Two years after Hamas – a U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization – carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the world’s only Jewish state is the only nation on Earth that faces a global alliance dedicated to its destruction. Alone among the United Nations’ 193 member states, only Israel is targeted by such an array of foes.
Put differently, there is an organized, well-funded, transnational movement to replace a UN member state, Israel, with a nonexistent “non-member UN observer state” called Palestine. Israel’s enemies are many and varied, and increasingly bold and sophisticated.
Liberal media outlets in the U.S. and Europe persist in referring to them as “critics,” as if they are merely voicing policy grievances with Israel, rather than advocating its eradication. This linguistic camouflage obscures the central reality: these actors oppose Israel’s existence, regardless of its borders.
The central engine behind this effort is Iran, the only UN member whose leaders declare openly that another member state must be wiped out. The Islamist regime backs its rhetoric with a network of terrorist proxies – Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis – organizations dedicated to replacing Israel with an Islamist Palestinian state.
But the campaign transcends Iran and its proxies. NATO-member Turkey, under its President Recep Erdogan, has crossed red lines no Western-aligned leader ever imagined violating. The neo-Ottoman Islamist despot has publicly prayed for Israel’s destruction, branded it a “terrorist state,” issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 36 other senior Israeli officials, and maneuvered for a major role in Gaza’s reconstruction, including a significant – inherently menacing – Turkish military presence.
When the head of a country with formidable military might – the second largest armed forces within NATO – calls for the elimination of a sovereign state, the term “critic” isn’t just inaccurate. It’s preposterous.
Across multiple continents, antidemocratic governments have integrated anti-Israel ideology into their political identities. Venezuela under its radical left dictator, Nicolás Maduro, broadcasts anti-Israel venom as part of its political alignment with Iran. South Africa’s governing ANC has embraced the anti-Israel cause with missionary zeal, framing its very existence as a crime and filing spurious “genocide” charges at the International Criminal (Kangaroo) Court at The Hague. Spain’s ruling leftwing coalition and Ireland’s new leftwing president have promoted anti-Israel views once confined to extremist circles.
For the first time, anti-Israel advocacy has penetrated the administrations of major American cities. New York City and Seattle are poised to be governed by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a far-left organization that rejects Israel’s right to exist. The DSA labels Israel a “settler-colonial” entity that must be dismantled, supports groups that celebrate the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, and endorses the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which demands the elimination of the Jewish state.
In the U.S. Congress, a militant leftwing faction of the Democratic Party has adopted similar positions. Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and others defend chants and slogans like “globalize the intifada” that explicitly demand Israel’s destruction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez avoids the bluntest language but provides political cover to those who use it. Their positions amount to a denial of Israel’s right to exist.
Across American universities, labor unions, professional associations, and activist networks, a new ideological dogma holds that Zionism is racism and Jewish self-determination is oppression. This intellectual architecture, shaped by decades of academic indoctrination – including by tenured academicians such as Zohran Mamdani’s father, a professor of political theory and African studies at Columbia University – redefines Israel as an illegitimate “imperialist outpost.”
Parallel to this intellectual offensive is a cultural one. The BDS movement, once fringe, now wields influence across music, publishing, film festivals, museums, and the arts. Prominent entertainers, authors and so-called public intellectuals – among them Ta-Nehisi Coates, who filters Israel through the lens of American racial politics – have embraced narratives that treat Israel as a moral stain. These voices promote an intellectual framework in which Israel’s defeat is treated as an inevitable and even desirable outcome.
Meanwhile, the antisemitic isolationist right promotes its poisonous propaganda. Figures such as Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens portray Israel as a manipulative foreign power and a burden on American taxpayers. Their rhetoric revives old conspiracy theories about Jewish disloyalty and global influence, while far-right apologists for Hitler are mainstreamed on social media alongside pseudo-academic crackpots who argue that Winston Churchill – not the Nazi monster – was the real villain of World War II.
Layered atop all of this is the entrenched hostility of numerous UN agencies, including UNRWA, UNESCO, the Human Rights Council, and various special rapporteurs who generate a constant stream of condemnations aimed at isolating Israel.
UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for educating children of Palestinian refugees, distributes classroom materials that praise “jihad to liberate the homeland,” promise never to “give up a centimeter” of land claimed as Palestinian, and present stories in which Israeli characters are depicted as brutal murderers and sadistic predators. Textbooks used in UNRWA schools systematically delete Israel from maps, deny its legitimacy, and glorify the idea of violent struggle and martyrdom. UNESCO has passed resolutions and published documents attempting to minimize, deny, or erase Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem. The UN Human Rights Council maintains permanent Israel-focused investigative bodies reserved for no other nation. These are bureaucracies of delegitimization masquerading as humanitarian institutions.
Major foundations back the anti-Israel assault. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have poured millions into NGOs that work to erode Israel’s legitimacy diplomatically, economically, and culturally. These groups promote BDS and collaborate with organizations that campaign for Israel’s destruction.
A final point deserves to be stated with absolute clarity. Eighty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Jews face a movement committed to the elimination of their national existence. The Nazis outlawed Jews; no conversion, compromise, or concession could save a Jew from annihilation. Today’s global anti-Israel coalition pursues a version of the same end – not the immediate destruction of individual Jews but the destruction of the Jewish State.
And since it is inconceivable that Israelis will ever acquiesce in their own erasure – will ever agree to commit national suicide – those who claim to support only “political pressure” to end Israel are endorsing a project that can succeed only through mass murder and expulsion. They may deny it, but this is the inescapable logic of their position.
There is one more truth that must be spoken, however uncomfortable. The relative handful of “progressive” Jews who have climbed aboard the anti-Zionist train are deluding themselves if they believe they would be spared should Israel ever be defeated. From the atomic ayatollahs and missile-mad mullahs of Tehran to the diplomats, intelligence operatives, and UN officials plotting the Jewish state’s demise in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, what Israel’s foes seek is not only a world without Israel and Zionism, but also a world without Jews and Judaism.