ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM -
Written by my husbond Thomas Finn - translated for you.
To my Jewish friends.
The times call for clarity, and many who follow this 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 being. I stand with you. Not conditionally. Not to the extent that it can be explained without cost. Not only when it is 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 country, and with the individual Jewish boy or girl who today in Malmö, Paris or Copenhagen considers whether the Star of David should be tucked inside their shirt before stepping out into the street.
I stand there because I have read history, and because I know what it means when a society begins to look at you with anger again. I have seen it in my own lifetime move from the unthinkable to the everyday, and I have seen how language has slowly been mined around you, so that what is happening can no longer be described with the words we once had for it.
I stand there also because I am a Christian, and because my own faith does not make sense without yours. Jesus was a Jew. Mary was a Jew. 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 ever reaches the manger. To be a Christian and stand indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people is an impossibility for me. It is to saw off the branch one is sitting on.
And I stand there because I refuse to be one of those who, in hindsight, will say that we did not know, that it was complicated, that we did not have all the information. Because we do. It is in front of us every day. What is lacking is not information. What is lacking is courage. To say it out loud, unambiguously, and to cut the patterns apart.
Therefore this.
Not as a contribution to a debate, but as what I owe you to say clearly, once, so that there is no doubt.
For we stand in a moment that more and more Western Europeans now recognize, even though no one has prepared them for it. A Jewish friend, a colleague, an acquaintance, takes off her Star of David before she walks out the door. A couple refrains 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 simply 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 discussions. Not in the newspapers. But in the streets, where things show what they are.
To understand why it has come to this, one has to understand the word that has been turned into a magic formula for hatred — Zionism. And one has to understand it WITHOUT the filter that 40 years of propaganda have 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 from the beginning it was not one thing. It was a reaction. A reaction to 2000 years of European history in which the Jews were a people without a land, where they could live in one place for generations and still be expelled in a week, where they were massacred in the Crusades, burned during the plague, thrown out of England, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, massacred in the pogroms of Eastern Europe, accused of poisoning wells, accused of drinking Christian children’s blood, accused of controlling the banks and at the same time of being poor communists, accused of being too visible and at the same time of hiding. A history that culminated in the Dreyfus affair in Paris, where an assimilated French officer, decorated, patriotic, Jewish, was falsely convicted of treason while the mob on the boulevards shouted “death to the Jews.”
It was there Herzl stood as a journalist and understood that assimilation did not work. That the Jews could not think themselves into a place in Europe. That no matter how deeply they stepped in, Europe would sooner or later spit them out again.
Zionism was the answer to that realization. But it was not one answer, it was many. Socialist Zionists who dreamed of collective farms and a new working humanism. Religious Zionists who saw the return to Zion as the fulfillment of prophecy. Cultural Zionists who primarily wanted a spiritual center, 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 disagreed deeply about almost everything. The only thing they shared was the fundamental insight Herzl formulated —
A people that has nowhere to go cannot survive a Europe that sooner or later decides to wipe them out.
And then exactly that happened. Precisely 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 Jewish presence in that land began in 1948.
The 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 more than 600 times. The word Jerusalem does not appear a single time(!) in the Quran. And at 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 more than 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 simply not a narrative that fits into today’s template, so it disappeared.
So when someone in 2026 says that he is anti-Zionist, he is not first and foremost 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 less than 80 years. The answer comes from three sources that have found each other, even though in principle they ought to 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 rooted in texts that speak of the Jews as pigs and apes, as betrayers of the prophet, as eternal enemies who must be fought until Judgment Day. It was imported into Europe by many millions of people from societies where this narrative is taught from childhood. It is measurable in every study of antisemitic attitudes among Muslim populations in Europe, where the percentages are two to four times higher than among the non-Muslim population. And it is that hatred that today walks the streets in Copenhagen, in Malmö, in Paris, shouting “from the river to the sea” and “khaybar khaybar ya yahud.” The latter phrase is a direct reference to a massacre Muhammad himself carried out against a Jewish tribe in the year 628. It is not metaphor. It is program.
The second source is the identity-political machine of the left. Over the course of half a century, it has worked its way toward a world model in which humanity is divided into oppressors and oppressed, where moral legitimacy is handed out according to victim status — and therefore where the Jews, because they succeeded, because they survived, because they became one of the success stories of the West, were placed in the oppressor category.
Israel was given the role of the ultimate colonizer, Jews globally as agents of white power, and all of this could be taken at face value because the category had replaced observation. You no longer had to see. You had a template. And the template said that the old European hatred of Jews could now be carried forward under progressive banners, because now it was no longer racism. It was ‘anti-colonialism.’ It was solidarity with the oppressed. It was, again and again, the ancient hatred dressed in the currently approved costume.
The third source is the European substrate itself. A substrate we insisted had been cleansed out with the Nuremberg trials, but which never disappeared. It lies in the language, in the jokes, in the look 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 talk about Rothschilds and Soros, about banks and media, about Epstein and Mossad, as if their own words were 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 the hatred in public, the substrate discovered that it was permitted again. And it woke up.
And right around here, we come to the question one has to enter into if the analysis is to be honest. Because there always comes a point in this conversation where someone raises a hand and says — but wait a second. Aren’t Jews overrepresented at the top of Western societies. On Wall Street. In Hollywood. In academia. In the media. In Nobel Prizes. Isn’t that simply pointing out what one sees?
Here one must not let one’s hand shake. 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 numbers form a pattern, not an accident. To deny that would be both dishonest and strategically losing, because anyone who has ever spoken with an antisemite knows that this is precisely the number that is used to confirm the oldest conspiracy theory in the world — 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 the Jews in Europe were forbidden to own land. Forbidden to join the guilds. Forbidden to practice most of the trades that defined European life. What they were allowed to do was a small and often despised selection of professions — moneylending, which Christians were not allowed to engage in, trade, tax collection, medical and legal work in certain cities. Professions that all had one thing in common, that they required literacy, 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, the country, the whole continent, land is a curse. Books are a blessing.
And over this lay a religious premise that was unique in medieval Europe — in the Jewish tradition every boy was supposed to be able to read the Torah. Universal male literacy, in a Europe where peasants could not write their own names, and where even noblemen often had written letters read aloud to them by priests. Generation after generation, the only capital you could pass on to your child was intellectual. And when European universities finally opened themselves to Jews in the 19th century, there entered a population that carried with it 30 generations of compressed hunger for learning, and a culture in which learning was the highest good.
Combine those two things. Centuries of forced specialization in portable intellectual capital, and a religion that elevated learning to duty. What does that produce when it is released into modern society? Overrepresentation in exactly the fields that reward those qualities — academia, science, law, medicine, finance, media.
And now comes the point that knocks the bottom out of the whole conspiracy barrel.
The same pattern exists everywhere a minority has been forced into the same structural position. The Chinese diasporas in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines make up a few percent of the population and control a significant part of the private economy. The Indians in East Africa were so dominant in trade that Idi Amin expelled them from Uganda in 1972. The Lebanese in West Africa. The Parsis in India. The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Huguenots in Prussia. This is what sociologists call ‘middleman minorities,’ and Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it. All of these groups display the same pattern. Minority. Shut out from land and political power. Strong family and community ties. Educational culture. Portable capital. The result is the same every time. Success in new roles when modernity finally opens up.
There is nothing specifically Jewish about this pattern. It is what happens to any people that for generations have been forced to own only what they could carry.
Which means that the conspiracy theory is not an observation. It is an inversion. It takes the pattern, and instead of asking ‘why did it arise,’ it asks ‘who is behind it.’ It takes the result of 1500 years of exclusion and calls it a plot. It turns success into proof of evil, instead of proof of what a people does when it has no other choice than to become highly competent.
And then comes envy, which is the real fuel of antisemitism.
Because success that cannot be explained by privilege becomes unbearable in a society that has built its entire moral order on the idea that success must always be explained by privilege.
When a people who are 0.2 percent of the world take 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes, and those same people in Europe 80 years ago were transported to the camps in cattle cars, then there is something in the story of oppressors and oppressed that creaks. And the easiest way to make the creaking disappear is to say that it was all a lie. That they were on top all along. That they still are.
And that is what is (again) happening in these years, and that is what connects the medieval anti-Jewish pogroms with Goebbels’ radio and 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 plot. The pogrom follows naturally after.
And here it must be said precisely, because precision is the only thing that holds when the discussion enters into the names that are used as code.
Soros finances a wide range of foundations and initiatives that one can — in my understanding should — be deeply critical of. Open Society Foundations have had real and documentable influence on migration policy, legal systems and media in both Europe and the United States. To disagree with that influence, and the way it takes place, is not antisemitism. It is political disagreement about one concrete man’s concrete choices of investments. But the moment the name Soros stops meaning Soros and begins to mean “the Jewish money,” the moment he comes to stand for something larger than himself, we are no longer in political debate. Then we are back in the old template.
The same goes for Epstein. He was really criminal. His network was real and we still do not know what it actually was. His death in custody is still unresolved enough to justify all kinds of suspicion. But to be angry about that case is not antisemitism. That case is worth being angry about. 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 mixed together, then we have once again left reality and moved back into the template.
And Rothschild. In 1850 the family was a real financial dynasty in Europe. In 2026 the name is first and foremost a code word. The family does not have the central role in the world economy that it had one and a half centuries ago. And yet the name appears as an explanatory model for everything from central banks to wars to pandemics, because code words survive longer than facts.
That is the pattern one has to 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 criticizes Soros, but when he uses Soros as a code word for something he does not dare say out loud.
Real criticism of power is legitimate and necessary. Power must be scrutinized. Billionaires must be scrutinized. Financiers must be scrutinized. Criminal networks must be scrutinized. It just has to be done with the actual names and the actual actions, not with ethnic categories that carry 2000 years of mythological material with them.
You can criticize Soros without meaning it about the Jews. You can condemn Epstein, whatever he was, without meaning it about the Jews. You can analyze financial power without meaning it about the Jews. That is what we must be able to do. And that is the discipline that has become difficult, because the times reward the lazy shortcut in which criticism of one man becomes an accusation against a people.
And the most absurd thing is that the three sources of the return of antisemitism in theory ought to be enemies.
The Islamist ought to despise the atheistic, progressive, relativistic, gender- and reality-dissolving left, which is the direct inversion of the unchanging God-given order that the Quran and its supplementary texts constitute — everything his own order has been put in the world to abolish.
The left ought to despise the patriarchy of Islamism, its homophobia, its treatment of women and minorities, its stock-conservative immovability. Everything it has otherwise spent half a century fighting, and itself claims to stand against.
The ordinary European ought to despise both, because he has spent a century learning what it costs when ideologies are allowed to define who gets to live. He has seen where it ends, and has promised himself never again.
But they have found each other anyway, because they have one thing in common — the Jew as the unifying enemy, and a pattern of Jewish success that all three can use in their own version. It is the oldest mechanism in history. When civilizations fall into confusion, they look for the people that can carry everyone’s dissatisfaction. And it is always the same people.
Added to this comes the element that is most uncomfortable for us ourselves to look at. We have allowed language to become mined, so that 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 the citizens are Palestinian Arabs and have full voting rights. The word genocide is used about a war that Hamas started on October 7, 2023 with massacres, rapes, hostage-taking and an explicit charter to wipe out the Jews globally. And the word antisemitism has at the same time been watered down so much that it may only be used about language so brutal that no one uses it any longer, 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 chased at a university. We call it sorrow over Gaza when a Jew is stabbed in Manchester.
And let me say immediately, in order to pre-empt any ‘whatsaboutism,’ because that is always where the next objection comes.
There is suffering in Gaza. There are civilian casualties. There is politics in Israel one can legitimately be deeply against, there is a settlement policy one can criticize in strong words, there is a conduct of war whose details deserve scrutiny, there is an intelligence service there that, as such things do, stretches the boundaries of what is acceptable. But that is not what the question is about.
The question is whether Jews have the right to a country, and whether that right falls away every time that country wages a war, or is part of a conflict, for which no other country would have its right to exist taken away. France did not lose its right to exist in Algeria. The United States did not lose it in Vietnam. Russia does not lose it in Chechnya or Ukraine. Only Israel. Only the Jews. Only there has warfare become an argument that the state behind it ought not to exist.
The language is mined because the truth is uncomfortable. The truth is that Europe, after 80 years, once again has a living hatred of Jews, and that it has returned both from outside and from inside, both from those we let in by the many millions without asking what they were bringing 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 in this landscape that Zionism must be understood. Not as a movement the Jews ought to be ashamed of. But as the repeated admission from a people that has 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 plainly necessary when Europe once again begins to look at them with anger.
And this is where the conversation must finally land.
The return of antisemitism is not a Jewish problem. The Jews have never been the problem. They are the symptom. They are the people who are the first to feel it when a civilization 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 allows the oppressed to be defined by template and not by reality, then the Jews begin to pack. And it is we who are left behind.
They are not leaving Europe because they have given up.
They are leaving Europe because we have.
❤️🔥🪽
…
And let me add this as well, because it is worth pausing at, because it lies there all the time as an unspoken assumption in the debate, and because it is the assumption that collapses the argument when it comes to the surface.
Judaism is not a missionary religion. It does not seek the conversion of your soul. It does not ask you whether you are saved. It does not confront you in the street. It does not ask 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 “those not yet subjected.” On the contrary, it is difficult to convert to Judaism. The rabbi is traditionally supposed to reject you three times before he takes you seriously.
It is a religion that points inward, not outward.
It is about a specific people’s covenant with a specific God, and about how that people are to live faithfully to that covenant. The rest of the world is allowed to remain the world.
And it is precisely this that must be held up against Islam, because here we are at one of the most overlooked differences in the entire conversation as a whole.
The inner architecture of Islam 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 allowing the House of War to remain what it is. To bring it under the House of Islam is not a possible abuse, it is a duty.
It is in this sense that Islam is not a religion in the Western meaning of the word, but a total social order that seeks the political, legal and territorial implementation of itself, everywhere it encounters 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 intention.
That 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 echoes through the entire conversation.
Judaism wants to preserve itself.
Christianity wants to call.
Islam wants everything.
Those are three very different orientations toward the world, and it is only the last that ideologically cannot rest before it has subjugated the final corner.
Which leads to the point that in modern debate has been systematically turned upside down.
When the Jews in 1948 got a country, they got something that in scope corresponds to around a quarter of one percent of the total Arab-Muslim territory in the region. 22 Arab states and one Jewish one. And for 80 years it has been the one that has been accused of colonization, while the other side has rejected every peace plan, started multiple wars of annihilation and maintained charters that openly call for the total destruction of the Jews. This is not a symmetrical conflict where one side has simply received more attention. It is an asymmetry in the very religious and political DNA, where one side does not need to expand in order to live, and the other side cannot rest until the expansion is total.
When a Jew today says that he wants a Jewish homeland, he is saying that he wants a place where his people can live in peace.
When an Islamist says that he wants the caliphate, the ummah, the worldwide subjugation under God’s law, he is saying that he wants everything.
Those two desires are not two versions of the same thing. They are each other’s structural opposites. The one is a people that wants a place. The other is an order that wants the world.
That is worth including in one’s reflections, when looking at and interpreting the world, and wishing to understand the movements we are seeing and who stands where.
/Thomas Finn - 21 April 2026.