r/antisemitism • u/ruchenn • 1d ago
From Be’eri to Bondi: global antisemitism after October 7
From Be’eri to Bondi: global antisemitism after October 7,
by Dave Rich, fathom, 2026-10.
Dave Rich identifies modern expressions of a persistent and enduring belief that Jews, in one form or another, are the keystone in the arch that holds up civilisation, and that if you want to bring the existing order crashing down and replace it with something radically transformative, you have to first remove this Jewish influence; or at least take away its power. This extract comes from his recently published book, From Be’eri to Bondi Global Antisemitism After October 7.
Star Wars tells the story of a heroic resistance struggling against a fascistic empire that commits genocide at the push of a button via its planet-sized weapon, the Death Star. But this Death Star has a fatal flaw: a small hole in the side, and if you can fire a rocket into that hole then you blow up the entire Death Star, you avert impending genocide, and you lift the imperial jackboot from the necks of free peoples everywhere.
This is the metaphor that Irish actress Denise Gough, who is starring in a recent Star Wars TV spin off, reached for a few weeks ago, when she wanted to explain why defeating Israel is the key to ending all global suffering. “The Death Star is like all of it”, she said: Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, “all of it, everywhere”, and Palestine is like that small hole, the weak point of the entire imperial system. “If we can free Palestine,” she said, “it explodes everything” and ends imperial oppression for all.
The novelist Pankaj Mishra made a similar argument, albeit in more highbrow terms, in his recent book, The World After Gaza, in which Mishra argued that the war in Israel and Gaza is of a different quality and significance than any other on earth, not because of the scale of death and destruction, the depth of Western involvement, or its sheer longevity, but simply and solely because Israel is Jewish. Only the Jews, he wrote, straddle humanity’s deepest fault lines: in the last century, “between religious tradition and secular modernity, capitalism and socialism, democracy and totalitarianism”; and now, in the form of Israel, “between Arabs and Jews, Global North and Global South, and white and non-white One more example: in August last year, Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, published a report titled peoples”. Therefore the “Jewish State”, he wrote, is “of great and ominous significance” for all of humanity; and it is Israel, not Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, or Xi’s China, which is causing a “collapse of the free world”.
“Palestine and the Right to Food”, which argued that “the tools and techniques that will free the Palestinian people from occupation, oppression, and exploitation will ultimately be the same ones that can free us all.” Fakhri was writing about hunger and the global food industry, and it’s that same claim, that same belief, that freeing Palestine frees the world; in this case, it promises liberation from the harms done by industrialised agriculture and processed foods. Even this, it seems, could be overcome if only Gaza were free. “Most of the world’s population”, Fakhri explained, “suffer under food systems that harm or kill them through slower forms of violence than in Gaza today”; “By fighting Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinians, people are in effect also fighting for their own freedom from hunger.”
I have no idea what the people making these arguments think is the material basis for their claims. It strikes me as implausible, to say the least, that the IDF lifting restrictions on Gazan fishermen would somehow bring an end to agricultural deforestation in Brazil. But these aren’t really material claims at all, but modern expressions of a persistent and enduring belief that Jews, in one form or another, are the keystone in the arch that holds up civilisation, and that if you want to bring the existing order crashing down and replace it with something radically transformative, you have to first remove this Jewish influence; or at least take away its power.
