acted in self-defense against Arab
attacks; or even peaceful activities by these Jews such as supervised
visits to Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and to historic sites by hikers and
tourists.
This week, it was revealed that the claim
that “settlers” had torched the Byzantine church of St. George in
Taybeh, near Ramallah, was a lie. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike
Huckabee, who had toured the church and said “desecrating a church,
mosque or synagogue is a crime against humanity and God,” walked that
back and acknowledged that the church was undamaged—as was always
entirely obvious from its intact stone walls. Yet this false claim, made
by priests and activists, had ricocheted around the world.
Instead of setting the record straight to
help Israel defeat these Islamist enemies of humanity and to protect
Diaspora Jews from the hatred incited by this media onslaught, political
leaders in Britain and Europe have been pouring more fuel onto the
flames.
A statement by
Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the foreign ministers of
27 other countries accused Israel of “the inhumane killing of civilians,
including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and
food,” denying “essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian
population” and soaring rates of “settler violence.”
How can we explain this astounding descent
from rationality into the sewers of lethal propaganda? How can it be
that in Britain, factual evidence about the Gaza war is met with
incredulity, “Zionist” has become a term of abuse, and antisemitism is
now regarded as little more than a device for Jews to sanitize the
“crimes” of Israel?
There are many reasons, including
ideology, ignorance and wishful thinking. There is also the widespread
belief that the U.N. and the humanitarian-rights establishment, which
have the status of a secular religion, act with perfect integrity and
are incapable of lying or doing evil.
But there are far darker impulses at
work—the deep desire to prove that the Jews are bad, that they have a
unique and destructive power over world events, that they can never be
victims.
That’s why the acute threats to the world
posed by Russia, China or Iran, the terrible atrocities against the
Druze in Syria or the Christians in Africa, the famine and starvation in
Sudan—all are dwarfed in the West by its overwhelming, unhinged,
vicious obsession with tiny Israel, the focus of a civilizational
disorder that is dragging down not the Jewish state but the West itself.