The conflict between Arabs and Jews over the rebirth of the Jewish state has persisted for over a century. However, it entered a volatile new phase after 1967. Once Israel no longer fit the modern script of the “perpetual Jewish victim” – once Jews were no longer seen as powerless or confined to a post-Holocaust narrative of displacement – hostility took on a more existential shape.
This is the thesis, stated plainly because it explains the pattern: this isn’t policy criticism. It’s identity assassination. “Jews aren’t Jews” is not a confused take; it’s a purification ritual. Strip Jews of ancestry, strip them of history, then recast their survival as a crime. That is the modern form of Jew-hate. Delete the people, and the rest becomes paperwork.
Much of today’s anti-Israel rhetoric has drifted away from what the state does and toward what Jews are. The debate is intentionally pulled into frameworks of genetics and “belonging.” If Jewish continuity can be rendered doubtful – if Jews can be reframed as recent, foreign, or fabricated – then their claim to nationhood becomes indefensible in Western moral language.
Once Jews returned in large numbers to their ancestral homeland and reestablished sovereignty, older categories of hostility were repackaged for a Western audience. In earlier eras, Jews were targeted in religious terms; in the twentieth century, they were targeted as a race; in the twenty-first – conveniently, they’re told they have no ethnicity at all. Pan-Arabism and caliphate language never translated well to Western spectators. “Anti-colonial liberation” does. It plugs neatly into post-colonial sensibilities and makes the conflict legible through familiar moral templates.
But the land-only frame runs into a stubborn obstacle: Jews have a deep and verifiable connection to the land in dispute. That isn’t a matter of belief; it’s a matter of record. The Merneptah Stele, dating to around 1205 BCE, is widely cited as the earliest extra-biblical mention of “Israel.” And archaeology doesn’t adjust itself to slogans.
So the argument shifts again. If the evidence can’t be dismissed, the continuity can be questioned. “Yes, ancient Jews were there, but today’s Jews are from Poland.” It’s a simple move: relocate Jewish identity and its continuity through history into suspicion.
Jews ethnically cleansed from the Middle East and North Africa
This narrative conveniently ignores the 850,000 Jews who were ethnically cleansed not from Europe, but from the Middle East and North Africa. Their descendants now make up the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, yet they are erased from the Western “settler” script. The claim doesn’t need to be coherent; it only needs to introduce doubt and make Jewish peoplehood sound like an allegation.
This is also why repetition matters more than accuracy. A claim this implausible can still spread if it is repeated steadily and if it’s treated as too fringe to engage. For years, many dismissed it as not worth rebutting. Policymakers avoided debates that sounded unserious. Jewish advocates often focused on diplomacy and security rather than the fundamentals of historical continuity. In that vacuum, the “Jews aren’t really Jews” narrative gained reach, moving from fringe corners increasingly into mainstream conversations.
By 2026, you see the results: public figures entertaining DNA-testing as a kind of legitimacy test, academic environments platforming discredited theories, and pseudo-scientific claims circulating widely online. The return to racial and biological “proof” language is not incidental; it is consistent with an effort to turn Jewish identity into a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be acknowledged.
Engaging this terrain is unpleasant, but necessary. You don’t have to indulge bad-faith arguments to answer them. And the answers are not complicated.
The Irony of Persecution: Claiming Jews aren’t “real” Jews while Holocaust survivors still live among us exposes a total logical failure. In the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, Jews were targeted as a distinct, ancient people. To argue they are a modern European invention is to ignore that the 20th century’s greatest industrial crime was predicated entirely on the fact that Jews were not seen as Europeans by the Europeans themselves.
Documentary Footprints: Jews did not exist outside history. They were deeply embedded in the societies in which they lived – so much so that legal systems created ghettos, occupational restrictions, and discriminatory civil codes to manage Jewish presence. Those historical footprints are part of the documentary record. They don’t disappear because a new narrative needs Jews to be “recent.”
Linguistic Signatures: The Jewish diaspora is among the most documented in human history. Communities, migrations, languages, and institutions are traceable across centuries. Ladino and Yiddish are not just languages; they are the linguistic signatures of a specific people in dispersion. From the communal records of the Cairo Geniza to the legal records of Europe, the historical footprint is consistent.
Internal Structure: Walk into any synagogue, and you will still find Kohanim and Levites maintaining distinct roles in liturgy. That continuity is not a modern invention; it reflects an enduring internal structure preserved through dispersion.
The Indigenous Calendar: Jewish holidays are not symbolic gestures. They are the markings of an indigenous Hebrew calendar. Passover is one of the oldest continuously observed rituals in history, tying a people to a shared story, language, and place. Jewish liturgy contains ancient layers preserved over time, including traditions found in manuscript caches.
Biological Consistency: Even the scientific evidence aligns with the historical narrative. Major genetic studies – encompassing thousands of samples across the global Diaspora – consistently show that Jewish communities retain substantial Levantine ancestry. They often cluster genetically closer to other Middle Eastern populations than to the European populations among whom they lived.
The erosion of these historical certainties marks the triumph of subsidized narrative over objective scholarship. In a Western academy shaped by decades of foreign influence, post-national politics now dictate the terms of engagement. The result is a total inversion of reality, where documented continuity is discarded to fit the rigid templates of a manufactured anti-colonial drama.
The difference today is twofold: Jews can now answer back, and the world can no longer plausibly say it “didn’t know.”
And the broader implication matters. Beware, if this kind of historical inversion can be normalized against one of the most documented, scrutinized, and continuously preserved identities on earth, it can be normalized against anyone.
The writer is the co-founder of Jewish National Initiative.