Why is there a surge in antisemitism?

Why is there a surge in antisemitism?

Gilbert Achcar

There is no denial that the past two years have seen a surge in antisemitism: beyond the general increase in manifestations of racism of all kinds, there has been a specific surge in dramatic attacks targeting Jews as such. Tackling this matter requires making the correct diagnosis as to the root cause of the phenomenon.

The surge in antisemitic acts is obviously correlated with the sequence of events that started in the Middle East with the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023. It signalled the beginning of a most brutal and murderous offensive by the Israeli armed forces against the Gaza Strip: wanton intensive bombing of one of the most densely populated territories on earth, leading to the systematic destruction of its urban fabric, and tens of thousands of direct deaths, in addition to a still unknown number of indirect deaths resulting from the blockade, the destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, organised starvation and highly precarious living conditions under tents.

Regardless of whether one accepts the characterisation of this terrible onslaught as a genocide or not, the fact remains that it has been an appalling massacre on a gigantic scale. It has moreover had the singularity of being the first televised massacre of such amplitude, thanks to a live coverage by networks that remained able to broadcast from inside the Strip. Very understandably, this mass slaughter, perpetrated at an intensive rate over two years under the eyes of the world, has created a global wave of peaceful protests in solidarity with the Palestinian victims – a wave of which London has been one of the prominent theatres, if not the most prominent.

In the face of these facts – the genocidal war conducted by a state that insists on defining itself as Jewish and on pretending to speak in the name of all the Jews of the world, and the protests against that hecatomb – it may seem superfluous to wonder whether it is the first or the latter that explains the rise in antisemitic acts. The UK’s most senior progressive rabbis were straightforward in acknowledging what should be obvious to any honest person: Israel’s far-right and increasingly murderous trajectory poses an “existential threat” to Judaism. This is an outcome that countless Jewish critics of Zionism have warned of since before even the state of Israel was founded. Hannah Arend warned in 1944 that the Zionist enterprise in Palestine “will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred”. Many of the Jewish critics of Zionism expressed the fear that a state born in colonial conditions at the expense of an autochthonous population would end up behaving in a way that they deemed “incompatible with Jewish values”, as the UK’s senior progressive rabbis observed.

Instead of this unmistakable diagnosis, the Starmer government, itself accused of complicity in the Israeli massacre, has been attempting to instrumentalize the rise in antisemitism in order to further stifle solidarity with Palestine and score points against political opponents. It has been laying the blame for the rise of antisemitism on the London marches in solidarity with Palestine – including a very skewed interpretation of a slogan such as “Globalise the Intifada” – and trying to exploit the surge in antisemitic acts in order to defame Zack Polanski today, in the same way that Jeremy Corbyn was defamed yesterday, with the additional oddity that the Greens’ leader is Jewish himself.

The vanity of this pretext should be obvious to any person of good faith and with a minimal knowledge of the facts. Take the incriminated slogan for instance: it obviously refers to what remains, and by far, the most important stage in the Palestinians’ long struggle against the occupation of their land, i.e. the impressive non-violent popular uprising that reached its peak in 1988 in the West Bank and Gaza and led to the term Intifada entering the international vocabulary. To construe a call to “globalise” this uprising into an instance of antisemitism is not only to deliberately conflate the Israeli state with all the Jews of the world, but it is even to conflate them with that state’s occupation of lands in blatant violation of international law.

In fact, the Starmer government’s various attempts to instrumentalize antisemitism are themselves in some way an instigation to antisemitism. They are so transparently dishonest – on the part of a prime minister who stands among the most disliked in British history with a damning reputation of untrustworthiness – that they end up stirring anti-Jewish feelings among those politically illiterate and foolish to the point of taking at face value Israel’s pretence of speaking in the name of all Jews. If the Starmer’s government truly wanted to combat antisemitism, it would start by ending its collaboration with the Israeli government and would bring to the fore the countless progressive British Jews who say of Israel’s murderous behaviour: not in our name!

Adapted from the Arabic original published in Al-Quds al-Arabi on 19 May 2026. Feel free to republish or to publish in other languages, with mention of the source.