Criticize Israel without blaming the Jews or any ethnic group

People rightfully criticize Israel for its massive human rights violations. But a contingent have taken it way too far and target all Jewish people. 

If I see you posting anti-Jew content, I am finished with you.

I posted that line to Substack recently. There are way too many people on the platform not only hating on the Jewish people, but wishing to see unspeakable things done to them.

That doesn’t mean Israel is above criticism, or that Benjamin Netanyahu deserves protection from scrutiny. Ditto for the Mossad, the IDF, lobbyists, donors, media propagandists, or political elites. They’re all guilty.

When states commit atrocities, they deserve condemnation. When leaders justify civilian suffering in the name of security, they deserve to be exposed. And when institutions lie, manipulate, censor, propagandize, or excuse mass death, they deserve to be castigated without apology.

But blaming Jews as a people is moral cowardice. It’s ignorant collectivism dressed up as political analysis.

Israel is a state, not a people

There is a massive difference between criticizing Israel and blaming Jews. Israel is a state, Netanyahu is a political leader, Mossad is an intelligence agency, and the IDF is a military institution.

Lobbyists are political actors, donors are individuals, and media figures are individuals. Meanwhile, think tanks, advocacy groups, and foreign-policy networks are institutions made up of specific people making specific decisions.

None of that collectively equals “the Jews.”

That distinction isn’t difficult, but too many people are either too angry, too lazy, or too addicted to online outrage to make it. They see the horror unfolding in the Middle East, and instead of directing their fire at the people and institutions actually responsible, they reach for the oldest shortcut in human history: blame the group.

That’s exactly how collectivist thinking works. It takes individual guilt and turns it into inherited guilt, reduces political analysis to bloodline accusation, and it takes specific crimes committed by specific actors and smears millions of people who had nothing to do with them.

The international legal case against Israel also makes this distinction clear. South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice is a case against Israel as a state, not against Jews as a people.

The ICJ issued provisional measures in January 2024 in the case Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), and the court’s own materials identify the respondent as the State of Israel, not an ethnic or religious group.

That distinction matters. They should accuse a state, condemn a government, and investigate a military. We need to hold political leaders responsible. But an entire people cannot inherit guilt for what a state does.

The humanitarian disaster doesn’t justify collective blame

You can look at Gaza and feel rage. Same for looking at the dead, the displaced, wounded, starving, and buried, and conclude that Israel’s government has committed monstrous acts. A person can condemn U.S. support for Israel, media double standards, political cowardice, and the foreign-policy establishment’s habit of treating some civilian lives as disposable.

None of that requires hatred of Jews.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains severe. OCHA’s May 1, 2026, humanitarian report says most people across Gaza remain displaced, stuck in poor shelter conditions, exposed to rising public-health risks, and affected by ongoing strikes, shelling, and gunfire. The same report says humanitarian work remains constrained by import restrictions, impeded movement, strikes, and disruptions to service delivery.

That deserves serious moral outrage, sustained attention, and condemnation of the people and institutions responsible.

But serious outrage still requires moral discipline. If your response to civilian suffering is to blame Jews as a people, you’ve abandoned the innocent civilians in Gaza and turned the conversation into your own ethnic obsession. You’re no longer focused on accountability — you’re focused on scapegoating.

Collective blame’s a coward’s shortcut

The real problem with anti-Jew content reveals a lazy mind. It shows someone who doesn’t want to understand power. He wants a villain simple enough to fit inside a meme.

Actual power is more complicated. States pursue power, political leaders pursue survival, military institutions justify violence, intelligence agencies operate in shadows, lobbying groups protect interests, media outlets manufacture narratives, donors buy influence, ideologues provide moral cover, foreign governments form alliances, defense contractors profit from conflict, religious nationalists sanctify bloodshed, and bureaucrats bury accountability under procedure. That’s the real machine.

But the anti-Jew obsessive is too lazy to study the machine. He doesn’t want to untangle the institutions, incentives, money flows, historical grievances, religious narratives, intelligence failures, election pressures, and geopolitical calculations. He wants to point at an entire people and call that insight. Anyone with a rational mind knows otherwise.

It’s the same primitive thinking that blames all Muslims for terrorism, all Christians for the Crusades or modern theocracy, all white people for colonialism, all black people for crime, all Palestinians for Hamas, all Chinese for the CCP, or all Russians for Putin.

Once you accept that logic, you’ve abandoned individual moral responsibility. You’ve accepted the premise that people can inherit guilt through ancestry, religion, ethnicity, or cultural association. That premise is evil. It doesn’t become less evil because the target changes.

Some Jews support Israel’s actions. Many do not.

Some Jews support what Israel’s doing. They defend Netanyahu, excuse every bomb, every dead child, every destroyed neighborhood, and every act of escalation under the language of security. Those people deserve criticism, hard questions, and public opposition. No one gets moral immunity because he belongs to a historically persecuted group.

But many Jews don’t support it. Many oppose Netanyahu, the war, Israeli occupation, and Zionism itself. Many have marched, written, organized, protested, lost friends, alienated family, and risked reputations because they refuse to let Israel’s government speak for them.

Jewish Voice for Peace describes itself as “the world’s largest Jewish organization supporting Palestine” and says it organizes a grassroots movement of U.S. Jews. IfNotNow describes itself as “a movement of U.S. Jews organizing to end U.S. support for Israel’s system and to demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for Palestinians and Israelis.”

You don’t need to agree with every position these organizations take to recognize the obvious point: Jewish dissent, opposition, and antiwar voices against Israel exist.

So when someone says “the Jews are responsible,” he erases every Jewish dissenter, antiwar voice, and critic of Israeli policy who have taken a moral stand. Same for the people who are horrified by what Israel has done in their name. He turns living, breathing individuals into a faceless collective. That’s called collectivist filth.

Anti-Jew rhetoric helps Israel’s defenders

Anti-Jew content helps the very people it claims to oppose. This is one of the worst strategic errors in modern political discourse. When people post anti-Jew content, they make it easier for Israel’s defenders to smear every critic of Israel as an antisemite. They hand bad-faith propagandists the exact weapon they want.

Instead of keeping the focus on state violence, civilian deaths, destroyed homes, starving families, foreign aid, military policy, and political accountability, they shift the conversation to whether criticism of Israel is secretly hatred of Jews. That’s a gift to the war machine.

The people defending Israel’s worst actions want nothing more than to collapse all criticism into antisemitism. They want critics to sound hateful, sloppy, and deranged. They want the public to believe that anyone criticizing Israel must be motivated by ancient ethnic hatred rather than moral outrage over state violence.

When anti-Jew posters who wish the worst on people they’ve never met enter the conversation, they prove the propagandists’ point for them. They make serious critics look guilty by association, they poison the well, give politicians, pundits, and institutional gatekeepers an excuse to ignore the actual argument, and let defenders of atrocity change the subject from dead civilians to bigotry.

Losing engagement doesn’t mean someone’s suppressing you

There’s another point people need to hear: losing engagement after posting anti-Jew content doesn’t automatically mean Substack, X, or any other platform is secretly suppressing you.

Maybe normal people are simply tired of your garbage. Maybe they’re smart enough to understand the difference between condemning a government and blaming a people. Or maybe they see that your “analysis” ends in the same place every cowardly collectivist argument ends: group guilt. Perhaps they don’t want to engage with someone who traded moral clarity for ethnic resentment. I sure as hell don’t. People are walking away from you because you made yourself morally repulsive.

There’s a serious case to make against Israel’s government, U.S. support for Israel, foreign-policy establishments that treat some civilian lives as sacred, and others as acceptable collateral damage.

That serious case extends to media outlets that sanitize state violence when the right ally commits it and to political leaders who pretend that unconditional support for a foreign government is a measure of patriotism. Make that case.

Name the officials, institutions, policies, lobbyists, donors, military decisions, propaganda, the double standards, and even the people who openly cheer suffering and demand more of it. Or do what the “cool kids do,” and base an antagonistic character on them in a novel. A character based on someone I know personally and justifies every atrocity Israel commits.

Hold individuals accountable

If a Jewish person defends genocide, criticize that person. If a Christian defends atrocities, criticize that person — I do this often. And if a Muslim defends atrocities, criticize that person. That criticism extends to even those of non-Abrahamic faiths (or a lack thereof).

Hold individuals accountable for what they do, say, fund, excuse, and support, but don’t assign guilt by ancestry. Especially if you’re white, and you’re against the collective guilt BS you see here in the West with the DEI and wokeism Mafia.

The State already does enough of that. It loves collective identity when it serves power, speaking in the name of “the people,” wrapping violence in flags, victimhood, security language, historical trauma, religious destiny, and national honor. And it loves telling ordinary people that they must accept moral responsibility for what rulers do in their name.

The answer to that can’t be another form of collective blame because it fuels the same beast that a lot of people reading this blog and my books claim to hate.

If you oppose tyranny, State violence, and propaganda, then stop justifying collective guilt. Hell, if you hate collectivism when it comes from governments, universities, activists, media outlets, or bureaucrats, then you can’t embrace collectivism the moment your preferred target appears.

Group guilt is still group guilt

It’s easy to oppose group blame when your group gets blamed. But it’s harder to oppose it when your side’s angry, grieving, furious, and looking for someone to punish. But that’s exactly when the principle matters most.

The individual’s responsible for his choices. Not for his blood, his surname, his ancestry, what a government he hates claims to do on his behalf, what a military does under a flag he may not even support, what strangers sharing his religion say on television, or what donors, lobbyists, or politicians from his background decide to fund.

Once we lose that standard, we lose the only moral foundation that stands against tyranny. Posting anti-Jew content’s absent-minded cowardice. It’s proof the perp’s fallen into one of the oldest propaganda traps in history.

He traded individual judgment for tribal accusation, moral clarity for scapegoating, and serious criticism of power for cheap hatred aimed at people who may have no connection to the conflict at all.

Criticize Israel and ALL warmongering powers

Hate the crime of war, and how it’s the health of the State. But remember that all types of war, whether on a battlefield or fifth-generation, is collectively the health of the State. In my Beyond the Lost trilogy, Quinn Cozens understood that. It’s one of many reasons he took a libertarian approach. Even when he held unpopular opinions.

That said, Quinn’s no saint. He regularly mocks Christianity, puts left- and right-wingers into collective bubbles, and shouts those opposing him down. But that’s what makes him so interesting in Beyond the Lost. 

If you’re into post-apocalyptic dystopian survival with strong political, libertarian, and revisionist themes, you’ll love this trilogy. You’ll love it even more if you can’t stand tropey, generic fiction that “authors” mass produce on Amazon these days.

Meet Quinn in Beyond the Lost Horizon and see if you can put up with him

Oh, and about the banner image at the beginning of this post? Catch more insights on it here. It teases a future work that’s going to be one of my hardest hitting.