Occasionally, Israel partisans read my articles and respond with predictable antipathy, insisting that my commentary on Israel’s actions and its genocidal policies reflect animosity toward Jews. They reject my explanations of denial, projection, and other unconscious mechanisms—concepts foreign to their unexamined minds—and maintain that their characterization of the entire Palestinian population as innately genocidal, with Hamas supposedly acting as its proxy, is fully justified. Equally telling is their angry insistence that behavior deserving condemnation when committed by a non-Jew is somehow acceptable when committed by a Jew. The cruelty inflicted under Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the IDF—conduct that human rights organizations have classified as illegal under international law—is, from their perspective, a necessary act of self-defense.
Granting themselves total impunity, they excuse their own tribe’s barbarism while vilifying Palestinian resistance—from the civil disobedience of the First Intifada to the unarmed protests of the Great March of Return. They react to peaceful dissent with the same murderous ferocity they reserve for armed resistance. How can these partisans not grasp that when you steal a people’s land, occupy them, deny them basic rights, and kill, imprison, and torture them, including their children, they will resist? Is that not the height of narcissistic blindness?
When I challenge their arguments with historical fact and psychological insight—especially psychological insight—their agitation escalates to the point of abuse. One such person, who has contacted me a few times, usually with stock pro-Israel talking points, recently wrote, “Since you wrote about projection, you might find this interesting from a prominent researcher on antisemitism.” He then forwarded the following excerpt attributed to Karin Stögner of the University of Passau:
What Stephan Grigat and I call ‘projective antizionism’ projects antisemitic resentment onto Israel while disavowing antisemitism: once Israel is cast as a Western oppressor and Palestinians as its colonized victims, even antisemitic hostility towards the Jewish state as a whole can be reframed as the legitimate outcry of the oppressed.
I replied with this email:
These academics appear to have a remarkably poor command of the documented history of Israel-Palestine, and their reasoning is correspondingly unconvincing. Rather than approaching the evidence without preconceptions, they approached it with a predetermined objective: to defend Israel and discredit its critics. Their conclusions reflect that commitment rather than a dispassionate examination of the facts. That makes them no different from Israel’s legions of propagandists, who are deeply invested in disregarding the facts because reality is a mortal threat to a self-image held together by cherished but uninspected beliefs about Israeli innocence and Palestinian culpability. Knowing the facts would force them either to cease defending Israel or admit to themselves that their defense is rooted in a double standard that privileges Jewish lives and aspirations while treating the lives and aspirations of non-Jews as less worthy or, as is the case with Palestinians, entirely unworthy. Such an admission would at least constitute an honest reckoning.
Stögner is guilty of the very projection she attributes to others, yet she doesn’t seem at all cognizant of that internal process because recognizing it would mean acknowledging the prejudices and subterranean self-imagery that threaten her idealized understanding of herself.
Of course there are antisemites. There will always be people who hate Jews purely out of prejudice, just as there are people who blame an entire group for the actions of a few members of that group.
Israel knows full well that its inhumane behavior incites antisemitism.
And who benefits from that incitement? Israel, of course, because it can rationalize its “need” for security in an inherently antisemitic world that allegedly wants to do to Israel what Israel has been doing for years to Palestinians and the other adversaries it helped to create. The result is a political narrative in which the hostility Israel helps generate can itself be presented as evidence of the necessity of its policies. Unfortunately, the idea that making peace with one’s adversary is the most effective way to neutralize their potentially destructive intentions is conspicuously absent from the conversation.
By weaponizing antisemitism under the guise of “security,” Israel can encourage Diaspora Jews to settle in “their ancestral homeland,” reinforcing Israel’s Jewish demographic advantage over the Indigenous population.
I believe the number of traditional antisemites is small compared to the number of pro-Israelis who justify genocidal atrocities while remaining callously indifferent to—or even gleeful about—the anguish inflicted on Palestinians. This exposes a profound abdication of moral conscience.
Moreover, only an ignorant person—and, in the case of Israel’s defenders, a willfully ignorant person—could be so deficient in humanity as to refuse to situate Hamas’s October 7 attack within the historical context of the Palestinian people’s generations-long struggle. Their refusal leaves them blind to the reality that violence of this magnitude does not arise in a vacuum.
And only an ignorant person would be incapable of recognizing that the attack was a gift to Netanyahu and his fellow deviants, a dream come true that handed them the pretext they have always wanted to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous people from their homeland.
Everything must be looked at against the history of occupation, dispossession, and genocidal violence. That context is why Israel must bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the attack and why it is highly likely Netanyahu permitted it to happen.
Context is also why Israel prioritizes the acquisition of land over the lives of its citizens. The most glaring example of this hubris is the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which might have been avoided had Prime Minister Golda Meir not withheld from her cabinet an Egyptian peace proposal similar in key respects to the one Israel later signed in 1979. On a per-capita basis, in less than three weeks Israel lost three times as many of its own citizens as the United States lost in a decade in Vietnam.
The attachment to a self-image reflects the ego’s need to preserve and validate itself. This attachment is so powerful and unconscious that parents will send their children to war before inquiring into the beliefs that sustain this idealized sense of self—or presumed identity. Anyone who still defends Israel’s conduct after three years of mass violence is unlikely to comprehend this insight, because doing so necessitates that they question the very beliefs their attachment to an idealized self-image compels them to protect.
All I can say to you is wake up. Reflect on the times you’ve minimized or excused cruel and hateful behavior. Ask yourself whether you’ve seriously researched the history of this tragedy, particularly the evidence that challenges your preexisting beliefs. Commit to studying the issue honestly, without allowing preconceived beliefs and prejudices to dictate your conclusions. Otherwise, your moral support for state terror will contribute to the deaths of many more people, including Jews, leaving you to go to your grave without ever having realized your common humanity with the other. The pro-Israel worldview I have described—one that subordinates moral judgment to group loyalty, treats the suffering of outsiders as less worthy of concern, and recasts domination as self-defense—is profoundly self-deceptive, narcissistic, and tribal. In these respects, it resembles the worldview associated with Donald Trump and embodied in the policies of the state of Israel.
Too entrenched in prejudice to subject his beliefs to serious scrutiny, my correspondent responded to my email with accusations of antisemitism instead of engaging with the substance of my argument. I had begun my email by explaining that my opposition to Netanyahu and to the atrocities committed against Palestinians is not antisemitic. Yet rather than address the distinction between criticism and bigotry, he resorted to that stock and intellectually bankrupt slur, which gave him license to dismiss my case without wrestling with its implications. His response exemplifies the psychological process I have been describing: when evidence threatens a cherished self-image, the mind most often turns away and labels the person presenting it as the problem. I know this reflex well, because it was once mine. He remained unmoved even when I pointed to a historical record that refutes the precious narrative seemingly so integral to his conception of self.
When I share these insights with such people, I know it would take a virtual miracle for them to truly hear me. The insights briefly touch their consciences, stirring faint traces of self-awareness and guilt, but their minds instinctively resist the dawning realization that a people whose humanity they share is being humiliated and destroyed, an abomination that could not take place without their moral support. Once the ego-identity senses an existential threat, fear swiftly turns to anger, burying those traces. Compelled to defend cherished beliefs and images, their unexamined minds retreat deeper into unconsciousness, turning away from the very self-understanding essential to tikkun olam—repairing a broken world.
These processes are not unique to Israel’s partisans. They arise from the human attachment to a presumed, limited, and mortal identity and to the beliefs and images that emanate from and perpetuate that presumption—a vulnerability that affects all but the most enlightened among us. What differs is the degree to which we remain unconscious of these processes and the extent to which they govern our perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. My criticism of Israel’s defenders concerns not a failing confined to them, but how strongly this universal vulnerability manifests itself in their defense of Israel.
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