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If I spoke critically of something abusive that India was doing in Kashmir, would you expect me to be accused of an anti-Hindu hate crime?
If you criticized an Indian military operation, would you have to preface it with “I don’t hate Hindus or their religion and am not the slightest bit Hinduphobic”?
If there was worldwide opposition to something that Indian military forces were doing, would you expect western governments to start frantically churning out laws to ban that opposition because it was making members of the Hindu community feel unsafe?
Would it ever in your wildest imaginings occur to you that a criticism of the violent actions of the government of India could in any way be interpreted as an attack on the Hindu faith and the membership of that religion?
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
You don’t expect to see criticisms of the state of India framed as an attack on its majority religion because people in your society haven’t been conditioned to have that expectation. But we have been conditioned to have that expectation about Israel.
The association between antisemitism and criticism of the state of Israel isn’t natural. It’s not something that would organically occur to an untrained mind.
If a man who’d never heard of Israel or Palestine were shown footage of the genocide in Gaza, he would reflexively recoil in horror and say what he was looking at was a bad thing. If somebody then ran up and explained to him that what he just said was actually a hateful act of religious persecution, he would be very surprised and confused. Because he hadn’t been indoctrinated into making that association, in the same way you haven’t been indoctrinated into associating criticism of the Indian government with an attack on the religion of Hinduism.
It’s a completely counterintuitive association. There’s nothing about it that that you could find your way into through your own observation and reasoning. It’s something you’d need to be taught by others. You need it to be explained to you.
That’s the literal translation of the Hebrew word “hasbara”. It means “explaining”. Israel and its supporters have spent decades “explaining” to the world that criticism of the state of Israel is actually a terrible hate crime against Jews and their religion, because otherwise it would never occur to a normal person that that is the case.
It’s actually astonishingly impressive. The political ideology of support for this tiny apartheid state has been so effective at explaining to the world what thoughts they should think about it that those efforts touch all our lives. It’s so effective that you could be at a social gathering all the way across the sea in the United States and, unless you are very familiar with the people around you, if the subject of Israel comes up you’ll immediately understand that you could be in for a very uncomfortable evening.
It’s stunning how much influence this ideology has had throughout our society’s culture and institutions. It’s almost magical.
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There was a segment in last year’s Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers that stuck with me where Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss refers to Zionism as a “magic system”.
“Jewish settlements in Gaza is a very difficult step that demands a lot of work,” Weiss told Theroux. “You have to influence the leftists, the government, the nations of the world, using the magic system: Zionism.”
It isn’t surprising to learn that Weiss views her operations as a kind of magic. On paper she and her ilk shouldn’t be able to do what they do. Forcefully dropping a foreign ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization and violently hammering it into place against every organic impulse of the region is freakish enough, but then convincing the rest of the world to support this? To the point that it actually affects our interpersonal relationships and interactions on the other side of the planet? It shouldn’t work. But it does.
I don’t really know what magic is, but it makes sense that some Zionists would see it that way. Because from the outside looking in all that mass-scale psychosocial manipulation kind of does look like an inexplicable sort of wizardry.
Luckily, the magic seems to be wearing off. The old tricks just aren’t working anymore. Calling someone who criticizes Israel an “antisemite” is widely recognized for the fraudulent manipulation that it is. Pro-Palestine politicians are winning elections despite highly coordinated smear campaigns saying their candidacy makes Jews feel unsafe. Everyone knows Israel lies about everything all the time. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, while awareness of the pro-Israel bias of the mainstream press is at an all-time high.
People are still showing up for protests and pro-Palestine events. The public is turning against Israel in unprecedented numbers. Nobody’s buying the old song and dance anymore.
Maybe the people are finding a little magic of their own.
© 2026 Caitlin Johnstone
PO Box 378, Mentone, 3194, Victoria, Australia