The Architecture of Erasure: Why the World Blames Israel for Everything
One cannot scroll for five seconds in online conversations of left-wing people without being reminded that Palestine is the great moral cause of our time, and Israel is the catch-all culprit for every crime and catastrophe. The louder the blame becomes, the less anyone sees the real dangers closing in. Perhaps that has been the point all along.
What strikes me repeatedly in conversations about the Middle East is how completely Hamas vanishes from the moral universe these activists inhabit. Their worldview depends on a singular, rigid rule: Palestinians are eternal victims, and Israel is the only actor with agency. In this framework, Hamas is not treated as a real organization; it becomes a narrative prop, a placeholder stripped of intention or responsibility so that all moral weight can be shifted onto the Jewish state.
As the writer Dara Horn aptly noted in People Love Dead Jews: “The world only loves Jews when they are victims; it has no stomach for Jews who defend themselves.”
Under this fixed narrative, Hamas never uses hospitals as interrogation centers; rather, "Israel bombs hospitals." Hamas never hides behind children; "Israel kills children." Hamas never steals aid; "Israel starves Gaza."
Israel can and should be criticized like any other state, yet what we see today isn’t criticism—it is a reflexive reassignment of guilt, no matter who actually committed the act. Recent revelations capture this pattern with uncomfortable clarity. The Associated Press reported that women in Gaza were being pressured to trade sexual favors for aid by local Hamas officials who controlled distribution networks. Yet, within hours, videos circulated blaming Israel for the "humiliation" of Gazan women. Hamas vanished from the story as if by muscle memory, and Israel absorbed the outrage belonging to the perpetrators.
Then came the discovery of vast stockpiles of infant formula hidden by Hamas, even as The New York Times, TIME Magazine, and the UN accused Israel of "starving children" with virtually no mention of the terror group’s hoarding. This misdirection worked so effectively that Hamas stopped even pretending. They hijacked aid trucks in broad daylight while the world scolded Israel for blocking them. They ate lavish meals in stocked tunnels while Western crowds insisted Israel was the cause of famine.
As John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, observed: “Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history, yet it is the only nation held to a standard of perfection that no other military is expected to meet.”
Internal Hamas documents now confirm that Gaza’s humanitarian system was never separate from the terror group. NGOs were not independent; they operated inside a parallel structure designed to control aid and deflect blame. Western governments treated NGO reports as neutral, even as appointed Hamas liaisons sat inside the very organizations producing the data. By the time this became public, the narrative had already taken on a life of its own.
We should have known better. We are an educated society with instant access to history, yet whenever antisemitism resurfaces, common sense is the first casualty. At present, the air is thick with its absence. If Israel wanted to kill civilians indiscriminately, Gaza would have been emptied in a week. Instead, roughly 97 percent of Gazans have survived a war fought in the most militarized civilian environment on earth. That alone is the rebuttal. But evidence means nothing when a moral worldview depends on archetypes: one people assigned the world’s sins while their enemies are absolved of theirs.
This mirrors the dynamics of "parentification" in dysfunctional relationships, where one partner becomes the perpetual adult responsible for everything, and the other becomes the perpetual child responsible for nothing. One carries the entire moral load; the other is exempt from accountability. Scale that psychology up, and you get modern anti-Israel activism.
We are living in a moment where political identity overrides moral reasoning. Hamas vanishes because acknowledging its agency would shatter the moral architecture of the narrative. Israel becomes the only moral actor in the story, held responsible not only for its own actions but for those of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and even ISIS. This is "splitting" on a societal scale: Palestinians must be pure, Israel must be evil, and anything that complicates that binary is rejected.
History shows what happens when societies fixate on Jews instead of the forces actually dismantling them. Europe’s worst collapses began when fear and frustration were redirected onto Jews while real threats gathered unchecked. That fixation has simply migrated from Jewish communities to the only Jewish state. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned: “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. It is a virus that destroys the host society.”
René Girard’s work on scapegoating explains this perfectly. When a society is overwhelmed by chaos or guilt, it unconsciously unifies itself by projecting its anxieties onto a single group. Today, that scapegoat is Israel. It is an impossible and irrational burden that reappears every century. In this universe, Jews are not the targets of hatred but its source. Every attack is dismissed as a "hoax." Every atrocity is laundered into a "false flag."
This creates a "double bind"—the "heads you win, tails I lose" structure. Israel exists in a system where any action, whether restraint or force, becomes proof of guilt. Any comment mildly sympathetic to Israel is met with accusations of being a "paid bot." When Israel’s contestant came second in Eurovision, it was a "Zionist plot." Had she placed lower, it would have been "proof the world hates Zionism." When the conclusion is predetermined, every outcome is recycled to prop up the same story.
The projection is staggering. AIPAC is cast as a shadowy puppet-master, yet Qatar runs one of the most aggressive and well-funded foreign-influence operations in U.S. history, pouring billions into universities and media. Israel is portrayed as manipulating information, while the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera—a state arm of a monarchy that hosts Hamas leadership—functions as the single most influential media empire shaping the global narrative.
This is the oldest defense mechanism: the aggressor disowns their violence by attributing it to the target. It is psychologically easier to accuse the victim than to confront the violence of your own side. Psychologists call this asymmetric agency bias: full agency is assigned to those perceived as powerful, while those framed as "oppressed" are granted a moral license for any atrocity.
A society that cannot correctly identify threats will not survive them. This is why, when a gunman scrawls antisemitic slogans on his rifle, the internet insists "Zionists added them." Why conspiracy networks claim Israel enacted a "Hannibal Directive" to murder its own citizens on October 7. The inversion is structural.
Israel is condemned as a "colonial project," yet the longest-running imperial enterprise in the region was the 1,300-year Arab-Muslim empire built on conquest and enslavement. That history is ignored while Jews—the indigenous people of the land—are cast as the architects of "racial domination." The accusation does not describe Jewish history; it describes the history of the accusers.
As Golda Meir famously said: "We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
ISIS publishes maps of a global caliphate. Iran boasts of its "Shiite Crescent." Yet the only map that triggers global fury is Israel—a country that has repeatedly offered partition and relinquished land for the hope of peace. A society that scapegoats a tiny minority for the world’s chaos prepares for its own darkness. Once you decide that one people is the source of all evil, you will never see real evil coming.
