To my Jewish friends.
The time calls for clarity - and many who follow the page have asked me about this over the past year.
So let me state clearly where I stand, and why.
First and foremost, I stand with the Human.
Then I stand with you. Not conditionally. Not to the extent it can be explained without cost. Not only when it's convenient in a given debate. I stand with you as a people, with your right to exist as a people, with your right to a land, and with the individual Jewish boy or girl who today in Malmö, Paris or Copenhagen considers whether the Star of David should go inside the jumper before he or she goes out on the street.
I stand there because I have read history, and because I know what it means when a society begins to look angrily at you again. I have seen it in my own lifetime move from the unthinkable to the everyday, and I have seen how the language has slowly been mined around you, so that what happens can no longer be described with the words we once had for it.
I stand there also because I am Christian, and because my own faith makes no sense without yours. Jesus was Jewish. Mary was Jewish. The apostles were Jews. The book I read does not begin in Bethlehem, it begins in the Garden of Eden, and it runs through Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets before it even reaches the manger. To be Christian and stand indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people is an impossibility for me. It is to saw off the branch one sits on.
And I stand there because I refuse to be one of those who in hindsight will say they didn't know, that it was complicated, that they didn't have all the information. For we have it. It lies before us every day. What is missing is not information. What is missing is courage. To say it aloud, unambiguously, and cut the patterns apart from each other.
Therefore this.
Not as a contribution to a debate, but as what I owe you to say clearly, once, so there is no doubt.
For we stand in a moment that more and more Western Europeans now recognise, though no one has prepared them for it. A Jewish friend, a colleague, an acquaintance, removes the Star of David before she goes out the door. A couple refrain from sending their boy in the kippah he used to wear. A family considers when it is time to move to Israel - not as a dream but as a contingency plan. It happens quietly and it is not news. It is just the new necessity. And when you ask, you get the same answer in Malmö, in Amsterdam, in Paris, in London, in Berlin, and increasingly also in Copenhagen - it is no longer safe to be visible.
That is where the conversation begins. Not as academic conversations. Not in the newspaper. But in the streets, where things show what they are.
To understand why it has come to this, one must understand the word that has been made into a magic formula for hatred - Zionism. And one must understand it WITHOUT the filter that 40 years of propaganda has laid over it.
So let me try.
Zionism was not invented by Netanyahu. It was not invented by Smotrich. It is not a plan for ethnic cleansing, and it was not from the beginning one thing. It was a reaction. A reaction to 2000 years of European history where Jews were a people without land, where they could live somewhere for generations and still be expelled within a week, where they were massacred in the crusades, burned during the plague, expelled from England, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, massacred in the pogroms of Eastern Europe, accused of poisoning wells, accused of drinking the blood of Christian children, accused of controlling the banks and simultaneously being poor communists, accused of being too visible and simultaneously of hiding. A history that culminated in the Dreyfus affair in Paris, where an assimilated French officer, decorated, patriotic, Jewish, was wrongfully convicted of treason while the mob in the boulevards shouted "death to the Jews".
That is where Herzl stood as a journalist and understood that assimilation did not work. That Jews could not think themselves into a place in Europe. That no matter how deeply they stepped in, Europe would sooner or later push them out again.
Zionism was the answer to that recognition. But it was not one answer, it was many. Socialist Zionists who dreamed of collective farms and a new worker humanity. Religious Zionists who saw the return to Zion as fulfilment of prophecy. Cultural Zionists who primarily wanted a spiritual centre, not necessarily a state. Territorialists who were willing to take anything, Uganda, Argentina, Madagascar. Revisionists who insisted on a Jewish state with clear borders. Pacifists, militarists, secularists, orthodox, Marxists, liberals. They deeply disagreed about almost everything. The only thing they shared was the fundamental insight Herzl formulated -
A people who have nowhere to go cannot survive a Europe that sooner or later decides to exterminate them.
And then precisely that happened. Exactly what Herzl had warned about. Six million Jews were killed. In the Europe that had been their home for a thousand years.
That is the background. It is the background that disappears when Zionism today is reduced to 'Netanyahu's cabinet'. It is the background that is made invisible when Israel is called a "colonial" construction, as if the Jews' presence in that land began in 1948.
Jews have lived continuously in that land for three thousand years. They lived there before the Romans, before the Arabs, before the Ottomans, before the British. The word Jerusalem appears in the Old Testament over 600 times. The word Jerusalem does not appear a single time(!) in the Quran. And the moment the state came into being, something happened that is almost never mentioned -
Around 850,000 Jews were expelled from the Arab countries they had lived in for over a thousand years, from Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Sana'a, Tripoli. Half of Israel's population today are descendants of these people, not of European colonists. Israel is not a European outpost. It is also, to a very large extent, a refuge for Jews expelled by Arab regimes. It is just not a narrative that fits into today's scheme, so it disappeared.
So when someone in 2026 says he is anti-Zionist, he is not primarily saying something about Netanyahu. He is saying that the Jewish people, as the only people in the world, do not have the right to a state. Not the Kurds. Not the Tamils. Not the Armenians. Not anyone. Just the Jews. And that is where the word reveals what it actually covers.
But how did we end up here. How did a hatred that Europe after 1945 said 'never again' return to European streets in under 80 years. The answer comes from three sources that have found each other, though in principle they should be each other's opposites.
The first source is Islamic antisemitism. It is not a product of the conflict over Israel, it is older than the state, and it is theologically anchored in texts that describe Jews as pigs and monkeys, as traitors of the prophet, as eternal enemies who must be fought until doomsday. It was imported to Europe by multimillions of people from societies where this narrative is childhood teaching. It is measurable in every survey of antisemitic attitudes among Muslim populations in Europe, where the percentages lie two to four times above the non-Muslim population's. And it is the hatred that today walks the streets in Copenhagen, in Malmö, in Paris, shouting "river to the sea" and "khaybar khaybar ya yahud". The last sentence is a direct reference to a massacre Mohammed himself carried out against a Jewish tribe in the year 628. It is not metaphor. It is programme.
The second source is the left wing's identity political machine. It has over the course of half a century worked its way towards a world model where humanity is divided into oppressors and oppressed, where moral validity is distributed according to victim status - and therefore where Jews, because they succeeded, because they survived, because they became one of the West's success stories, have been placed in the oppressor category.
Israel got the role as the ultimate coloniser, Jews globally as agents for white power, and all this could be taken at face value, because the category had replaced observation. One no longer needed to see. One had a scheme. And the scheme said that the old European Jew-hatred could now be carried forward under progressive terms, because it was no longer racism. It was 'anti-colonialism'. It was solidarity with the oppressed. It was, again and again, the age-old hatred dressed in the currently valid costume.
The third source is the European substrate itself. A substrate we have insisted was cleansed out with the Nuremberg trials, but which never disappeared. It lies in the language, in the jokes, in the glance that makes an eye flicker when a Jewish surname is mentioned. It lies in what is called salon antisemitism, where well-educated people at the dinner table speak about Rothschilds and Soros, about banks and media, about Epstein and Mossad, as if their own words are not a hundred years old. That substrate lay quiet, as long as the pressure from outside kept it down. The moment the other two sources began to carry hatred into public, the substrate discovered it was permitted again. And it awoke.
And right here around, when we look at that question one must go into if the analysis is to be honest. For there always comes a point in this conversation where someone raises a hand and says - but wait. Jews are overrepresented at the top of Western societies. On Wall Street. In Hollywood. In academia. In media. In Nobel Prizes. Is it not just pointing out what one sees?
Here one must not tremble. The answer is yes. The overrepresentation is real and measurable. Around 0.2 percent of the world's population is Jewish. Around 20 percent of all Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jews. In American top academia, in parts of finance, in law, in medicine, in certain parts of media and film, the number is a pattern, not a coincidence. To deny that would be both dishonest and strategically lost, because anyone who has spoken with an antisemite knows that it is precisely that number that is used to confirm the world's oldest conspiracy theory - that there exists an inner Jewish force, a conspiracy, a lodge, that controls things behind the scenes.
But it is precisely here the pattern reveals itself, if one is willing to look and take it seriously.
For 1500 years Jews in Europe were forbidden to own land. Forbidden to be in the guilds. Forbidden to practise most of the crafts that defined European life. What they were allowed was a small and often despised selection of occupations - money lending, which Christians were not permitted to do, trade, tax collection, medical and legal work in certain cities. Occupations that all had in common that they required literacy and numeracy, and that their capital could be carried in the head and in documents, not in the field. For when you can at any moment be thrown out of the city, of the country, of the entire continent, land is a curse. Books are a blessing.
And over this lay a religious prerequisite that was unique in medieval Europe - in the Jewish tradition every boy should be able to read the Torah. Universal male literacy, in a Europe where peasants could not write their own name, and where even noblemen often had written letters read aloud by priests. In generation after generation the only capital one could pass on to one's child was intellectual. And when the European universities finally opened themselves to Jews in the 1800s, a population came in that had 30 generations of compressed reading urge with them, and a culture where learning was the highest good.
Combine the two things. Centuries of forced specialisation in portable intellectual capital, and a religion that elevated learning to duty. What does it produce when released into modern society? Overrepresentation in precisely the fields that reward those characteristics - academia, science, law, medicine, finance, media.
And now comes the point that knocks the bottom out of the entire conspiracy barrel.
The same pattern is found everywhere a minority has been forced into the same structural position. The Chinese diasporas in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines comprise few percent of the population and control a significant part of the private economy. Indians in East Africa were so dominant in trade that Idi Amin threw them out of Uganda in 1972. Lebanese in West Africa. Parsees in India. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Huguenots in Prussia. It is what sociologists call 'middleman minorities', and Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it. All these groups display the same pattern. Minorities. Shut out from land and political power. Strong family and community bonds. Education culture. Portable capital. The result becomes the same every time. Success in new roles, when modernity finally opens itself.
There is nothing Jewish in this pattern. It is what happens to any people that for generations has been forced to own only what it could carry.
Which means the conspiracy theory is not an observation. It is an inversion. It takes the pattern, and instead of asking 'why it arose', it asks 'who is behind it'. It takes the result of 1500 years of exclusion and calls it a plot. It makes success proof of evil, rather than proof of what a people does when it has no other choice than to become skilled.
And then comes the envy, which is antisemitism's actual fuel.
For success that cannot be explained with privileges becomes unbearable in a society that has built its entire moral order on success always having to be explained with privileges.
When a people at 0.2 percent of the world take 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes, and the same people in Europe 80 years ago were driven to the camps in cattle cars, then there is something in the narrative about oppressed and oppressors that creaks. And the easiest way to make the creaking disappear is to say it was all a lie. That they were at the top anyway. That they still are.
And that is what is (again) happening these years, and that is what connects the Middle Ages' Jew pogroms with Goebbels' radio with today's TikTok videos about Rothschilds and Epstein. It is the same movement every time. Take what is difficult to explain within the frame. Call it a conspiracy. The pogrom follows naturally after.
And here it must be said precisely, because precision is the only thing that holds when the discussion goes into the names used as code.
Soros finances a long series of foundations and initiatives one can - in my understanding should - be deeply critical of. Open Society Foundations has had real and documentable influence on migration policy, legal systems and media in both Europe and the USA. To disagree with that influence, and the way it occurs, is not antisemitism. It is political disagreement about a concrete man's concrete choice of investments. But the moment the name Soros stops meaning Soros and begins to mean "the Jewish money", the moment he stands in for something larger than himself, we are no longer in political debate. Then we are back in the old scheme.
The same applies to Epstein. He was genuinely criminal. His network was real and we still do not know what it truly was. His death in custody is still unclear enough to justify all possible forms of suspicion. But to be angry about that case is not antisemitism. That case is anger-worthy. But when Epstein's name is used to confirm that "the Jews" blackmail the elite, even though his client list was a cross-section of the entire Western power elite, Jews and non-Jews among each other, then we have again left reality and moved back into the scheme.
And Rothschild. In 1850 the family was a real financial dynasty in Europe. In 2026 the name is first and foremost a codeword. The family does not have the central role in the world economy it had a century and a half ago. Yet the name appears as explanatory model for everything from central banks to wars to pandemics, because codewords survive longer than facts.
It is that pattern one must learn to see. A real person. A real scandal. A real criticism. And then the quiet slide, where the name stops meaning 'the person' and begins to mean 'the people'. That is where the antisemite reveals himself. Not when he criticises Soros, but when he uses Soros as codeword for something he doesn't dare say aloud.
The real criticism of power is legitimate and necessary. Power must be scrutinised. Billionaires must be scrutinised. Financiers must be scrutinised. Criminal networks must be scrutinised. It just must be done with the actual names and the actual actions, not with ethnic categories that carry 2000 years of mythic matter with them.
One can criticise Soros without meaning it about Jews. One can condemn Epstein, whatever he was, without meaning it about Jews. One can analyse financial power without meaning it about Jews. That is what we must be able to do. And it is the discipline that has become difficult, because the time rewards the lazy shortcut, where criticism of a man becomes an accusation against a people.
And the most absurd thing is that the three sources of antisemitism's return in theory should be enemies.
The Islamist should abhor the atheistic, progressive, relativistic, gender- and reality-dissolving left wing, which is the direct inversion of the unchangeable God-given order the Quran and its supplementary texts constitute - all that his own order is set in the world to abolish.
The left wing should abhor Islamism's patriarchy, its homophobia, its treatment of women and minorities, its rock-conservative unchangeability. All that it has otherwise spent half a century fighting, and itself claims to stand against.
The ordinary European should abhor both, because he has spent a century learning what it costs when ideologies are allowed to define who may live. He has seen where it ends, and has promised himself never again.
But they have found each other anyway, for they have one thing in common - the Jew as the unifying enemy, and a pattern of Jewish success that all three can use their own version of. It is history's oldest mechanism. When civilisations go into confusion, they search for the people who can bear everyone's dissatisfaction. And it is always the same people.
To this is added the element most uncomfortable for ourselves to look at. We have let the language be mined, so reality can no longer be described.
The word Zionist has become code. The word settler colonialism is used about a people who have returned to their own land. The word apartheid is thrown at the only country in the Middle East where Arabs sit in parliament, in the supreme court, in government, where around 20 percent of citizens are Palestinian-Arab and have full voting rights. The word genocide is used about a war that Hamas started on 7 October 2023 with massacres, rapes, hostage-taking and an explicit charter about exterminating Jews globally. And the word antisemitism has simultaneously been diluted so much that it may only be used about a language so brutal that no one uses it anymore, whereby the word has become useless for describing what is actually happening. We call it criticism of Israel when a synagogue is burned. We call it political engagement when a Jewish student is hunted at a university. We call it grief over Gaza when a Jew is stabbed in Manchester.
And let me say immediately, to pre-empt any 'whataboutism', because that is where the next objection always comes.
There is suffering in Gaza. There are civilian casualties. There is policy in Israel one can legitimately be deeply against, there is a settlement policy one can criticise in strong words, there is a warfare whose details deserve scrutiny, there is intelligence service that, as that sort does, stretches the boundaries of the acceptable. But that is not what the question is about.
The question is about whether Jews have the right to a land, and whether that right lapses every time that land wages a war, or is in a conflict, that no other country would have its right to exist taken from it for waging. France did not lose its right to exist in Algeria. The USA did not lose it in Vietnam. Russia does not lose it in Chechnya or Ukraine. Only Israel. Only Jews. Only there has warfare become argument that the state behind should not exist.
The language is mined because the truth is uncomfortable. The truth is that Europe after 80 years again has a living Jew-hatred, and that it has come back both from outside and inside, both from those we let in by the multimillions without asking what they brought with them - and from a culture, our own, that lost faith in itself and therefore could no longer distinguish between persecutor and persecuted.
It is this landscape Zionism must be understood in. Not as a movement Jews should be ashamed of. But as the repeated admission from a people who have tried everything else, that Europe's promise of protection only applied as long as Europe itself stood strong, and that a place is therefore quite obviously necessary when Europe again begins to look angrily at them.
And it is here the conversation must finally land.
Antisemitism's return is not a Jewish problem. Jews have never been the problem. They are the symptom. They are the people who are the first to sense when a civilisation begins to lose its mind. When a society can no longer distinguish friend from enemy, when it can no longer hold onto its own language, when it invites everything inside and calls it strength, when it lets the oppressed be defined by scheme and not by reality, then Jews begin to pack. And it is us who are left behind.
They are not leaving Europe because they have given up.
They are leaving Europe because we have.
❤️🔥🪽
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And let me in addition add this, which is worth pausing at, because it constantly lies as an unspoken premise in the debate, and because it is the premise that topples the argument when it surfaces.
Judaism is not a missionary religion. It does not seek your soul's conversion. It does not ask you if you are saved. It does not challenge you on the street. It does not pray for your loyalty. It does not call for your territory. It has no inner obligation to spread itself, no command to bring the world under its law, no category called "the not yet subjected". On the contrary, it is difficult to convert to Judaism. The rabbi must traditionally reject you three times before he takes you seriously.
It is a religion that points inward, not outward.
It is about a particular people's covenant with a particular God, and about how that people should live faithful to this covenant. The rest of the world is allowed to be the world.
And it is precisely this that must be held up against Islam, for here we are at one of the most overlooked differences in the entire collected conversation.
Islam's inner architecture is built around expansion. The world is divided into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War, and the movement goes ONLY one way. There is no theological category for letting the House of War remain what it is. To bring it under the House of Islam is not a possibility of transgression, it is a duty.
It is in this sense Islam is not a religion in the Western meaning of the word, but a total social order that seeks political, legal and territorial implementation of itself, everywhere it meets something else.
Christianity has also been missionary, but Christianity's mission was always calling, never subjugation, and its expansion has several times stood in direct conflict with its own foundation, while Islam's expansion is anchored in the foundation itself. The intent.
This means that when one places Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the same category and says "the three Abrahamic religions", one makes a category error that propagates through the entire conversation.
Judaism wants to keep itself.
Christianity wants to call.
Islam wants everything.
These are three vastly different orientations towards the world, and it is only the last that ideologically speaking cannot rest until it has subjected the last corner.
Which leads to the point that in modern debate has been systematically turned on its head.
When Jews in 1948 got a land, they got something that in extent corresponds to around a quarter percent of the total Arab-Muslim territory in the region. 22 Arab states and one Jewish. And for 80 years it has been the one that has been accused of colonisation, while the other side has rejected every peace plan, started several extermination wars and maintained charters that openly call for the Jews' total extermination. It is not a symmetrical conflict where one side merely got more attention. It is an asymmetry in the very religious and political DNA, where one side does not need to expand to live, and the other side cannot rest until the expansion is total.
When a Jew today says he wants a Jewish homeland, he is saying he wants a place where his people can live in peace.
When an Islamist says he wants the caliphate, the ummah, the worldwide subjection under God's law, he is saying he wants everything.
The two wishes are not two versions of the same. They are each other's structural opposites. One is a people who want a place. The other is an order that wants the world.
It is worth having in one's considerations when one looks and interprets the world, and wishes to understand the movements we see and who stands where.
