It seems that Gaza will soon be free. Not “free” in the sense desired by pro-Palestinian fanatics—“cleansed of Jewish filth”—but free in the truer sense: a place where ordinary people will no longer live in fear, neither of the Israeli army nor of jihadist militias. Something that, according to countless analysts, was supposed to be impossible. How could so many of them have been so utterly wrong? The same way they have been wrong again and again over the past three years—right about Ukraine, perhaps, but consistently mistaken about the wars between Israel and its Muslim neighbors.
For us, this moment offers an opportunity to reflect on what might be called cognitive antisemitism. By this I do not mean the medieval myths of global Jewish conspiracies, or grotesque stories of Jews murdering Christian virgins and baking matzos from their blood. I mean a certain mental configuration—a way of perceiving the world in which any negative statement about Jews is automatically received as true. The mind exaggerates every fault, inflates every accusation, and reacts with disproportionate emotion. Every conflict becomes a genocide; every negotiation a betrayal; every alliance an act of domination. Positive aspects are filtered out entirely, leaving behind an image of essential evil, as though Jews were not human beings at all.
Education, unfortunately, offers little immunity. The learned and the unlearned may hold different kinds of prejudices, but the cognitive pattern is strikingly similar. Analyses produced by such a mind are useless, no matter how sophisticated the vocabulary.
A simple test reveals the distortion. Take any headline or incident and replace the word Israel with Russia, Syria, Algeria, or India. Would we judge it in the same way? Would we still speak of genocide, of a criminal regime, of a nation beyond redemption?
Some readers may ask whether there also exists a form of cognitive anti-Russian bias. Of course there does. Yet it is easier to recognize, precisely because it comes packaged with the familiar narratives of secret plots and world domination. Antisemitism, by contrast, often hides behind the façade of “critical analysis.” It flatters the intellect even as it blinds the mind.