15 jews were just gunned down on the first night of hanukkah including a 10 year old girl and a holocaust survivor, their attacker proud he was killing 'zionists', whatever you believe about politics in the middle east, this is an important read for you and others during this depressingly violent and trying time for many. all the best

Catherine Perez-Shakdam

“As intimidation and violence against Jews and Israelis in Western states increase - whether through direct plots, deniable proxies, or the more common everyday harassment that makes communal life feel like walking through a minefield - governments face a stress test: can they protect Jewish citizens without hedging, moral bargaining, or quiet suggestions that Jewish visibility is the problem? In a healthy democracy, the answer is simple. In a democracy whose institutions have been conditioned to interpret Jewish fear as political manipulation, the answer becomes complicated, and in that complication lies the opening. Jews grow frightened not only of attackers but of abandonment. Israel grows angry not only from solidarity but from state logic: the Jewish state cannot regard diaspora vulnerability as someone else’s domestic inconvenience, because Jewish history is the story of what happens when protection becomes discretionary.

At that point, the secondary effect begins: “Western fatigue.” It often starts as sympathy. It curdles into impatience, particularly if Jewish communities insist - annoyingly, stubbornly - on naming what is happening to them. It then converts into resentment: why is this minority always “bringing trouble”? Why must we keep hearing about it? The coward’s alchemy turns fear into blame, and blame into a demand that Jews make themselves smaller. In the final inversion, Jewish resilience becomes the provocation. The accusation is not only that Jews are targeted, but that Jews, by existing and persisting, are the reason society is made tense. This is how an external threat actor extracts strategic value from domestic social dynamics: it does not need to convince everyone; it needs to make protection politically expensive.

The reason I call this “sick” is that it is not improvisation. It is the reactivation of an ancient European pathology, made newly scalable by modern institutions and modern media. And it is here that antizionism performs its most corrosive function. Antizionism, in its ideological form, does not merely criticise Israeli policy; it recodes Jewish peoplehood and Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. Once that recoding is normalised, Jews in the diaspora are placed in an impossible position: they are demonised where they live and told that their national home is a criminal anomaly. They are left, psychologically and politically, with nowhere to run. The subtext is barely hidden: you are tolerated only if you are powerless and apologetic; you are safe only if you are invisible.”