The following article has been published in Newsweek by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

Keir Starmer, the post-Jeremy Corbyn leader of Britain’s Labour Party, acted swiftly to demote a member of Par­lia­ment who tweeted an article con­tain­ing a paragraph linking Israel to the killing of George Floyd. In truth, when Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey tweeted the interview with the actress Maxine Peake in which she made the appalling and unfounded claim, Long-Bailey may have had no sinister inten­tions. Indeed, she may have missed the offending paragraph alto­geth­er. So common has the obsession with Israel become in the left fringes of social-demo­crat­ic parties, so accus­tomed must Long-Bailey be to hearing Israel blamed for all of the world’s ills at branch meetings and in her social media feed, that a casual reference to the Jewish state mas­ter­mind­ing violence on the other side of the world would hardly raise an eyebrow. Instead, Long-Bailey tweeted out the article with no caveats or qual­i­fic­a­tions, inter­ven­ing only to opine that the actress who made the accus­a­tion was an “absolute diamond.”

The alleg­a­tion that Israel trains American officers to kneel on the necks of suspects is the sort of half-baked musing one might overhear on a uni­ver­sity library lawn. But while such theories often originate on campuses or in the disturbed minds of people like Roger Waters — the musician made the identical claim in a recent interview with a Hamas-affil­i­ated news agency — they rarely stay there. Such theories now have a voice in the U.S. Congress and in national legis­latures through­out the world.

This can partly be attrib­uted to the nature of modern com­mu­nic­a­tions, which means that fanatical political ideas and pre­ju­dices no longer reside in pamphlets that no one outside the movement reads, but are now man­u­fac­tured into com­pel­ling content, entirely stripped of context or truth, and instantly trans­mit­ted into the eyeballs of millions. It is also a symptom of the main­stream­ing of once-fringe elements who have shifted from micro-parties and, occa­sion­ally, the back-benches, into the corridors of power. More than that, it shows how society, stricken by pandemic, discord and fatigue, has embraced con­spir­at­ori­al thinking.

A common feature of all con­spir­acies is the belief that something is concealed, that the truth is known only to an enlightened few and that all our mis­for­tunes are the cause of someone else — some unseen hand that rests upon the levers of financial, gov­ern­ment­al or media power. His­tor­ic­ally, these delusions have found the Jew to be a suitable enemy. Until the mid-20^th century, the Jews were a stateless people, scattered through­out the world, lacking a cohes­ive­ness and a national center, and therefore both phys­ic­ally vul­ner­able and uniquely suited to being cast as a mys­ter­i­ous arch-villain in the fantasies of both the far-Left and the far-Right. Jewish survival in the face of unpar­alleled calam­it­ies and the ability of Jews to revive their ancient tongue as a language of everyday use, rebuild scorched com­munit­ies and con­trib­ute beyond their numbers to the societies in which they live only fed the belief that the Jews con­sti­tuted some phant­as­mic, super­nat­ur­al presence. They were feared and hated in equal measure.

The Jewish national movement, Zionism, was supposed to render all that irrel­ev­ant. By being rescued from exile and restored to a national home approx­im­at­ing the ter­rit­or­ies they con­trolled in ancient times, the Jews should have attained equality with other peoples who had homelands, flags, distinct languages, national tra­di­tions and so forth. But so deeply ingrained was the char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of the Jews, and so com­pel­ling is the desire to blame a despised other for our own failings, that the return of the Jews to their homeland nearly two millennia after their expulsion by the Romans, an event unpre­ced­en­ted in human history, was not uni­ver­sally greeted with wonder and admir­a­tion. Rather, it spawned new feelings of loathing and hardened the per­cep­tion that Jews were bound up in something sus­pi­ciously extraordin­ary — even super­nat­ur­al.

In fact, far from curing anti-Semitism and the con­spir­acy theories that so often give effect to it, Zionism and the state of Israel offered a new medium through which to express irra­tion­al feelings towards the Jews. As Nazi-era race theories about immutable Jewish inferi­or­ity were com­pletely dis­cred­ited and older religious-based contempt for the Jews dimin­ished, Zionism and Israel became the new outlets for those driven to apoplexy by Jewish assert­ive­ness, perceived success and a stubborn refusal to submit and disappear. Pseudo-political accus­a­tions of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment replaced classical accus­a­tions of ritual murder, bloodlust, a cunning malevol­ence and a people standing in the way of a better world.

It is this modern politi­ciz­a­tion of anti-Semitism that ensured that Rebecca Long-Bailey, who would have been instantly awake to a racist jibe directed at any other minority group, could mistake the anti-Semitism in the interview for benign criticism of a state she doesn’t much care for.

The belief that every injustice can be traced to Israeli evil was perhaps best demon­strated by another British Labour politi­cian (now mer­ci­fully retired), Clare Short, who claimed during a pro-Palestini­an con­fer­ence in Brussels in 2007 that not only was Israel “much worse than the original apartheid state,” but that it “under­mines the inter­na­tion­al com­munity’s reaction to global warming.” Given Short’s con­clu­sion that global warming could “end the human race,” one can readily connect the dots about how loathsome and threat­en­ing Israel must be, and what should be done with it. For good measure, Israel has also been accused of causing domestic violence in Gaza.

More recently, Black Lives Matter, a group ostens­ibly formed to combat racism, adopted in 2016 a manifesto that, amidst the discourse on incar­cer­a­tion rates, police conduct and racial profiling, also accuses Israel of being an “apartheid state” and com­mit­ting “genocide” of the Palestini­ans — whose pop­u­la­tion through­out the Holy Land has undergone a con­tinu­ous and spec­tac­u­lar increase since the advent of modern Zionism in the 19^th century. The British arm of the movement then paused its tweets on black lives in order to shoot off an anti-Israel medley, including offering its weighty legal opinion that Israel is in breach of inter­na­tion­al law and lamenting the “gagging” of attacks on Zionism.

The campaign to attach Zionism to every grievance and injustice has its origins in Stalin’s deteri­or­at­ing mind during the last years of his reign. It became the basis for official Soviet anti-Zionism and remains as a vestige in far-left political movements today. But in a sense, it runs even deeper than that. It is the hallmark of an irra­tion­al, fanatical mind, incapable of grasping the nuance and com­plex­ity of life. Just as tra­di­tion­al anti-Semitism brought ruin and misery, anti-Zionism will corrupt noble movements and worthy causes unless it is finally stamped out.

Alex Ryvchin is the author of Zionism — The Concise History and is the co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.