Israel and the Jewish people are facing a dramatic collapse in their standing across much of the world. Israel is increasingly portrayed not merely as a country whose policies should be criticised, but as the embodiment of absolute evil: accused of genocide, colonialism and apartheid, while the legitimacy of Jewish collective existence itself is challenged. Is this simply the latest eruption of an ancient antisemitism? Or has something deeper changed in Western society that has made hostility towards Israel increasingly respectable?
Dan Schueftan speaks to Jonathan Sacerdoti, arguing that the central conflict is between the worldview increasingly dominant in Western institutions and the reality in which Israel has to survive. While much of the West has grown suspicious of nationalism, military force and even the idea that nations must defend themselves, Israelis have drawn almost the opposite conclusions from Yom Kippur, the Second Intifada and October 7. Israel cannot afford, he argues, to adopt fashionable Western assumptions about war, national identity and security when its enemies still pose an existential threat. The result is a country increasingly at odds with the political and cultural zeitgeist of the societies whose approval it once sought.
Dan Shchueftan joins Jonathan Sacerdoti for a wide-ranging discussion about why Israel has become such a fixation of Western politics, whether Jewish life in Europe and America has a future, and why the moderate right may now offer Jews an alliance once associated with the liberal left.
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👁🗨 Watch if you want to understand why hostility towards Israel has exploded across the West – and why antisemitism alone cannot explain it.
💬 We Discuss:
🇮🇱 Why Israel has become increasingly isolated from the Western political and cultural mainstream
🌍 The clash between Israel's survival instincts and the modern Western zeitgeist
🕊️ Why Western attitudes towards war and military force changed so dramatically
⚔️ What October 7 taught Israelis about deterrence, prevention and the use of force
🎓 How progressivism transformed universities, human rights activism and attitudes towards Israel
🇵🇸 Why Israelis largely reject Western guilt over the Palestinians
✡️ Is today's explosion of anti-Israel sentiment fundamentally about antisemitism?
🩸 How the ancient blood libel has been repackaged for the modern age
📰 Why Schueftan believes Western media helps legitimise some of the oldest accusations against Jews
🔄 How antisemitism can simultaneously serve radically different political movements
🤝 Why parts of the Western left and the developing world have found common cause against Israel
🌐 What international institutions reveal about the changing global order
🇪🇺 Why Schueftan believes Jewish life in Europe faces a profound crisis
🇺🇸 Could American Jewish life be heading in the same direction?
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👇 Comment below — is today's hostility towards Israel primarily a new form of antisemitism, or the result of a much deeper ideological shift in the West?
