The “new” needs a major caveat: Zionists have long promoted hatred against Arabs and Muslims to shore up U.S. support for Israel. As a 2023 report from Rutgers University’s Center for Security, Race and Rights noted, “an ecosystem of Zionist institutions and prominent individuals perpetuate Islamophobia to promote the policies and goals of Israel in its theft and occupation of Palestinian territory.”
But in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the shift in American public opinion toward the Palestinians, Israel and its domestic partisans are pouring massive resources into their Islamophobia campaigns. The Israeli government alone is allocating $725 million to promote its propaganda in a desperate bid to restore its lost favorability.
This anti-Muslim strategy couldn’t be more ironic, but it is totally on brand for Zionists, where every accusation is a confession.
Zionists have spent the last two years alleging that antisemitism is the driving force behind opposition to Israel – rather than its destructive policies — and now they’re promoting Islamophobia to enlist support for their cause. We cannot think of another political movement that obsessively claims to be a victim of prejudice while simultaneously engaging in its own prejudice, as if the answer to alleged hatred for Jews is to make people hate Muslims.
It reminds us of Eric Cartman’s counsel: The only way to fight hate is more hate.
Part of this strategy is an attempt to criminalize American Muslim political conduct, most prominently seen in the recent designation of CAIR, perhaps the largest Muslim political organization in the country, as a terrorist organization by the governors of Florida and Texas. More attempts to stigmatize Muslim and Arab groups are to be expected.
This zero-sum thinking is ugly gaslighting and absolutely unnecessary if the Israeli government were committed to an equitable peace with the Palestinians. Such an Israeli government would improve its image by pursuing policies that would be viewed favorably by people around the world. But the current Israeli government is hell-bent on pursuing the annexation of the West Bank and the interminable subjugation of the Palestinian people. The only way you can get Americans to sign onto apartheid is to get them to hate the Palestinians.
It is a strategy that is bound to bear some fruit, given the widespread anti-Muslim prejudice that still exists in the West. Still, it is a Faustian bargain Zionists are making with far-right nativists who are ultimately no less hostile to Muslims than they are to Jews. Muslims may be the target today, but antisemitism is baked into nativist ideology. The Zionist alliance with the far-right will only embolden exclusionary nationalists to pursue policies that will undermine the basis of a pluralistic society that has been a source of Jewish safety and well-being in the U.S. and Europe.
And it is a lose-lose: An alliance with the far-right would come at the further expense of the very groups Israel has been losing more than any other: liberals and Democrats. The latter would move further away from an Israeli government more and more aligned with global illiberal forces, and the far-right would inevitably revert to antisemitism, something already evident. But, for the extreme Israeli government, that’s a better bet than doing something as perfunctory as ceasing new illegal settlement construction.
