The Guardian’s Latest Antisemitic Libel
The words of a Jew desperate to prove he belongs, and proving only that he never will
Norman Solomon’s latest essay in The Guardian is a tired repackaging of the oldest antisemitic tropes in circulation. It dresses them up in modern NGO jargon about “human rights” and “genocide,” but the bones are positively medieval. Jews are not allowed sovereignty, Jews are secretly responsible for violence against themselves, and Jews are to blame for antisemitism.
In short, it’s exactly what you’d expect from The Guardian.
1. The “Israel is not Jewish” Canard
Solomon’s central thesis is that “Jews and Israel are not the same,” and that equating Israel with the Jewish people is “propaganda.” What he ignores is that this “propaganda” happens to be codified international law. The 1947 UN partition resolution explicitly described the creation of a “Jewish state” alongside an Arab one. Israel’s Declaration of Independence makes the same point. One of Israel’s Basic Laws codifies it. This is not an invention of Zionists in the 2020s. It is the foundation of Israel’s existence.
Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland is no more “propaganda” than Irish sovereignty in Ireland. Denying that link is an attack on the core of Jewish peoplehood.
2. The Jewish People as a Nation
What Solomon also refuses to acknowledge is that the connection between Jews and Israel is not an abstract theory or a political slogan. It is a lived reality that stretches across centuries. For two thousand years, scattered Jewish communities — in Yemen, Poland, Morocco, Iraq, Spain, and beyond — recited the same prayers hoping for a return to Zion (Israel). They fasted on the same day to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. They ended every Passover Seder and Yom Kippur service with the words “Next year in Jerusalem.”
This is not the language of a mere religion. It is the language of a people bound to a land. Nations can be exiled, conquered, and dispersed, but they remain nations. No one would say that Armenians ceased to be a people after their genocide, or that Kurds are not a people because they lack a state. Yet somehow, Jews, who maintained their identity without sovereignty longer than any other nation in history, are told by critics like Solomon that they are not really a people at all.
This denial is a deliberate attempt to strip Jews of their nationhood so that their state can be delegitimized as a colonial fraud. But history, faith, and culture all testify otherwise. The Jewish people are a nation, and Israel is our homeland.
3. The Fabricated “Genocide”
Solomon leans on Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports as if they are gospel. He calls their declarations “evidence,” but evidence is not repetition. Evidence is mass graves, organized extermination, the targeting of a people for destruction. Israel, by every measure, has done the opposite: facilitating aid deliveries, warning civilians to evacuate, providing medical supplies even while Hamas hoards them.
The famine narrative itself is also baseless. There are no images of famine in Gaza like there are from Yemen or Sudan. Israel has allowed over two million tons of food and supplies into Gaza since October 7. To call that “genocide” is to rob the word of meaning and to spit in the face of real genocide victims, including six million Jews.
4. Blaming Jews for Antisemitism
Perhaps the most grotesque line in the essay is Solomon’s claim that Israel is “the world’s most powerful cause of antisemitism.” This is the blood libel updated for 2025. In the Middle Ages, Jews were blamed for plagues. In the 20th century, they were blamed for capitalism and communism simultaneously. Today, they are blamed for antisemitism itself.
The reality is simple. Antisemites hate Jews whether or not Israel exists. Pogroms swept Eastern Europe long before Israel’s founding. The Dreyfus Affair happened in France when Palestine was still under Ottoman rule. The Holocaust murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews before Israel declared independence. To claim that Jewish survival in Israel is the cause of Jew-hatred is historical illiteracy of the highest order.
But here is the most important point Solomon erases. No other people on earth are treated this way. Russians are not beaten in the street because of the Kremlin’s crimes. Chinese students are not attacked on campuses because of Beijing’s policies. It is only Jews who face violence for the actions of a state thousands of miles away. And for what? Solomon himself proves the absurdity of his thesis. He is Jewish, and he opposes Israel. Yet if a mob sees him walking down the street with a kippah, they will not stop to ask about his politics. They will not care what his opinion is of Gaza or the IDF. The average Jew has no role in shaping Israeli policy. They do not vote in Israeli elections. They do not serve in the Israeli army. Many have never even set foot in Israel. And yet, around the world, they are targeted, harassed, and attacked as if they are personally responsible.
To blame Israel for that hatred is sick. It is the old antisemitic logic in a new costume. Jews are guilty no matter what they do, and when they are attacked it is their own fault.
And Solomon’s own words expose just how far he is willing to go. In November 2023 he tweeted that “Hamas didn’t attack Israelis because they are Jewish”, a claim that defies both Hamas’s charter and its own rhetoric. Days earlier, he described the “underlying cause” of October 7 not as Hamas’s genocidal ideology but as Israeli “apartheid.” A week later, he wrote that “Hamas is a terrorist organization; so is the Israeli government.” These tweets represent a larger worldview. Absolve Hamas, blame Israel, and somehow find a way to shift responsibility onto Jews themselves.
5. The Lazy Apartheid Comparison
Solomon also rolls out the tired South Africa analogy, pretending that BDS is just a new version of anti-apartheid activism.
Apartheid South Africa denied Black citizens the right to vote. Israeli Arabs vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and hold ministerial positions. BDS and the apartheid smear are solely about branding Jews as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely evil, and uniquely undeserving of statehood.
6. A Twisted Morality
The most revealing section comes at the end, where Solomon approvingly cites Peter Beinart’s claim that Israel values Jewish life infinitely and Palestinian life cheaply. One look at this war would tell you opposite. Hamas values Jewish death infinitely and Palestinian life not at all. Hamas embeds its fighters in schools, hospitals, and mosques. Hamas uses its own people as human shields. Hamas murdered 1,200 civilians on October 7 in the most sadistic ways imaginable, and would have killed tens of thousands more if the IDF had not stopped them.
Yet Solomon never mentions Hamas once in his article. Not once. His moral outrage is reserved entirely for Jews.
The IDF has sacrificed hundreds of soldiers in a ground war that was not militarily necessary. Israel’s air superiority over Gaza is so overwhelming that it could have fought this war entirely from the skies. The only reason Israeli soldiers went in on the ground was to protect civilians in Gaza from greater harm. And yet Israel receives no credit for that sacrifice.
7. What This Really Is
This is not journalism or even honest opinion. This is the laundering of antisemitic conspiracy theories through the language of human rights. It is the same trick we have seen for decades. Erase Jewish history, distort Jewish identity, accuse Jews of causing their own persecution, and then call anyone who objects a propagandist.
Every era finds a new vocabulary for the same old hatred. In the Middle Ages it was religion, branding Jews as Christ-killers. In the 19th century it was race, painting Jews as parasites on European society. In the 20th it was politics, accusing Jews of being both capitalist exploiters and communist subversives. Today it is human rights language, weaponized to strip Jews of their legitimacy as a nation.
The Guardian publishes this under the guise of “progressive” values, but there is nothing progressive about telling Jews that they have no right to a state, that their existence is a crime, and that they are to blame for the hatred directed at them. That is as regressive and dangerous as it gets.
Conclusion
Norman Solomon accuses Israel of “hijacking” Judaism. In truth, he is hijacking Judaism himself. He exploits Jewish memory, Jewish pain, and Jewish ethics as weapons against Jewish survival. He claims to separate Israel from the Jewish people, but in reality, he denies both the Jewish right to self-determination and the Jewish right to safety.
What makes this essay so poisonous is not just the lies it spreads but the way it cloaks them in moral superiority. It is not moral. It is not superior. It is the same old antisemitism, repackaged for a new audience.