What we must know about these threats to civilisation:
One need not be Jewish to believe that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. There are many non-Jewish Zionists out there, including myself. The noted British journalist, writer and commentator Melanie Phillips has turned out a number of important volumes over the years on this and related matters. I have previously reviewed three of her earlier books:
Her newest book is just out and speaks a great deal to the current situation:
Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege (Wicked Son, 2026).
The entire volume is worthwhile, but I will limit myself to her second chapter, offering some useful quotes along the way. She begins by stating the obvious: antisemitism has always been with us. It has taken different forms over the past 3,500 years, but it seems to have ramped up to a whole new level over the past decades.
And what happened on October 7 and immediately afterward has certainly demonstrated this newer and ever more diabolical form of this threat. It demonstrates how the West has lost its moral compass and how it may now be in terminal decline. The West desperately needs to “recover its historic moral and intellectual core.”
As to whether antisemitism is the same thing as anti-Zionism, Phillips says this:
It’s not just a prejudice. It’s not just a form of racism. It’s not just an expression of objectionable views about a people called the Jews. It is unique to the Jews. There is no other bigotry like it. That’s because it rests on assumptions that are so deranged it amounts to a form of mental disorder. These assumptions involve a paranoid, conspiratorial belief that the Jews have some kind of otherworldly power over global events, they exercise a manipulative, diabolical control over governments and financial and cultural institutions to serve their own interests, and they are uniquely responsible for all the ills of the world. No other group of people, however much they may be the victim of hatred or bigotry, is subjected to this pathologically unhinged attitude.
We know that antisemitism is always with us; it’s protean, taking different forms in different situations. And the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narrative is undoubtedly, at base, virulently anti-Jew.
She says there are three good reasons why these two forms of hatred go together:
First, the vast majority of Jews support Israel and consider themselves, consequently, to be Zionists.
Second, the demonization of Israel and Zionism displays exactly the same characteristics as antisemitism throughout the ages. Both involve obsessive and deranged lies and blood libels; holding Israel to a higher standard than any other people, or indeed to an utterly impossible standard; the conviction that Israel has unique power in the world; and the belief that it is a diabolical, manipulative, conspiratorial force acting as a hidden hand over world events. All these demonic fantasies singling out Israel as a unique force for bad are characteristics of historic Jew-hatred in its various manifestations.
Third, and most important, even though Zionism as a political movement was created in the nineteenth century, it is an integral part of Judaism itself. Judaism is a unique fusion of the people, the religion, and the land. It holds that the Jews (the people) have a sacred duty imposed upon them by God to live by a set of divinely ordained precepts (the religion) within the patch of earth that the Almighty chose for them (the land of Israel).
Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siegeby Phillips, Melanie (Author)
She goes on to say this:
That doesn’t mean you have to be religiously observant or a Zionist to be a Jew. But it does mean that the presence of the Jewish people as a holy nation in the land of Israel—known in religious language as Zion—is what Judaism is all about, and the yearning to return to the land is integral to Jewish history, thought, and prayer. It’s like a three-legged stool. Knock out the Zionism leg and the stool falls over. That’s why an attack on Israel’s existence is an attack on Judaism itself.
No other faith, people, or nationality has this multi-faceted character. It’s another thing that makes the Jewish people unique. And it’s the feature that non-Jews find so difficult to grasp and leads to endless misunderstanding. People wonder why the Jews are even entitled to have a country of their own since Judaism is “just another religion.” Well, Judaism isn’t “just” anything. It’s uniquely and inextricably multidimensional. It involves faith, peoplehood, and nationhood. And that needs to be unpacked and explained, not least to many Jews themselves.
Phillips of course understands that not everyone who is an anti-Zionist is an antisemite. And since this is a book intended to help Jews deal with all this, she goes on to explain how they should and should not respond in this regard:
There’s also no point thinking, “Oh well, what’s going on is just antisemitism, so we have no alternative but to keep our heads down because antisemitism is profoundly irrational, and it’s therefore impossible to argue with antisemites.” This is a recipe for despair. It’s also a deeply unhelpful generalization.
The first thing to bear in mind is that it’s extremely inadvisable to level the charge of antisemitism at anyone who’s telling lies about Israel. It may make you feel better to do so, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.
Some of these attackers are indeed dyed-in-the-wool Jew-haters. If someone really is an antisemite, however, the charge may bounce straight off them. They may not understand that vicious tropes about Jews, such as the claim that they control the world through devious means or that they kill people to harvest their internal organs, are indeed examples of antisemitism.
That’s because, astonishingly, some people believe such things to be true. Such real antisemites may therefore bat away the accusation of antisemitism as merely a self-serving and meaningless insult.
However, even if people are spewing lies about Israel which meet the definition of antisemitism, they still might not be antisemites.
She looks at other ways – both good and not so good – that we must deal with this and then finishes the chapter by admonishing us to understand the enemy. And that includes being aware of the various unholy alliances that produce the vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish mindset:
-Anti-West revolutionaries and Muslim jihadists
-Left-wingers, Islamists, and white supremacists
-MAGA isolationists and the revolutionary left
-“Queers for Palestine”
-Climate change activists and Palestinian Arabs
-Progressive Christian churches and the Islamic world
-Progressive Jews and the Islamic world
Dealing with these and other threats will not be easy, but this books offers helpful suggestions as to how we might fight this fight.
I may devote future articles to other chapters in the book. But this brief collection of quotes might spur you on to get the book and read it for yourself. And of course you need not be a Jew to do so and benefit greatly as a result.
One Reply to “Melanie Phillips On Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism”
Who would have thought a year ago that this topic would need to be raised to the level of an existential argument requiring believers to re-examine their views or be lost in irrelevance?
Just this morning the subject of Zionism came up with one of my friends loudly touting that Zionism was evil.
This is my answer;
“There is a serious problem with using that definition (of Zionism). There are many scriptures that build an intricate understanding of what pertains to Zion, what it is, and what promises relate to it. For this reason I prefer to see what you have called Zionism as an aberration: as something the enemy has corrupted from its Biblical base. To solve this problem I see two “Zionisms”, two “Zionists”. The first is about “Biblical Zion” which picks up the doctrine correctly; and the second is what I term “extreme Zionism” which for simplicity’s sake the twisted, sinful, un-Biblcal ideas. Using the two enables the theological discussion about the first to continue. Now the argument that “Zion” does not appear except once in the NT (Matt 21:5) and therefore makes it improper for Christians to discuss outside the current presumption of evil, is evil itself. There is much much more that could be said but I find that insisting on the two adjectives are indispensable for sanity in the current discussion climate.
Who would have thought a year ago that this topic would need to be raised to the level of an existential argument requiring believers to re-examine their views or be lost in irrelevance?
Just this morning the subject of Zionism came up with one of my friends loudly touting that Zionism was evil.
This is my answer;
“There is a serious problem with using that definition (of Zionism). There are many scriptures that build an intricate understanding of what pertains to Zion, what it is, and what promises relate to it. For this reason I prefer to see what you have called Zionism as an aberration: as something the enemy has corrupted from its Biblical base. To solve this problem I see two “Zionisms”, two “Zionists”. The first is about “Biblical Zion” which picks up the doctrine correctly; and the second is what I term “extreme Zionism” which for simplicity’s sake the twisted, sinful, un-Biblcal ideas. Using the two enables the theological discussion about the first to continue. Now the argument that “Zion” does not appear except once in the NT (Matt 21:5) and therefore makes it improper for Christians to discuss outside the current presumption of evil, is evil itself. There is much much more that could be said but I find that insisting on the two adjectives are indispensable for sanity in the current discussion climate.