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Criticism is not the problem; the reversal is. Since October 7, 2023, parts of the activist and party left have established a fixed repertoire: perpetrators become resistance fighters, victims become perpetrators, Israel becomes the power controlling everything, and the Jewish state becomes a crime without equal. The terms are modern. The patterns behind them are not.
What matters is the pattern that has repeatedly become visible since October 7. What is presented as Middle East policy or radical criticism of Israel draws on mechanisms that are well known from the history of antisemitism: conspiracy, demonization, double standards, and the reversal of perpetrator and victim.
The non-legally binding IHRA working definition of antisemitism provides a clear standard for this. Criticism of Israel, as also directed at other states, is not antisemitic. By contrast, anyone who claims Jewish world conspiracies, denies the Jewish right to self-determination, equates Israel with the National Socialists, revives classic blood libels, or holds Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions is operating within precisely the patterns that the IHRA identifies as examples of antisemitism.
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Aus dem SCHLAGSEITE X-ArchivHow the October 7 massacre is reinterpreted
The Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, is extensively documented. Civilians were murdered, people were abducted, communities were attacked, and the Nova music festival was assaulted. The subsequent investigation by the Israel Defense Forces recorded a total of 344 civilian festivalgoers killed, as well as 34 security personnel killed. Forty-four people were abducted to Gaza.
The claim that reports of sexual violence were merely Israeli propaganda does not withstand the United Nations’ investigation. UN Special Representative Pramila Patten stated after an on-site investigation that there were reasonable grounds to believe, that conflict-related sexual violence had occurred at multiple locations on October 7, including at the Nova festival, along Route 232, and in Re’im.
Nevertheless, a counter-narrative spread early on: festivalgoers had mainly been caught in crossfire, Israeli helicopters had killed their own people, or the victims were not civilians anyway because of Israel’s compulsory military service. Questions about Israeli fire on October 7 were investigated. The subsequent Israel Defense Forces investigation into the Nova attack does not support the narrative of a festival massacre caused by Israel. It describes an Israeli attack helicopter that spotted a convoy of Hamas terrorists on Route 232. The crew knew nothing about the festival, had no contact with ground forces, and therefore did not open fire on the convoy.
A documented terrorist attack is thus turned into a story in which the perpetrators gradually disappear from view and the victims are ultimately held responsible for their own massacre. That is precisely the reversal of perpetrator and victim.
Antisemitism as a conspiracy narrative about October 7
The claim that Israel deliberately allowed October 7 to happen or staged it itself in order to create a pretext for the war in Gaza goes even further. There is no reliable evidence for this claim.
The pattern is older than the State of Israel. Jews, or the Jewish state, no longer appear as victims of an attack, but as the secret directors of their own suffering. The terrorist attack is not simply denied. It is incorporated into a conspiracy narrative in which Israel is ultimately supposed to be behind the crime itself.
Where Israel is portrayed as the secret director of its own suffering, where Jewish power allegedly controls events, and where even a massacre is declared a tool of a hidden strategy, a classic antisemitic conspiracy pattern lives on. Only the State of Israel has taken the place formerly attributed collectively to “the Jews.”
Hamas and its antisemitic ideology
For Hamas to appear as merely a liberation movement, a central part of the story has to disappear: its own ideology.
The 1988 Hamas Charter contains openly antisemitic passages, religiously based hostility toward Jews, and classic conspiracy myths. The 2017 political document changed the language significantly and now explicitly distinguished between Jews and Zionists. It accepted a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines as a political formula for consensus, but did not recognize Israel and did not abandon armed struggle.
The Middle East Institute summarizes this change accordingly: less openly antisemitic language, but no recognition of Israel’s right to exist and no renunciation of armed resistance.
Anyone who presents October 7 as “decolonization” or mere “resistance” while omitting this ideological foundation is not conducting an analysis. They are turning terror into a political symbol of liberation and murdered Israelis into representatives of an allegedly colonial system. The perpetrators are given a motive; the victims are assigned partial blame.
Slogans and symbols are not meaningless
The red, downward-pointing triangle was used by the Qassam Brigades in propaganda videos to mark Israeli targets. Anyone who adopts this symbol in connection with Hamas propaganda also adopts its visual language. Context does not determine whether the symbol suddenly becomes harmless. It determines what meaning it carries concretely.
The same applies to “From the River to the Sea.” The slogan is used by different actors. In an explicitly Hamas-related context, the State Protection Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court I again classified it in December 2025 as an identifying mark of the banned terrorist organization. The December 2025 decision is not final. However, the chamber had already made this classification in November 2024; that decision became final after the appeal was withdrawn.
Legally, the specific context remains decisive. That does not change the political message when the slogan is used together with Hamas symbolism, glorification of terrorism, or calls for Israel’s elimination. In that case, it is not a harmless geographical formula, but a rejection of a Jewish state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Blood libels do not disappear; they change their packaging
The historical continuity is particularly clear in unsubstantiated narratives about alleged organ theft, deliberate poisoning, or other bodily crimes committed by Israelis or Jews. Such motifs are not modern human-rights criticism. They draw directly on old notions in which Jews secretly use other people’s bodies, blood, or lives for their own purposes.
In allegations such as starvation policy, war crimes, or genocide, what matters is not the most inflammatory catchword, but the evidence. A serious accusation does not become a fact merely because it is repeated thousands of times at demonstrations, on social networks, or in headlines.
The legal situation concerning the genocide accusation must be described clearly. Proceedings in South Africa v. Israel are pending before the International Court of Justice . The Court has ordered provisional measures. These measures are not a judgment on the merits. There is no final judgment on whether Israel is committing or has committed genocide in Gaza. Anyone claiming that an Israeli genocide has already been established by a court is claiming something the International Court of Justice has not decided.
Victim figures are not a matter of faith
The figures for casualties in Gaza are handled similarly. The figures from the local health ministry are widely used internationally. The ministry operates within an administration controlled by Hamas and does not reliably distinguish between civilians and combatants in its published totals.
The collection methods changed during the war. At times, hospital and morgue data, media reports, and reports from families were incorporated into different datasets. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy documented significant problems in earlier versions, including incomplete datasets, placeholder identification numbers, and insufficiently transparent revisions.
Later lists were substantially cleaned up and completed. That does not change the core problem. A total figure alone says neither how many of those killed were civilians or combatants, nor who was responsible for individual deaths. Anyone who suppresses these distinctions and immediately derives a political or legal conclusion from a total uses statistics as a moral sledgehammer.
That is precisely why casualty figures are not a matter of faith. They must be checked, contextualized, and assessed according to how they were collected. An authority run by Hamas does not become an independent statistical agency merely because international media adopt its figures.
The colonizer must look European
Another common pattern describes Israelis collectively as “white European colonizers.” Historically, this template does not hold.
Israeli Jews come from very different communities. A large Pew survey found that among Israeli Jews, 48 percent identified as Sephardic or Mizrahi, compared with 45 percent Ashkenazi. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have family roots, among other places, in North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the Muslim world.
The narrative of the white European colonial project therefore works only if a substantial part of Israel’s Jewish population is cut out of the picture. Mizrahim and Sephardim disrupt the template. So they are left out.
Double standards and antisemitism related to Israel
The reversal ultimately works through selection. Hamas rockets, other armed groups, years of rocket fire against Israel, Hezbollah’s attack on northern Israel, or the military use of civilian spaces are relegated to a footnote. The focus remains on Israel. The actor that attacks disappears. The state that responds becomes the sole cause.
This is precisely where the double standard begins. The IHRA explicitly identifies applying standards to Israel that are not demanded of any other democratic state as a possible example of antisemitism related to Israel. The standard is therefore not whether criticism sounds harsh. The standard is whether Israel is judged by rules that suddenly no longer apply to other states.
It becomes even clearer when it concerns Jews outside Israel. Anyone who holds Jewish communities, Israelis abroad, or individual Jews responsible for decisions by the Israeli government is not discussing Middle East policy. They are making Jews collectively liable. The IHRA explicitly names this exact pattern.
Why this is more than a collection of bad arguments
Individual errors can be corrected. This repertoire serves a different function. It provides relief. Those who do not have to view Hamas as an Islamist terrorist organization with its own antisemitic ideology also do not have to explain why parts of their own political milieu adopt its symbols, slogans, and narratives.
This systematically shifts the discussion. The starting point is no longer the terrorist attack of October 7, but rather the question of what Israel allegedly must have done for this attack to appear understandable, explainable, or even legitimate. The perpetrator becomes someone reacting. The victim becomes the actual cause.
These recurring argumentative patterns are not evidence in every individual case. What matters are the specific statements, slogans, and narratives themselves. Some of them are political propaganda. Others reproduce classic patterns of antisemitism almost by the textbook.
Criticism of Israel needs no special rules. It needs the same rules as any other political criticism: facts, evidence, context, and comparable standards. What goes beyond that and turns Israel into an omnipotent, uniquely criminal, and secretly controlling power is not particularly courageous criticism.
Where Jewish victims are rewritten as perpetrators, where Jews worldwide are expected to answer for Israel, where the Jewish state appears as a hidden power controlling events, and where old conspiracy theories and blood libels are translated into political language, the boundary to criticism ceased to exist long ago. These are old antisemitic patterns. Only the vocabulary is new.
Criticism asks about decisions, responsibility, and evidence. Antisemitic inversion requires something else: Israel as a unique perpetrator, Jewish power as a universal explanation, and Jewish victims as part of the guilt. That is precisely how the difference can be recognized.
ℹ️ Factual basis and primary sources for the article 📑
▶️ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance:
Working Definition of Antisemitism
Definition and examples of antisemitism related to Israel, double standards, Nazi comparisons, conspiracy myths, and assigning collective responsibility.
▶️ United Nations:
Report by Pramila Patten on sexual violence on October 7
UN findings on conflict-related sexual violence during the Hamas-led attack.
▶️ Times of Israel / IDF investigation:
Investigation into the attack on the Nova festival
Figures on festivalgoers and security personnel killed, those abducted, as well as findings by the Israeli armed forces on the course of the attack.
▶️ Yale Law School, Avalon Project:
Hamas Covenant 1988
English documentation of the original Hamas charter.
▶️ Middle East Institute:
Hamas Backgrounder
Contextualization of Hamas ideology and the 2017 founding document.
▶️ Berlin Regional Court I:
Decision of December 2025 on “From the River to the Sea”
Renewed classification of the slogan by the state security chamber as an identifying mark of Hamas. The decision of December 2025 was not legally binding when the press release was published. The corresponding decision by the same chamber from November 2024 became legally binding after the appeal was withdrawn.
▶️ International Court of Justice:
South Africa v. Israel
Official procedural overview of the ongoing proceedings under the Genocide Convention. No final judgment on the merits has been issued.
▶️ Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
Assessing the Gaza Death Toll After Eighteen Months of War
Analysis of data collection, revisions, and methodological problems concerning Gaza casualty figures.
▶️ Pew Research Center:
Religious and Cultural Identity in Israel
Data on the ethnic self-identification of Israeli Jews.
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