‘Genocide’ and ‘Starvation’: How Stereotypes Fuel the War on Israel

It’s really quite simple. No matter what you say about someone you dislike, especially when you don’t know them well (which, in itself, raises the question of why you dislike them in the first place), if your opinion is already negative, eventually, you’ll believe anything about them.

That’s how it works when we hear slander about others, or when we fear or envy someone, or when we hold stereotypes about them. And this holds especially true when applied to collectives.

The historian Shmuel Ettinger argued that the root of antisemitism lies in stereotypes. He likely arrived at this conclusion through the recognition that antisemitism is always accompanied by some persistent motif about “the Jew.” It was, you might say, a somewhat technical recognition of the structure of the phenomenon, not an attempt to trace it to its metaphysical or emotional core.

Today, when we hear insane accusations of genocide (which isn’t happening), of deliberate starvation (which occurs on a micro-scale and is, in fact, perpetrated by Hamas), or of colonialism (which doesn’t apply when it’s clear the Jews are indigenous to the land), we begin to understand Ettinger’s point. Show me the Jew, I will show you the crime.

Sociologist and historian Jacob Katz, by contrast, claimed that the crucifixion of Jesus is the source of antisemitism. From a Western perspective, this is certainly a valid explanation, even though antisemitic attitudes and actions predate Christianity.

The truth is, both were right: Christianity laid the foundation by casting Jews as the target of inherited guilt and myth, and the Ettingerian engine of stereotype finished the job.

Because there’s no rational basis for the accusations historically leveled against Jews, or those made today, they can only be understood as projections shaped by deeply entrenched stereotypes, often rooted in religious dogma or cultural mythology. These are not observations of reality, but fabricated lenses through which Jewish people are perceived. At times, this distortion arises from personal emotion, envy, fear, resentment, seeking moral justification; at other times, it’s nothing more than pure xenophobia masquerading as critique.

Yet interestingly, the process of manufacturing false realities about Jews isn’t just an accidental byproduct of trying to assign them blame, it’s also a natural consequence of viewing the Jew as being himself a fabricator of reality in the first place.

The logic goes like this: If the Jew is a manipulator, deceiver, creator of alternate narratives which he uses to manipulate reality, then whatever is said about him must be just as realy as the real-life manipulations he’s doing to reality.

Thus, paradoxically, the Jew is only “understood” through a conspiratorial lens, because, conspiracy is the only realm in which he truly really exists !.

In other words: if Jews distort truth by ruling the world, then the lies told about them are simply a justified reflection of their own twisted essence and mechanism.

Those who promote the Palestinian narrative know this well. Especially the KGB, which helped create the PLO’s image and messaging.

All that’s needed is to accuse the Jew of something primal, and the imagination takes it from there.

The more exaggerated the accusation, the more powerful the political result - and the suffering of arab children, just adds conrecte evidence to what we ayway need not much proof of to know who we are dealing with.

Thus, when it comes to Jews, who already exist as an archetype in the collective imagination, the gap between the abstract “ideal Jew” and the images projected from Palestine leaves little room, or interest, for nuance or context.

Through the act of antisemitism, the accuser becomes what he projects onto the Jew: a conspirator crafting fictions and manipulating truth.

If the Jew distorts the world, then you must distort yourself into the conspiratorial form of the Jew himself in order to understand the world.

You could say that what Russia began, and what many European states later adopted, was the concretization of the streotype of antisemitic fabrication via media for political goals. And today, without a doubt, this process has been translated into real-world political, diplomatic, and even military pressure on Israel, and, of course, on Jews worldwide.