Julio Levit Koldorf
“We Arabs are damn lucky that Jews do not behave like Arabs.”
— Fred Maroun, Lebanese human-rights activist
There are conflicts whose tragedy lies not only in their casualties but in their choreography.
The Palestinian national movement, adrift since its inception, discovered early that the most advantageous political decision it could make was not strategic, territorial or diplomatic, but symbolic: It chose its enemy. It chose the Jew.
In that choice — theatrical, shrewd, almost mythographic — it found the gravitational force it lacked. For without the Jew, there is no stage, no audience and no global echo chamber.
The world’s moral gaze fixes, almost magnetically, on the Jewish question. And thus, the Palestinians secured what no military victory could grant them: eternal protagonism.
This was not merely a political calculation; it was an existential one. By positioning themselves against the Jews, the Palestinians inherited the world’s fascination with Jewish vulnerability. They understood — whether consciously or through a learned historical instinct — that victimhood is a form of capital and that proximity to the Jew amplifies it. The tragedy is that this calculus infantilized an entire people, trapping them in a self-image of helplessness, while granting them a moral immunity rarely interrogated by those who claim to defend them.
Meanwhile, the world is transfixed by a conflict whose asymmetry is not military but symbolic. Everyone debates the river and the sea; activists fly across continents to stage flotillas against Israel and fashionable indignation becomes a form of social currency. Yet the same moral enthusiasm evaporates when confronted with real famine, real genocide, real dismemberment — the kind seen today in Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, Mali. These crises, devoid of Jews, attract neither celebrities, nor activism, nor global solidarity. Their victims perish in a vacuum of indifference, punished not by their suffering but by their inability to fit into the West’s preferred moral dramaturgy.
The obscene paradox is that the more authentic the horror, the less visible it becomes. Sudanese children do not trend on social media; Christian communities being erased by Islamist militias do not receive vigils in London or marches in Madrid; no Hollywood actor composes an earnest monologue about Boko Haram. Their tragedy suffers from a fatal narrative defect; it cannot be blamed on Jews.
And thus, the same ideological machinery that condemns Israel with operatic fervor is silent when confronted with Muslim-on-Muslim or Muslim-on-Christian atrocities. The reason is simple: These catastrophes expose the true, uncomfortable enemy — not Israel, not Zionism, not “Western colonialism,” but the metastasis of radical Islamist ideology across continents. It is an enemy far too dangerous, far too proximate and far too destabilizing to confront directly. So, the world avoids it by fixating on the safer antagonist: the Jew, who alone provides the paradoxical luxury of an enemy who will not retaliate against moral theatrics.
This is why Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, Spanish activist Hanan Alcalde (aka “Barbie Gaza”) and the constellation of performative humanitarians do not go to Sudan or Congo. It is not courage that takes them to Gaza flotillas; it is the certainty of Israeli presence. They know that the Israel Defense Forces will prevent them from entering a warzone and, critically, ensure their safety while doing so. They would never dare enter Sudan, where no one would protect them, or Gaza under Hamas control, where they would be used, filmed and discarded. Their activism is not moral but an opportunistic and calibrated targeting of the only enemy that guarantees their survival.
The irony is that in being chosen as the enemy, the Jew becomes the world’s moral anchor point. Jews are accused not because of what they do but because of what they represent: the last safe repository of universal blame. Yet this position, unwanted but inescapable, grants a clarity unavailable to those who wield victimhood as a political instrument. We see with painful precision that the world’s outrage is not guided by suffering but by narrative utility.
The massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, was not an aberration but a manifestation of the same ideological cruelty that now tears through African villages. The perpetrators share the same theological grammar, the same sacrificial aesthetics and the same contempt for the human person. What they did to the Jews is what they now do to others — and what they intend, without disguise, to do in Europe, North America and Australia.
The Palestinian leadership’s greatest achievement was not state-building but dramaturgy: the ability to mobilize the world by choosing the perfect antagonist. Yet the true enemy facing humanity today is not Israel; it is the ideology that sanctifies annihilation, that weaponizes victimhood, that expands through grievance and moral blackmail. It is the ideology that dismembers civilians in Kibbutz Be’eri and in Sudanese churches with equal theological fervor.
Julio Levit Koldorf is a scholar specializing in communication and politics with a focus on political antisemitism. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia, the University of Zaragoza and Oxford University.
The Palestinian political strategy is known as “sumud” or steadfastness.
The philosophy of sumud is rooted in Palestinians’ implacable belief in the righteousness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It operates both passively and actively in Palestinian culture, demanding stubbornness and tolerating ruthlessness, violence, and duplicity.
At sumud’s core lies the unswerving, blinkered view that Israel is illegitimate and its duration limited. As a result, Palestinian leaders have for decades mobilized their society to outlast Israel. Indoctrination begins at a young age through family, education, and media, and later encourages more aggressive resistance, including terrorism.
In other words, Palestinians are playing a long game. But plans for a functioning Palestinian state that do not depend on foreign aid have been conspicuously absent.