The Psychology of the Antisemite

After being involved in this fight for so long, I’ve learned a thing or two about the enemies of the tolerant society. It is no longer surprising to me to see antisemites lie even when the truth is presented directly in front of their faces. We’ve all heard the more egregious accusations of “genocide”, “apartheid”, and “ethnic cleansing” thrown ad nauseam against the Jewish state. No less evil are the assertions that Israelis kill Palestinians to harvest their organs or that Jews are “white colonialist”, “settler”, “occupiers” of the land they are indigenous to.

There are a couple reasons for the unabating torrent of lies that I can articulate, though my reasoning is only anecdotal. As I’ve said before, the field of psychology is pathetically lacking in solid research on Jew hatred today. Appeals to historical understandings are less useful when, as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, antisemitism is a mutating virus, and in our day and age it has adopted the forms of “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Israel” bigotry. Nevertheless, let us ask: why do antisemites lie, about everything?

The first phenomenon I’ve noticed is a severe confirmation bias, to the point of straight-up denying reality if it tends to exonerate Israel or Jews of wrongdoing. This likely stems from an innate bias, the bias of antisemitism, which is humanity’s oldest hatred. It is not surprising that millennia of hatred has not been undone with a scant few centuries of liberal democracy. Antisemitism is the ultimate ‘otherization’, and humans have a tendency to mistrust that which they do not understand.

This innate and ingrained historical-cultural bias against the Jewish people causes otherwise rational individuals to reject evidence that contradicts their assumptions. Israel has provided more aid, more food, water, electricity, and medicine to the Palestinians in Gaza during this war than any and all other countries that screech incessantly for a “ceasefire” (never mind the hostages Hamas STILL HOLDS). Egypt barely lets anything cross their highly secure border with Gaza (except through the terror tunnels of Hamas).

Likewise, the IDF has gone to greater lengths than any other nation or army in the history of warfare to protect the civilian life under the control of its enemy. Israel has invented technological miracles like the Iron Dome and Arrow so that it does not always have to strike back at the terrorists that commit double war crimes by targeting Israeli civilians from civilian locations. Israel invented an entirely new category of weaponry - the ‘knock bomb’ - purpose-built to warn civilians of incoming danger. Israel drops waves of warning pamphlets and organizes massive phone bank campaigns to try to get civilians out of harm’s way, even as Hamas tries their hardest to keep them there under threat of death. And the civilian death toll in this war reflects that - even granting the “accuracy” of Hamas death counts (which we know are blatantly false), Israel has still achieved a civilian-to-combatant death toll in urban warfare against terrorists purposefully embedded in civilian locations better than any other nation in modern history, or any history.

But none of this matters to the antisemitic brain. It can all be dismissed as “Zionist propaganda” or some other such barely-disguised euphemism for a Jewish conspiracy. The first and most prominent reason for the lies of the antisemites is that they simply cannot believe the truth. Their small minds won’t let them.

This brings us to the second motivating force for the falsities perpetrated by antisemites, and it is perhaps the more insidious of the two. Innate Jew hatred motivating cognitive biases is bad enough, but even worse is when it doesn’t even lead the antisemite to believe reality is false - yet, the antisemite will assert the opposite of the truth anyway, knowing full well that they’re lying through their teeth.

Why would someone do this? In essence, it stems from a misplaced sense of “justice”. See, if you are an educated individual with even the barest knowledge of history or law, you know that Israel isn’t committing “genocide” in Gaza. There is no mens rea by Israelis to commit one of the worst crimes against humanity in the books. All the evidence points to the contrary - some of which I have listed above.

But if incessantly asserting that Israelis are committing “genocide” and other atrocities in Gaza somehow advances your ‘cause’, then lying about them is “justified”. What is the cause, you ask? Nominally, it is “ceasefire now”. But we know that their ultimate aim is for “Palestine to be free from the river to the sea” - in other words, they seek to delegitimize the Jewish state until it collapses and becomes absorbed by, well, none of them seem to be very sure on what Israel will be replaced by, but the end goal is absolutely the destruction of the only Jewish nation on Earth.

They’ve been working for decades on this goal, both inside and outside Israel. Yasser Arafat launched the ‘Second Intifada’ under false pretenses, which resulted in thousands of both Israelis and Palestinians dead. And across global universities, there has been an incessant campaign of lies surrounding Israel’s defensive measures against terrorism, labeling border fences with the West Bank “apartheid” and giving Israel its own week of hatred. No one seriously believes Israel is an “apartheid state”. Israel is one-fifth Arab, and Arab Israelis have full rights and equal protection under the law the same as every other Israeli.

But again, truth does not matter to the antisemite. They know Israel isn’t any of the evil things they claim it to be; at least the smarter and more educated among them do. But it advances the goal of destroying the Jewish state to lie to people about it, people that won’t question and fact-check the falsehoods. And the mutating virus of antisemitism carries on through the decades.

We can only hope that through our efforts to assert the value of the Truth the lies will be driven back and driven out of places where they can influence the world in any serious capacity. Jew haters are on the wrong side of the history books. Always.

Am Yisrael Chai 🇮🇱