The Defamation of Israel and the Survival of the West

Here is the argument that the defamation of Israel and the delegitimization of Jews and Zionists is boomeranging on the Western world: “From France to America, hatred of Israel is eroding the West – opinion,” by David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, November 7, 2026:

The defamation of Israel and delegitimization of Jews/Zionists is boomeranging on the Western world.

Let’s begin with France, which is being consumed by a toxic brew that blends Marxism, Islamism, Palestinianism, and antisemitism into a potent assault on the state and on French culture and civilization.

The ideological depravities that undergird the deepening chaos have long and deep roots in French society and politics, particularly in France’s perverted policies toward Jews and Israel.

This is the elephant in the room that French President Emmanuel Macron and his predecessors will never admit to: that their ideological elevation of the Palestinian cause into a monster master political storyline has willy-nilly birthed a narrative of nihilism, a swell of anti-civilizational contempt wearing a keffiyeh that goes far beyond Israel.

The moral inversions that excuse October 7 as “resistance” and heroize calls to “globalize the intifada” now excuse the torching and looting of iconic French buildings and boulevards. The diplomatic grandstanding at Israel’s expense (“Palestinian statehood now!”) and the indulgence of Islamo-fascist and leftist mobs who hail Hamas have started aeonian fires of self-immolation and devastation.

A protester wearing a costume walks next to a burning fire during a demonstration organised by labour unions as part of nationwide protests joined by French high school and university students against the cost of living and rising fuel prices, in Paris, France, October 31, 2026.

My late father, Prof. Henry H. (Zvi Meir) Weinberg, was a scholar of French literature and a keen observer of socio-cultural trends in France. He passed away in Jerusalem almost 20 years ago (after serving as an MK in the Knesset for Natan Sharansky’s immigrant party).

Psychological warfare against the Jewish state
Forty years ago, he wrote a book called The Myth of the Jew in France 1967-1982 in which he dissected the techniques by which highbrow publications such as Le Monde and the upper echelons of French literary society pursued a long campaign of psychological warfare against the Jewish state.

Under the mask of high-minded objectivity and fealty to human rights, they adopted narratives fiercely hostile to Israel, inevitably sliding into the murky waters of anti-Jewish prejudice.

My father chronicled the lifting of taboos on public expression of antisemitism in France – beginning with the writer and philosopher Voltaire and the Encylopaedists of the 18th century; to the French laboratories for “scientific” racism and national socialism of the 19th century; leading to French collaboration with the Nazis under the Vichy regime and subsequent far-right French preoccupation with Holocaust denial.

Other notable markers on the way: president De Gaulle’s notorious “Sermon to the Hebrews” in 1967; French policies of appeasement toward Palestinian terrorism under presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s and 1980s; the vehemence and consistency of French attacks on Israeli policy ever since the First Lebanon War (1982); and the malicious depredation wrought by fashionable antagonism to everything Israeli peddled by French intellectuals.

Since then, the “myth,” or defamation, of the Jew and the Zionist in France and other high-minded democracies has only darkened.

Jews in Israel are no longer seen as the oppressed, even though they have had to fight three wars for their very survival, and been subject to thousands of terrorist attacks; they are instead the oppressors, for the land they live on is no longer seen as the “ancient Jewish homeland,” but as land snatched from its true owners, the “Palestinians.” They are the “oppressors,” even though their Arab enemies have 22 states, covering a territory a thousand times larger than Israel; they are the “oppressors” even though Arabs in Israel have full civil and political rights; they are the oppressors in Gaza — which is why Hamas launched its attack on October 7,2023, even though every last Israeli had been pulled out of the Strip in 2005.

And despite the tremendous efforts Israel has made to keep civilian deaths in Gaza to a minimum, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, and making millions of robocalls, all in order to warn people away from sites about t be targeted, Israel, the eternal ”oppressor,” stands accused by most of the world of committing “genocide.”