One of the most repellent forms of that old-new popular thinking—now once again spreading with mounting intensity across Western societies since the genocidal devastation of Gaza and the American-Israeli escalation toward Iran—is the stale, mildew-ridden yet ever-ready conclusion: that, finally, the dehumanization of the Jews has been vindicated. That the racist phantasmagoria of Jews as a “cancer of humanity” was merely awaiting its historical confirmation. Ah yes – Hitler, it seems, “knew something after all”: because Zionists, because AIPAC, because Netanyahu, because lobbies—because of that wonderfully crude analytical apparatus that explains history as if it were He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, with a single eternal villain scheming from Snake Mountain against the pious people of Eternia.
Do not misunderstand me. It is difficult, in the history of the Jewish people, to find a political leadership darker, more ruthless, more brutal, and more morally decomposed than the one governing Israel today. It is equally difficult not to notice that in various pro-Israeli lobbying houses, committees, institutes, and societies sit individuals whose empathy for Palestinian life – or for human life at all – hovers somewhere around the level of an accounting error in the U.S. military budget.
But is that because they are Jews?
No. It is because they are human beings—more precisely, that particular kind of human being whom excessive power, wealth, fear, and ideology transform into cold administrators of other people’s deaths.
And here we arrive at the question that spoils the sport for all professional hunters of the “eternal culprit”: why are other accomplices across the vast spectrum of wars, massacres, sanctions, blockades, and mass deaths somehow always deemed “less evil” than the “evil Jews”? Why are Anglo-American imperial elites – Protestant or secular, it makes no difference – and their allies in various petro-monarchies, including Wahhabi–Kharijite ideological apparatuses, so readily portrayed as misguided marionettes of grotesque Jewish caricatures lifted from Nazi propaganda, rather than as fully conscious, fully responsible accomplices in joint criminal enterprises stretching from Libya, through Iraq, to Syria, Gaza, and Iran?
So, is it therefore impossible to be evil if you are not a Jew? Are Washington, D.C., London, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi in fact historic courts of virtue and humanism—merely bewitched by wicked counsellors, like King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings? Otherwise, would they—as a kind of global alliance of beauty queens—ceaselessly labour for peace and human understanding, if only “the Jew” were not whispering in their ear that today, of all days, is perfect for yet another humanitarian catastrophe and genocide?
Let us look at Sudan. There, far from the focus of corporate media, one of the most harrowing contemporary catastrophes is unfolding. The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has, according to humanitarian estimates, produced tens of thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and famine; agencies describe it as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. The RSF, in particular, has been accused of mass atrocities in Darfur, including in El Fasher, where UN investigators have spoken of “hallmarks of genocide.”
And who, then, is pulling the strings? Israel? No—rather the United Arab Emirates: the gleaming showroom of desert capitalism, where conscience is laundered through glass skyscrapers, Formula One circuits, and conferences on tolerance. The Emirates deny arming the RSF, yet numerous reports and investigations point to their role as a key external patron of this paramilitary machinery; inquiries have also traced networks of gold trading, real estate, and companies in Dubai linked to circles around RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
And here we arrive at the uncomfortable lesson: if Muslims are massacred by Zionists, it is a crime. If Muslims are massacred by other Muslims, financed through gold channels, Gulf interests, and paramilitary corporations of death—that too is a crime. Victims do not become lesser victims because their killer does not match the familiar enemy’s face. Blood in Sudan is not cheaper than blood in Gaza simply because it cannot be so easily folded into a pre-fabricated story about a single, metaphysical enemy.
The Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970, likewise, was not a manifestation of any “clash of civilizations.” Biafra, whose Igbo population was predominantly Christian, found itself under blockade by the federal Nigerian government; that blockade brought mass starvation and the deaths of vast numbers of civilians, with estimates ranging from several hundred thousand to around two million victims. The federal government in Lagos was not some Islamic horde from the propaganda pamphlets of American Protestant Zionists: it was led by Yakubu Gowon, a Christian from the Middle Belt, while other Christians also held important commands. At the same time, Britain, according to declassified documents and historical analyses, supported the Nigerian government in part because of its oil interests.
So here, too, there is no perfect formula of the eternal enemy: Christians suffered at the hands of a government in which Christians held significant power; Muslims can perish under Muslim regimes; Jews can be victims of antisemitism, while a Jewish state can at the same time organize genocide against Palestinians and spearhead criminal projects for the remaking of the Middle East that entail millions of human victims. Whoever cannot bear a truth so plainly stated is not seeking truth at all, but settling for tribal-confessional sedatives.
The lesson, then, is simple and severe: even in the worst of times, we must not declare evil to be the inheritance of one ethnic, religious, or cultural group alone, however critical we can and must be of the depraved ideological and cultural patterns within each of them. Evil is not, in its essence, exclusively Jewish, Muslim, Christian, wholly Western, or wholly Eastern. It is a universal human scourge—but not as some abstract moralistic fog; rather, as the very concrete product of power, interest, fear, class, resources, and a predatory economic system that functions just as efficiently in the hands of a Jew as of a non-Jew. Extreme and criminal ideologies do not fall from the sky; they grow out of the ways societies produce, consume, wage war, and distribute power. And capitalism, in its imperial and crisis-ridden logic, does not produce war and genocide as a systemic error, but as one of its darkest mechanisms of self-preservation.
Let us not forget that the population of Gaza has not been killed only because it is Palestinian and Muslim, but also because it happens to live in the wrong place. It is no coincidence that, in the very same political language in which Gaza is being flattened, a kind of posthumous tourist brochure has already begun to take shape. Donald Trump first mused that Gaza could be “better than Monaco,” boasting “the best location in the Middle East,” only to go on and suggest that America might “take it over” and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” His son-in-law Jared Kushner was even more shamelessly precise in real-estate terms: Gaza’s “coastal property,” he remarked, “could be very valuable”—provided civilians were moved out while Israel “cleans up” the strip. In just a few sentences, human tragedy is translated into the language of investment: first the ruins, then displacement, then a marina, a hotel, and cocktails with a sea view—beneath which, quite conveniently, lie natural gas reserves ready for exploitation. In other words, Gaza is also the victim of a joint capitalist criminal enterprise. One might therefore reformulate Max Horkheimer’s famous dictum—grounded in Hitler’s key ties with German big industry, that “whoever does not wish to speak of capitalism should remain silent about fascism”—into something like: “Whoever moralizes about Zionism while remaining silent about capitalism has entirely missed the point.”
Accordingly, Jeffrey Epstein was not abhorrent because he was Jewish or some supposed creature of Mossad, but above all because—together with his willing international clientele—he was a poster figure for a profoundly perverse global order: one that proclaims tolerance and human rights while, in practice, most brutally crushes those who have no money and therefore no protection. From children drawn into networks of sexual exploitation by predatory elites, to children in Iraq and Palestine—the victims were not victims solely because of who they were, but because of their vulnerability, their poverty, and their total exposure to a system that, precisely because they are poor and cannot “afford” the protection of the powerful, treats them as disposable biological waste.
That is why the antisemitic “explanation” of the world is not only morally repugnant, but analytically foolish and politically harmful: it does not expose the existing system—it rescues it. It is especially useful to the system entrenched in Israel, which in fact thrives on the premise that antisemitism is the natural condition of non-Jews, a premise designed to render every new enterprise of Netanyahu’s killers intelligible, even inevitable. Instead of focusing on the nature and structure of capital, the state, lobbies, military-industrial complexes, petro-monarchies, imperialism, and comprador elites, it reduces everything to an ancient, fetid metaphysics of blood and soil—of a handful of uniquely evil people without whom the world, supposedly, would be better.
Only it would not.
Evil—as history abundantly demonstrates—has never relied on a single nation as its exclusive vehicle. That does not mean, however, that it lacks budgets, logistics, and very concrete addresses. But when all efforts are made to reduce it to just one of those addresses, it is not merely left unexplained—it is shielded from any serious analysis.
While the mind busies itself searching for a single name—ethnic or personal—upon which to pin the full weight of evil, evil itself deftly changes its forms and masters, though never its nature.
For the one who learns to recognize evil in persons and ethnic groups, rather than in the very structure of the world, is condemned to miss the forest for the trees—forever.Email
