For a decade I kept a Google Alert on the word “antisemitic.” Eventually I shut it off. Not because the hate stopped; my inbox couldn’t take the volume anymore. Every swastika, every assault, every campus mob, landing in one man’s email until the email broke.
In those same years, Israel built a machine to fight the thing that broke my inbox. The Foreign Ministry has a department for combating antisemitism. The Diaspora Affairs Ministry renamed itself the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, in case anyone missed the point. The Prime Minister’s Office runs its own initiatives. There is a special envoy. The Mossad keeps a file. The World Zionist Organization (WZO) has a department, the Jewish Agency has programs, and beneath them all an ecosystem of nonprofits, each insisting it is the address.
My favorite example is almost funny. In 2024, the government passed a worthy resolution recognizing Diaspora Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks as victims of hostile acts. To carry it out, Israel set up an interministerial committee: the Jewish Agency, the WZO, the Foreign Ministry, the PMO, and the National Security Council. Five bodies to honor the dead. How many does it take to protect the living?
We are spending billions on this fight. So let me ask what nobody asks from the conference stage: how’s that working out for us? The WZO reports an eightfold increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide since October 7.
A swastika on a Jewish school isn’t news anymore. I have reporters whose entire beat is antisemitism, and I could hire 10 more tomorrow. If eight bodies shared responsibility for missile defense and interceptions collapsed like this, someone would have resigned by now.
And that’s the easy problem. The harder one is that I’m not sure Israel can fight this fight at all.
The wrong messenger
Let’s be honest about the past three years. Much of the hatred toward Jews didn’t start that way. It started as hatred of Israel, of Gaza footage, of a war people watched on their phones, and then it crossed the line, from the Jewish state to the Jewish student, the Jewish school, the kosher restaurant.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned a decade ago that antisemitism survives the way viruses do, by mutating. Jews were hated first for their religion, then for their race, now for their nation state.
The current strain arrived exactly as he predicted, wearing the language of human rights and insisting it has no problem with Jews, only with Israel. But here’s the trap: when Israel is the accusation, Israel can’t be the defense attorney. No press release from a Jerusalem ministry will persuade a 20-year-old whose entire picture of us is a war. The message might be right. The messenger was disqualified before he opened his mouth.
Zionism promised that a Jewish state would be the answer to antisemitism, not its case manager. And yet Israel can’t stand aside, because Jews abroad are attacked in our name. The question was never whether Israel has a role, only which one.
Then there’s what we discuss least: Israel and Diaspora interests aren’t the same thing, and nowhere is the gap wider than Europe. Jerusalem courts right-wing and far-right parties, some with histories that include Nazi collaboration or worse.
Some have done real work confronting their pasts, purged their antisemites, and become reliable friends in Brussels and at the UN. Others just learned to hide it better. For the Foreign Ministry it’s votes, vetoes, and arms deals, and that’s legitimate.
A Jew in Vienna doesn’t live inside Israel’s UN arithmetic. He lives under the government Israel just legitimized. I’m not arguing Israel should refuse the support; a country in survival mode doesn’t have that luxury, and some of these parties have earned a second look.
My argument is smaller and harder: when Jerusalem makes that calculation, it almost never asks the Jews who will live with the result.
Who leads?
So what is Israel’s role? Things only a state can provide: intelligence on threats to Jewish communities, security funding, legal and diplomatic muscle, recognition for victims. Israel should do those superbly.
The public fight, in parliaments, on campuses, in city councils, has to be led by the communities themselves. They have the standing, the accents, and the passports Jerusalem lacks.
Israel’s job is to arm them, not front them, and certainly not to elbow them aside with a dozen competing Israeli logos.
Which brings me to the next government, whoever forms it. Three commitments, one page.
One address. Antisemitism mutates; our bureaucracy multiplies. Fold the whole file into a single statutory National Authority for Combating Antisemitism. One accountable head, one consolidated budget, every scattered shekel routed through it, results published annually. We built exactly this for cyber. We can build it for Jews.
One division of labor. The state does what only a state can do: protection, intelligence, law. The communities lead the public battle, funded generously and directed by nobody in Jerusalem.
One conversation. The decision on whom Israel befriends stays in Jerusalem, and it should. But no embrace of a foreign party before sitting down, formally, with that country’s Jewish community. Before the handshake, not after the headline. Consultation isn’t a veto. It’s the minimum owed to the people who live with the consequences.
There’s a bigger version of that last idea, floated for years, though never for this reason: giving the Diaspora a formal voice in Jerusalem, an advisory council attached to the Knesset, or Knesset members representing Jewish communities by region.
France runs the model in reverse. French citizens living in Israel help elect their own deputy to the National Assembly, a seat held today by Caroline Yadan.
If a Jew in Netanya has a voice in Paris, a Jew in Paris can have a structured voice in Jerusalem. Not a vote on war and peace. A seat at the table on the one file that is about him.
Sacks left us one more warning: “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.” He delivered that line to the European Parliament; I would hang it over the door of the next cabinet room. And here is my test for the government that sits there, cheaper than any of its dozen budgets: I want to turn that Google Alert back on. Not because the hate will have ended; Sacks taught us it only mutates. Because when it lands in my inbox, I’ll finally know who’s supposed to answer.■
Zvika Klein is the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post , an Israeli-American journalist, columnist, speaker, and moderator covering Israel, the Jewish world, Diaspora affairs, antisemitism, and Israel-Diaspora relations. He previously served as the paper’s Jewish World analyst and is recognized as one of the leading journalists covering Jewish communities worldwide.