After Manchester, there can be no doubt – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

There were two horrifying events in England on Thursday. The first was the fascistic murder of two Jews at a synagogue in Manchester. The second were the anti-Israel protests that swept big cities before the bodies of our two Jewish countrymen were even cold. ‘From the river to the sea!’, the Israelophobic mob hollered in the deathly wake of the barbarous assault at Heaton Park. Two dead Jews were not enough, it seems – these people desire the violent erasure of the entire Jewish nation.

We need to grapple with just how sick it was, how heartless, for mobs in London, Edinburgh and Manchester itself to rain hatred on the Jewish State mere hours after two Jews were murdered. This was the salt of Israelophobia rubbed in the wound of anti-Semitism. ‘I hate Jews’, that vile knifeman essentially said. ‘We hate the Jews’ homeland’, followed up the keffiyeh creeps on our streets. As Jews in England were feeling insecure, these wailing activists were rallying for the destruction of the one, tiny patch of land that promises Jews security. ‘There’s nowhere to run’ – that was the implicit and horrific cry of the Israel-hate that followed the Jew-murder.

But there was more to the marches than heartlessness – they were nothing less than a reverse Cable Street. On 4 October 1936 – today is the 89th anniversary – the radical left rallied to the defence of London’s Jews from the menace of fascism, then of the European rather than Islamist variety. They stood with Jewish EastEnders against the threat of Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts. Fast forward 89 years and now the left responds to violent Jew hatred not by siding with Jewish people but by raging against the Jewish nation. Let us speak plainly: in the wake of the terroristic murder of Jews on English soil in 2025, the left hit the streets to echo the vile prejudices of the Oswald Mosley in this situation – knifeman Jihad Al-Shamie. They have officially crossed the barricade of Cable Street. They are now on the other side.

The orgy of Israelophobia that followed the slaughter at the synagogue made it crystal clear: hatred for the Jewish State is a close cousin of hatred for Jewish people. In fact they are spiritual siblings. That these two frothing ideologies exist in tandem in modern Britain is not a coincidence, as the anti-Israel left would have us believe. It is not an accident that Britain is overrun with both ‘respectable’ loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation and ‘unrespectable’ animus for the Jewish people. The one feeds the other. Israelophobia is the rotten soil in which Jew hatred festers and grows. And it’s time more of us said so.

A wave of defensiveness swirled through left-wing and liberal circles in the UK following the racist savagery at Heaton Park. Influential ‘progressives’ made perfunctory condemnations of the attack – making sure to mention the scourge of ‘Islamophobia’ while they were at it – but then they got down to their real business. Don’t blame this horror on us, they essentially said. We campaign against a state, not a people. Our fury is reserved for a ‘genocidal entity’, not any ethnic or religious group. We’re anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish.

Social media were awash with desperate efforts to draw a line between anti-Israel agitation and anti-Jewish hatred. ‘Conflating protests against the genocide in Gaza’ with ‘an anti-Semitic attack’ is ‘deeply irresponsible’, said Zack Polanski of the UK Green Party. There is no comparison between anti-Semitism and opposing ‘a foreign state which a consensus of genocide scholars… concluded is committing a genocide’, said Owen Jones. The mob of Israel-bashers that swarmed Liverpool Street Station and other sites across the UK clearly thought likewise – that their curiously intense hatred for one nation had nothing to do with the mindset behind the horrors at Heaton Park just a few hours earlier.

I’ve never bought into the idea that you can neatly separate the activist class’s myopic dread of the Jewish State from the bubbling up in our society of bigotry against the Jewish people. After Manchester I accept it even less. This moment calls for frankness. The stakes are too high for linguistic tiptoeing around the sicknesses in our society. The bottom line is this: if you spend every hour of every day obsessing over the unconscionable wickedness of the Jewish nation, if you ceaselessly damn Zionism as the cruellest ideology on Earth, then you have no right to come over all coy and shocked when Jews are targeted with invective and even violence. You’re like a bull in a china shop asking: ‘What happened to all these plates?’

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. It’s the main form Jew hatred takes in the Western world in the 21st century. It is the uncanny likeness this ancient hatred wears in these supposedly post-racist times. You expect me to believe it is purely by chance that the activist class now says about the Jewish State all the things that fascist scum once said about the Jewish people? Israel, they say, is uniquely murderous. It’s a bloodletting entity. It derives pleasure from the murder of children. It wields staggering levels of global power. It has even mighty states eating from the palm of its blood-stained hand. Zero out of 10 for originality – every one of these libels was feverishly issued against the Jewish people before you co-opted them for your campaign of demonisation against the Jewish State.

Consider the sheer fixation with Israel. I have opposed wars fought by America, Britain, France, Turkey, Russia and Rwanda, but not once did any of those states occupy my every waking thought. Not once did I call for their violent obliteration from the family of nations. Never did I obsessively visit campuses, write articles, make videos and stand on street corners to say not only that ‘Turkey is wrong to bomb the Kurds’ but also that ‘Turkey is the most demonic, bloodthirsty entity in existence and the whole of humanity is fucking doomed until this vile so-called “country” has been wiped from the face of the Earth’. You know why I didn’t say that? Because I am not racist.

Here is the key commonality between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitsm – both ideologies hold some Jewish thing, whether the Jewish nation or the Jewish people, to be the true source of evil in the world. That is always what distinguished anti-Semitism from other forms of racism – the fact its fuel was not merely prejudice and bigotry but also a conspiratorial derangement that sees the Jews as the corrupters of the Earth, the spoilers of men’s souls. And it is what now distinguishes anti-Zionism from politics, from the realm of reasoned discourse that the followers of this ideology falsely claim to inhabit – it, too, finds a Jewish phenomenon, the Jewish State, guilty of manifesting evil, of sullying our species, of letting the blood of innocents and warping the minds of Westerners. It, too, sees ‘the Jew thing’ as the poison in the well of humanity.

To my mind, anti-Zionism is like a laundering scam. It is the passably political belief system that allows certain sections of society to launder their fear of Jews and present it as ‘criticism of Israel’. From England’s upper classes, who’ve long been iffy about Jews, to radical Islamists, who openly hate Jews, anti-Zionism has become the cloak under which they might spirit their Jew suspicion into everyday life. From far-right filth to leftists drunk on the old Socialism of Fools, anti-Zionism is a mask for the lingering, latent belief that there is something noxious, something unholy, about Jews.

To sow so much rancour for the Jewish nation and then reach for the smelling salts when Jews are demonised – no. We aren’t having it anymore. The reason ‘Zios’ – Jews – are getting it in the neck is because you have polluted public life with the fanatical, chauvinistic belief that Zionism is evil and everyone who supports it is evil. That Israel is uniquely cruel and everyone who backs it is cruel. That the Jewish State is the most despicable state, so much so that it deserves to be destroyed, ‘from the river to the sea’. Only Jihad Al-Shamie is responsible for the barbarism at Heaton Park. But here’s what you are responsible for: rebirthing in pseudo-political language the medieval derangement about evil Jews. After Manchester, I, for one, am devoted to the complete defeat of anti-Zionism.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy