SIR SIMON SCHAMA: Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth

Antisemitism is now the fastest metastasising race hatred in the Western world. Eighty years after the end of the war that exterminated two-­thirds of their European population, Jews are experiencing a drastic contraction of citizenship. They no longer enjoy the assumed right, for instance, to wear in public what clothing when and where they wish; to gather for prayer or weddings or bar mitzvahs without the necessity of armed guards in front of their place of worship. 

Should Jews have the temerity to show up near a pro-­Palestinian demonstration carrying a sign indicating their allegiance, they are the ones threatened with arrest unless they remain silent or, preferably, remove themselves altogether from the scene. In April 2024, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism was told that looking “quite openly Jewish” near to a demonstration (he was wearing a kippah) constituted “a breach of the peace”.

Never mind that this dramatic loss of security in the Diaspora makes the case for Zionism more effectively than anything Herzl or Ben-­Gurion wrote (though in many ways it rehearses their prophecies and warnings); the pile-­on continues unabated. College faculties are commanded by student demonstrators to cleanse themselves of suspect – or, worse, professed – Zionists.

An undergraduate leader of marches and rallies at my own Columbia University in New York excitedly proclaimed on video that he would like to go out and murder as many Zionists as he could. A British government review in June 2026 revealed National Health Service workers saying they would refuse to treat Israeli patients, even if they were on the verge of death. Medical staff at a hospital in Bankstown, Australia, were filmed performing a throat-­slitting gesture, indicating how much they looked forward to prime opportunities to hasten the death of any Israeli patients.

Everywhere, Jews have been instructed that they cannot expect to remain in cultural or social institutions in which they have participated, should they not publicly and vehemently repudiate their ancestral homeland. Installed on this cultural and social selection ramp are the arbitrators of which Jews may pass this acceptability test and which not.

In Italy, Keshet Italia and Keshet Europe, Jewish LGBTQ organisations, were forbidden from joining a Pride march in Rome for insufficiently denouncing Israeli genocide. The Israeli presence at the Eurovision Song Contest was enough for Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Ireland to pull out of the event, claiming in high dudgeon that it would be morally tainted. Purges and exclusions, active or passive, are now the norm.

On a New York subway car in 2024, a shouty pro-­Palestine militant demanded to know whether there were any Zionists aboard, as they would have to exit before the train could proceed. In November the following year, supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were banned by Birmingham City Council from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on the grounds that they had demonstrated a thirst for exceptional violence at an earlier match in Amsterdam.

The council acted on information supplied by the West Midlands Police; the fact that the information turned out to be false did not prevent the chief constable from repeating it to Parliament. In January 2026 it was revealed that the WMP had had intelligence about local groups planning to arm themselves and target Maccabi fans but failed to disclose this to the MPs.

Lies are the nourishment of Jew-­hatred and have been for millennia.

On 3 June 2026, an unhinged woman on the C train subway in New York shouted that “Jews are eating kids”, adding that she could smell the children on a nearby Orthodox woman whom she went on to assault.

Appearing at an anti-­Israel rally in the heart of a conspicuously Jewish district of  Toronto, Abbas Hamze – who has been an instructor at Canadian colleges, including the University of Niagara Falls – spoke of Jews “practising black magic” and raping and eating children. The fleeting period when social media platforms made an ostensible effort to block evidently harmful lies from multiplying has given way to the higher imperative of clicks, triggered not by conscientious resistance to conspiracy and malevolent fantasy but by encouraging its profitable sensationalism.

The road to revenue is lined with lies and Jews are its run-­over casualties.

In the digital universe, the revelation of outlandish falsehoods is no guarantee of their impotence, much less their disappearance. Long gone are the times when John Milton, arguing in Areopagitica for an unlicensed press, could write, “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

Unhappily, a habitual liar sits in the White House, his falsehoods not incidental but constitutive to his power, for he discovered early on the liberty they gave him to excite and entertain. Truth is a brake; lies are rocket fuel. Accordingly, whoppers must be freely and regularly scattered like Domitian throwing buns to the Colosseum mob. There is no longer any solid ground on which fact may stand; only the world wide web of opinion.

The most consequential of falsehoods – because it has become the great stoker of Jew-­hatred; the engine of our dehumanisation – is that the Israel Defense Forces set out to commit genocide.

It follows, then, that the massacres and hostage-­taking of 7 October were merely a pretext for carrying out this calculated extermination and, therefore, it is not at all improbable, according to some sources, that the attack on the Nova festival-­goers was actually an Israeli project. What could possibly explain the deafness of Mossad to intelligence of an impending Hamas action, the removal of troops from the south to the West Bank, or the long delay before the IDF went into action, other than that Israel planned the massacre of its own people?

Whatever else is shouted on anti-­Israeli marches and demonstrations, whatever else is scrawled on walls, the accusation of genocide is invariably present – graphically and vocally. “Hey, Professor, you can’t hide, we accuse you of genocide.” Does a supermarket sell Israeli avocados? That makes it complicit in genocide; off the shelf with it! Was the baked goods chain Gail’s founded many years ago by an Israeli? Then heedless eaters of its carrot cake are party to the genocide.

Do the vast majority of Diaspora Jews wish Israel to endure? That is enough, these days, to be told that you endorse genocide. For those accosting Israelis at airports, cancelling hotel reservations or howling at Israeli singers, being an Israeli is, by definition, to commit genocide. That the word was coined by a Jew, Raphael Lemkin, only makes the rightness of this claim more powerful. Did Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, not call Palestinians “human animals” and wish out loud for their extermination?

No, he did not. On 9 October 2023, as details of unspeakable atrocities were becoming known, Gallant used the phrase when speaking of the Hamas terrorists who had planned and executed the horrific massacre, whose power – and, if necessary, whose lives – he wished to see ended. Therein lies the difference between war and genocide.

But did not the International Court of Justice rule that Israel had indeed committed genocide? No, it did not. It ruled that the Palestinians have “a plausible right to be protected from genocide” (as indeed they do) and that Israel should take all possible steps to prevent one. From even that limited ruling, Julia Sebutinde of Uganda dissented, stating that the Republic of South Africa, which had brought the case claiming Israel was breaching the convention of genocide, had not produced evidence that Israel’s actions were “committed with . . . genocidal intent”.

Jew-­hatred (and Islamophobia) feeds on lies. The antidote is the truth. So, what are the truths of Gaza?

Did Hamas commit crimes against humanity on October 7, including torture, rape, sexual mutilation, and the murder of children after forcing them to witness the killing of their parents? Incontrovertibly. Is it possible – in fact, morally necessary – to grieve and rage about both Palestinian and Israeli deaths and suffering? Surely it is. Did Hamas knowingly invite the suffering of Palestinians by siting missile launchers and munitions in schools, mosques, hospitals, apartment blocks and houses while their fighters were protected in tunnels, so that Israel would be seen as the murderer of civilians? Yes.

When was the last time that a military warned a civilian population of where and when it would strike? Never. Have comparable – or worse – catastrophic tragedies happened amid the carnage of urban war? See Dresden, Hiroshima, the US bombing campaign on Iraq. Are Russians inflicting targeted massacres on Ukrainian civilians from the skies almost every day, and have they abducted 35,000 Ukrainian children, whose parents will never see them again? Yes. Does this trigger marches of protest? No. (And do not let me hear the fatuous retort of “whataboutery”.)

Are there Jewish supremacist-­fascists in the Israeli government who are enthusiasts for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (including encouragement of “emigration” and persuasion by killing)? Yes. Are they enabling repeated, vicious, often murderous settler pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank? Yes. Is the claim that a “secular democratic state” of Palestine would welcome Jews as co-­citizens disingenuous (or absurd), given that Hamas is neither secular not democratic, but rather a theocratic tyranny? Yes. Do they inculcate the killing of Jews in their schools? Yes. Does “from the river to the sea” (whatever the transparently insincere pieties uttered for the sake of credulous Western supporters) mean the death of half of the world’s Jews? Of course!

To be sure, the world brims with bloody cruelty and the slaughter of civilians. Yet, somehow, there are no marches grieving and raging against the massacre of Ukrainians; of the African Sudanese by the Arab RSF; the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters by their theocratic despots. There is no boycotting of Chinese restaurants to show solidarity with Uyghurs facing cultural annihilation.

It requires less homework to pin genocide on a people not white enough for the right and not brown enough for the left.

So, for all the chants, this paroxysm of rage is, at its psycho­logical core, not about Palestine, Israel or even the Jews. The hatred is about the haters: a failure of self-­recognition; a displacement of the obligation to make amends. The Nazification of Israel and the morally squalid, historically preposterous equating of Gaza with Auschwitz act as a reprieve from failing to do much about saving the Jewish victims even after the facts of their annihilation were known.

Likewise, framing the Jews as history’s paradigmatic imperialist oppressors spares the descendants of actual colonisers from too much critical self-­examination.

Put the Jews in the dock rather than your great-­grandparents, for we are the folk to whom culpability can be easily transferred, and the means by which to indict us, collectively, is readily available, as it has been for centuries. We are equal-opportunity culprits.

Hence the infuriated obsession, especially by self-­designated white progressives yearning to be forgiven for a colonial past, with demonising a people who had nothing to do with their ancestors’ bloody freebooting. Hence, also, the rage of the descendants of immigrants from those empires for whom any gestures of penance are unassuageable, though white comrades in keffiyehs urging intifada on the Jews seem to help.

To be able to send our children and grandchildren to a Jewish school in their uniforms, maybe with a kippah on their heads, without their being screamed at and being made to feel frightened and ashamed; to be able to ride public transport without being spat at or assaulted; to go to synagogue without having to pass through protecting men with guns; for our Israeli friends and family to be able to speak Hebrew between themselves and still get a hotel reservation, or an entry to a song competition or seats at a football match.

And maybe, if it’s not too much trouble, we might ask that the chanters take the trouble to read a little history – if they can find it, since only anti-­Zionist histories get prominent display in the Middle East sections of bookstores.

Some book (and there are plenty) that does not presume that Zionism has been racist and imperialist from the outset; that bloodshed has been one way; that Gaza deaths must be spoken of and those of 7 October not at all. For our tragedies and toils are, and this bears repeating over and over, shared, and unless we are prepared to listen to that shared history, we are doomed to an endless tournament of lethal aversion.

And should we, Jews and non-­Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, fail to listen to each other with respectful attention, informed by the truth, the unhappy victims of such deafness will, in the end, be all of us.

• Sir Simon Schama is professor of history and art history at Columbia University. He was the presenter of the BBC’s Story of the Jews. This is an extract from his Jewish Quarterly essay Jew-Hatred: The Latest Edition, published this week. Click here to subscribe