The Word Antisemitism Was Invented by a Man Who Hated Jews
He wanted a respectable new name for an old hatred. Since October 7, that hatred has a new name again.
I'm Inbal. I'm a native Israeli, a Hebrew teacher, and a descendant of Holocaust survivors.
On October 7, 2023, I wasn't in Israel. I was in the US, in the middle of cancer treatment. And I didn't know what to do with myself. All I could do was watch.
About 1,200 people were murdered that day. 251 were dragged into Gaza as hostages. Babies, children, women, elderly. Jews, Christians, Muslims, foreign workers. Even the family dogs. Anyone they came across on Israeli land.
And then October 8 happened.
October 8 is what we call the campaign that started the very next day. Before the dead were counted. Before families even knew who was alive. Rallies. Statements. Crowds in Western cities. Not grief for the victims. Justification. And it hasn't stopped since.
As a Hebrew teacher, as an Israeli Jewish woman, staying quiet about that would feel like staying quiet about what was done to my family in Europe. Because it's the exact same thing.
It calls itself political so it won't sound like antisemitism. It isn't political. It's the oldest hatred in the world, and every generation or two it changes its clothes.
Four Hebrew words tell you exactly what's going on.
Antisemitism: A Word Invented to Sound Modern
אַנְטִישֵׁמִיּוּת /an-tee-'she-mee-yoot/ Antisemitism. Hebrew borrowed this word straight from German, and that's the first clue.
In 1879 a German Jew hater named Wilhelm Marr made it popular, to make old religious hatred sound modern and scientific. The word itself was a rebrand. And the hatred had been rebranding for centuries.
First it was religious. Jews were called Christ killers. Jesus was a Jew. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment. When a Christian child died, Jews were accused of killing him for his blood, to bake matzah, our alternative to bread during Passover. When the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. Whole communities were burned alive for it.
Then it was racial. When the Tsar was murdered, Jews paid for it in pogroms. When Germany lost the First World War, it blamed the Jews for stabbing it in the back. In the 1930s, Jews were the greedy capitalists and the dangerous communists at the same time. Too rich and too poor. Too foreign and too assimilated.
That's what makes it unlike any other hatred. Other hatreds look down on their target. This one says Jews are beneath everyone and secretly control everyone. At the same time. It never had to make sense. It only had to point at Jews. And it wasn't only thugs in the street. It was professors, doctors and judges. That's how isolation always starts.
Today the word is Zionist. Same hatred. This year's vocabulary.
Here's how you know it isn't political. Only one country has its own permanent agenda item at the UN Human Rights Council. Not Iran. Not North Korea. Israel. That isn't politics. It's the same hatred.
What the Word Genocide Actually Carries
רֶצַח עַם /'re-tsakh am/ Genocide. In Hebrew, literally, the murder of a people. Hebrew doesn't soften it.
The English word was invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The legal definition is acts committed with intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part. Intent is the heart of it.
October 7 was carried out by an organization whose founding charter calls for killing Jews. Not Israelis. Jews. They went house to house. They filmed it. Calling their parents to brag about how many Jews they killed. Weeks later a Hamas leader promised on TV to do it again and again, until Israel is annihilated. That's intent.
Now look at Israel. It warned Gaza's civilians to leave. Leaflets. Text messages. Phone calls. Nobody warns the people they're trying to destroy. Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels. Asked why there were no shelters for civilians, a Hamas leader said the tunnels are for the fighters. Civilians are the UN's problem.
And within days of October 7, the word a Jewish lawyer invented to describe what was done to Jews was being aimed at Israel again.
Genocide has a definition. Apartheid has a definition. Colonialism has a definition. When people use those words without their definitions, they aren't describing anything. They're just aiming.
Zion: What Zionism Actually Is
צִיּוֹנוּת /tsee-yo-'noot/ Zionism, comes from Zion צִיּוֹן /tsee-'yon/, a place the Hebrew Bible names more than 150 times.
עַל נַהֲרוֹת בָּבֶל שָׁם יָשַׁבְנוּ גַּם בָּכִינוּ בְּזָכְרֵנוּ אֶת צִיּוֹן /al na-ha-'rot ba-'vel sham ya-'shav-noo gam ba-'khee-noo be-zokh-'re-noo et tsee-'yon/ By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, and we wept, when we remembered Zion. תְּהִלִּים /te-hee-'leem/ Psalm 137.
Written in exile 2,500 years ago, about coming home.
That is all Zionism is. The Jewish people have the right to come home. Not at anyone else's expense.
Israel wrote both into its Declaration of Independence in 1948, hours before the armies of 5 Arab countries invaded to destroy it. It reads מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל תְּהֵא פְּתוּחָה לַעֲלִיָּה יְהוּדִית וּלְקִבּוּץ גָּלוּיוֹת, the State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of the exiles. תְּהֵא מוּשְׁתָּתָה עַל יְסוֹדוֹת הַחֵרוּת, הַצֶּדֶק וְהַשָּׁלוֹם לְאוֹר חֲזוֹנָם שֶׁל נְבִיאֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, it will be founded on freedom, justice and peace, in the light of the vision of the prophets of Israel. תְּקַיֵּם שִׁוְיוֹן זְכוּיוֹת חֶבְרָתִי וּמְדִינִי גָּמוּר לְכָל אֶזְרָחֶיהָ בְּלִי הֶבְדֵּל דָּת, גֶּזַע וּמִין, it will ensure complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender. תַּבְטִיחַ חֹפֶשׁ דָּת, מַצְפּוּן, לָשׁוֹן, חִנּוּךְ וְתַרְבּוּת, תִּשְׁמֹר עַל הַמְּקוֹמוֹת הַקְּדוֹשִׁים שֶׁל כָּל הַדָּתוֹת, it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. It will safeguard the holy places of all religions.
And look at Israel today. About 1 in 5 Israeli citizens is Arab. Muslims, Christians, Druze. They vote. They serve in the Israeli parliament. Arab justices have sat on the Supreme Court. None of that happens where one group is denied equal rights. Apartheid has a definition. It isn't about what I think. It's what happens in practice, in reality.
Nobody asks a French person if the French have a right to live in France. But Jews get asked all the time: Are you a Zionist?
The UN voted for a Jewish state in 1947. We're one of the oldest native peoples on earth, back in our own land. And Israel is still the only country that has to keep proving it has the right to exist.
Our holiest place on earth is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Jewish Temple stood there 3,000 years ago. The Dome of the Rock was built on top of it 1,300 years ago, after the Arab conquest. So who was there first? And who's the colonizer?
In 1967 Arab armies tried to destroy Israel again. Israel won that war too, and reunited Jerusalem. And it left the mount in Muslim hands. Muslims pray there every day. Jews pray at the wall below.
Here's what a Hebrew teacher sees in the word colonialism. Colonizers bring the language of the empire with them. Jews came home and brought back the language of the land itself. Hebrew hadn't been anyone's mother tongue for more than 1,500 years. Today millions speak it, in the same land, with the words of the Bible. No colonizer in history has ever done that.
No other country has faced annihilation from its first day to this one. From outside, armies in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. Missiles from Yemen and Iran, Iraq. From inside, suicide bombers on buses and in cafes.
So Israel defends itself. It has to. Borders. Walls. An army. That's not aggression. That's survival. And every one of them gets used against us.
In 2002, in the middle of a wave of suicide bombings, Israel started building a security barrier along the West Bank. Today it's called the apartheid wall. In 2007 Hamas took over Gaza, their charter is killing Jews, and Israel closed the border to keep weapons and terrorists out. Egypt did the same. Egypt has its own wall along Gaza, facing the people it calls its brothers. Nobody calls that apartheid.
The army that protects us is called genocidal. We're the only people in the world blamed for surviving.
Shalom: What Peace Actually Looks Like
שָׁלוֹם /sha-'lom/ The Hebrew word for peace is what Israelis say for hello. And when you want peace, it shows. Not in what you say. In what you do.
In 1947 the UN offered a plan to divide the land. Most of what we were offered was harsh desert. We said yes. The other side said no.
On the day Israel was born in 1948, an Arab Palestinian state could have been born right next to it. The UN had offered one, and the Arab leadership refused it. Israel offered its hand in peace to every neighbor. The next day 5 Arab armies invaded.
After the war in 1967, the Arab League answered with 3 no's. No peace. No recognition. No negotiations.
In 1977 Egypt's president offered peace. Israel said yes. It gave back all of Sinai, almost 3 times Israel's own size, land we won in one of those wars meant to annihilate us.
In 1994 Jordan was ready for peace. Israel said yes.
In 2000 and again in 2008, Israel put a Palestinian state on the table. Both times the answer was no.
In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and every citizen out of Gaza. What came back was rockets. And eighteen years later, October 7.
In 2020 came the Abraham Accords. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco.
Every time a neighbor says yes, there's peace.
The conflict was never about how much land. Israel has given land for peace again and again. It's about whether the Jewish people are allowed to have any land at all. That is what's behind the FREE PALESTINE slogan. Freeing it from Jewish people.
What I'm Left With
October 7 wasn't the start of something new. It was the oldest thing in the world, in this year's clothes.
My family met it in Europe. I watched it from far away. And I'm still here. Teaching the language of a people that was supposed to disappear. Spoken again, in the land it came from.
Hebrew is alive. Israel is alive. עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי /am yees-ra-’el khay/ The people of Israel live.
Share this with someone who needs to hear it. And if you stand with us, write עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי Am Israeli Chai in the comments. In English or in Hebrew.