There is a tragic similarity in the psychology of collective accusation. When Nicholas Kristof paints Jews as uniquely bloodthirsty, uniquely indifferent to suffering, or uniquely responsible for every death in a complicated war, he participates in an ancient instinct: the need to turn Jews into a moral monster large enough to absorb the world's rage. The language may wear the suit and tie of humanitarian concern, but underneath it lives the old medieval poison — the belief that Jewish power is uniquely sinister, uniquely corrupting, uniquely illegitimate.
What makes Kristof’s rhetoric so poisonous is not merely that it is dead wrong but that it drags an ancient moral sickness into a modern newspaper costume and calls it conscience. To smear Jews collectively is bad enough; to dress that smear up as concern, to launder accusation through the language of virtue, is a deeper disgrace. It is the old blood libel with better tailoring. The setting has changed, the vocabulary has changed, but the instinct is the same: take a whole people, flatten their humanity, and present suspicion as if it were wisdom.
And yet the hypocrisy does not stop there. The same kind of collective indictment, the same lazy moral vandalism, appears inside Israel itself, where ultra-Orthodox factions too often speak as though the state, the secular public, and the IDF are not fellow Jews but something alien to be scorned, blamed, or exploited. The result is a grotesque mirror image. One side slanders Jews from the outside; the other erodes Jewish solidarity from within. One attacks with accusation, the other with contempt. Different uniforms, same moral defect.The secular Jew becomes spiritually contaminated. The Israeli government becomes a machine of impurity.The soldier who risks his life becomes morally inferior to the man who condemns him from the safety of a Beit Midrash study hall.
History should have cured Jews of this madness. It should have taught us what happens when Jews become incapable of distinguishing disagreement from demonization. For two thousand years, defenseless Jews prayed for someone — anyone — who could defend Jewish blood. Now, for the first time in centuries, there exists a sovereign Jewish state with Jewish pilots, Jewish tanks, Jewish intelligence officers, Jewish infantry. And still there are those who speak of these defenders almost as if they are agents of evil rather than the shield standing between Jewish life and annihilation.A serious people cannot survive on this kind of poison.
Jews have endured too much history, too much exile, too much blood, to surrender to the cheap thrills of collective accusation. The enemy outside and the fracture inside feed each other. When Jews speak about one another as if they were strangers, traitors, or moral contaminants, they hand ammunition to every anti-Semite who ever claimed Jewish unity was a lie. And when outsiders revivify the ancient charge against Jews as a people, they confirm why that unity matters in the first place.
One does not need to agree with every Israeli policy to recognize the grotesque imbalance of moral scrutiny imposed upon the Jewish state. Nor must one abandon religious devotion to understand that the existence of Israel is not sustained by miracles alone. It is sustained by young men and women standing guard at borders while "intellectuals" abroad condemn them and sectarians at home spiritually belittle them.
The old blood libel claimed Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. The modern version declares Jews enjoy oppression, crave domination, thirst for war, and manipulate world powers. It is more sophisticated in vocabulary, but not necessarily more enlightened in spirit. And when Jews themselves begin describing their fellow Jews as moral contaminants, spiritual Nazis, or enemies of God merely because they inhabit modern Israeli society or serve in its army, they unknowingly echo the same dehumanizing impulse that has haunted Jewish history from the beginning.
A civilization cannot survive if every internal argument becomes an accusation of cosmic evil. Israel was not reborn so Jews could resume the luxury of civilizational suicide. The secular Israeli soldier and the ultra-Orthodox scholar are bound together whether they like it or not. One preserves the body of the Jewish people; the other preserves part of its soul. Sever either one completely, and the entire structure begins to crack.
The enemies of the Jews never cared whether a Jew wore a black hat, a knitted kippah, or no kippah at all. In Auschwitz, they did not separate the observant from the secular before sending them into the smoke. Jewish history is cruel precisely because it reminds us that the world has often seen Jews collectively — while Jews themselves remain determined to fragment into tribes incapable of recognizing a shared fate.
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