Negative Solidarity
Understanding weaponized antisemitism and the story of the land through the writings of Hannah Arendt (Part II)
This is Part II of the essay, Part I can be found here.
The Assets and the Catalysts
Many naively trace the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship to October 7, 2023, when Hamas conducted one of the largest terror attacks on the Israeli civilian population. Israeli intelligence and opposition claim that Netanyahu knew about the attack months in advance but dismissed it, appearing at the time “bored and indifferent to the issue” (Sokol 2024). But the dehumanization of Palestinian civilian populations didn’t start with the tragic and deeply traumatic for Israel events of October 7; it was a long-standing project of alienation involving disinformation, warfare, occupation, and limiting Palestine's access to the world stage.
In his book The Science of Evil, Simon Baron-Cohen writes that dehumanization is the essential step towards trivializing violence against other human beings; turning people into objects helps erode empathy and create a mental barrier between the self and the other, making despicable atrocities seem permissible. Baron-Cohen explains that what initially encouraged him to write the book was one of the most haunting objects of Holocaust history – the lampshade made out of human skin, extracted from the Buchenwald.

But how does this happen? How do the flowers of evil take their root?
Arendt, who herself barely escaped a concentration camp, identified such camps as the “central institution of totalitarian power,” designed to systematically destroy human individuality, dignity, and both legal and moral personhood. She described them as places where “punishment is meted out without connection to crime”, reducing humans to superfluous beings.
The goal was to eradicate the very concept of humanity, transforming prisoners into “bundles of reactions” devoid of will. The dehumanisaion happens in stages. First, the Destruction of the Juridical Person, where people were stripped of legal rights - this severed their connection to any community, nullifying the protection of laws. Next, the Destruction of the Moral Person, where dignity and solidarity were entirely annihilated. And finally, the Banality of Evil — an attempt to abolish human plurality and individuality, rendering people expendable. Arendt argued that such evil thrived on thoughtlessness by normalizing atrocities through clichés and administrative detachment in order to enable industrialized murder.
In 1948, during the Israeli-Palestinian war, Haganah and later Israel Defense Forces deployed biological warfare in the top-secret Operation Cast Thy Bread, contaminating drinking water in Palestinian wells with typhoid bacteria in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The main objective of the mission was terror; the Israeli government was hoping this would deter Palestinian Arabs from recapturing and returning to the villages taken by the Yishuv. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF chief of general staff Yigael Yadin oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare.
The operation resulted in severe illness among Palestinian people. Abba Eban, representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, strongly denied the very existence of this operation and sought to block further investigations by accusing the Arab states of engaging in “anti-Semitic incitement”. The operation was, of course, real and the documents are now available in state archives (Aswat 2022). This begs the question: What kind of possible top-secret operations are deployed in Palestine today? Will we find out about them decades later when they become a part of the national archives? And will pre-emptive attempts to investigate these operations as they unfold be labelled as “anti-Semitic” in a move to silence them?
In 2012, the Israeli government was forced to release a document produced in 2008, which revealed that Israel kept Gaza “on a diet” by calculating a minimum necessary amount of calories per day to avoid complete malnutrition, while continuously restricting access to food (Middle East Eye, 2025). For more than a decade, human rights organisations, including UN, considered this a form of collective punishment, but in absence of repercussions, the cruel “diet” continued, effectively engineering deprivation. Reporting on the issue, Amira Niwerami writes:
The systemic denial, delay, and destruction of water, food, medical supplies and shelter have become defining features of this policy, even water purification equipment, crutches and insulin have been blocked due to Israel’s indefensible and opaque “dual-use” restrictions. Palestinian public service providers, civil society networks, and humanitarian organisations have been left unable to meet even the most basic needs of Palestinians living in Gaza (Middle East Eye, 2025).
Since famine in Gaza reached critical situation under Israeli bombardment, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency confirmed that hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods are decaying at the border, some are even on Gaza’s side but the Israeli army prevents the trucks from going further (WUSF, 2025). Israel outright denies these claims. But according to Sam Stein, a Jewish activist who lived among Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, IDF is not to be trusted:
“This pattern of deception isn’t new: long before these past 18 months, Israel has repeatedly retracted its official stories, as the world witnessed following the assassination of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Yet even Zionist government critics still reflexively give the military the benefit of the doubt. Today, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza behind a wall of censorship, we must start from the opposite assumption: that every official word from the military is a lie.” (Stein, 2025)
The Growing Rift
“I can only hope that people start treating Jews and Israelis as two separate categories of people,” one of my friends told me in a private conversation. It took me a while to wrap my head around it.
Numerous journalistic sources corroborate that Israelis aren’t engaging with the same media ecosystem as other Jewish populations around the world, which can explain the tendency of the former to side with strong anti-Palestinian sentiments bordering on pro-genocidal messages. I will spare you the details of such messaging, but at least one of them revolves around gloating over the death of Palestinian children, celebrating the undoing of the “terrorists-to-be”. If you find it impossible to wrap your head around this concept, here’s a statement from an IDF intelligence officer Eliyahu Yossian proclaiming “There are no innocents in Gaza, there are 2.5 million terrorists”, calling for “maximum corpses” and “zero morality” in the assault on Gaza (Truth Untold, 2024).
But how is this possible for anyone to generalize too broadly, and yet be completely oblivious to the very fact of generalisation, which is a common logical fallacy? An entire population of any country cannot be defined in such narrow terms; Canada can’t consist only of lumberjacks, and the British population can’t be all royalists. The secret sauce is that Israeli citizens are grown with a certain packaged thinking full of contradictions on what their relationships with Arabic states, and Palestine, are like. Some of such contradictions include the cliché “the ‘enemy’ is both weak and strong”, but there’s too many of them to recite them all here.
Perceived total victimization and defiance to such victimization at all costs are a huge part of Israeli identity. Many citizens genuinely internalize the idea that all Arabic nations without exception want Jews dead, and Israel - to cease to exist. This is a prime example of negative solidarity noted by Arendt about totalitarian movements; it is characterised by people uniting against perceived enemies, as opposed to under any kind of positive common goals.
Hanna Arendt writes that the very state of Israel was built on negative solidarity politics, which, she worried, would only spark growing nationalism that acts as the glue binding the state together:
…the moment has now come to get everything or nothing, victory or death; Arab and Jewish claims are irreconcilable and only a military decision can settle the issue; the Arabs-all Arabs-are our enemies and we accept this fact; only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines believe in justice, and only schlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to propaganda and machine guns; Jewish experience in the last decades-or over the last centuries, or over the last two thousand years-has finally awakened us and taught us to look out for ourselves; this alone is reality, everything else is stupid sentimentality; everybody is against us, Great Britain is antisemitic, the United States is imperialist-but Russia might be our ally for a certain period because her interests happen to coincide with ours; yet in the final analysis we count upon nobody except ourselves; in sum-we are ready to go down fighting, and we will consider anybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back.” (“The Jewish Writings”, 1944, 391)
Arendt argues that totalitarian regimes don’t just suppress dissent — they systematically dismantle “common sense”, the shared understanding of reality that allows people to navigate the world. Perhaps in modern context, “common sense” is not ideal phrasing, but for Arendt it meant the shared framework of facts, logic, and moral intuitions that stabilize society, allow people to distinguish truth from lies, and reality from fiction. Most importantly, for Arendt “common sense” was about being rooted in human plurality. The fictions of Totalitarian regimes and movements work best on alienated populations, whether they are alienated territorially, ideologically or both. With alienation as a precursor, the facts rooted in human plurality are replaced with ideological fictions of the regime.
For example, in Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine didn’t just spread misinformation — it flooded the public sphere with contradictions: Jews were perceived as both “all-powerful conspirators” and “subhuman vermin”. In Stalinist USSR, “show trials” like Bukharin’s confession in 1938 forced people to accept absurdities of loyal Bolsheviks suddenly being “traitors”. In USSR, the constant rewriting of history made reality fluid. The goal was not to convince people of any single lie, but to make truth itself irrelevant.
Don’t modern media technologies allow for similar type of constant rewriting of perceived facts? Since the foundational goal of Totalitarianism is to make lying the new normal (until people can no longer trust their own judgment), Arendt saw the defense of truth as essential to resisting tyranny.
Since Israel is in a continuous state of hostilities, real as well as imaginary ones, such conditions facilitate “siege mentality”, which acts as a mental barrier preventing the population from engaging with the Palestinian conflict meaningfully and critically. To understand the lived experiences of Palestinians one needs to see Palestine with one’s own eyes and engage with its population on a human level, and not through political narratives, hearsay or misinformation. Whenever direct engagement is possible, minds are changed:
For six months, I lived alongside those I’d been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears. These lessons carry urgent weight because Masafer Yatta is once again facing a campaign of demolition that threatens to erase its people from the only land they know. (Stein, 2025)
Israel wove a lot of fictions around Gaza and the West Bank to prevent any kind of solidarity, scaring its own population into believing that every Palestinian man, woman and child without exception is a potential terrorist conspiring with Hamas. Yet, those who tried engaging with Palestinian communities tell a different story; a story of people living in precarious conditions without the necessary political representation, where families are trying to survive and take care of their children. The Israeli population is deterred from engaging with the human side of Palestine; both civilian populations and tourists alike can’t freely access Gaza.
In 2024, a survey conducted among Jewish Americans revealed a striking discovery: a third of young adults did not approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza, with 69% viewing Israel’s actions as “excessively aggressive” (The Jerusalem Post). The Zionist media labeled the story “Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’ ” (Times of Israel), which of course was not at all a question actually polled and discussed in the survey; nevertheless, this sparked deep concern among the heavily influenced and polarized Israeli-Jewish population. Fear-baiting and the perceived attacks on “Israel’s right to exist” are the pressure points that activate the Israeli population into aggressive defensiveness.
Pro-Palestinian content started circulating on social media networks, partially shared and re-shared by American Jews. This threatened Israel’s image, risking exposing their population to the “wrong ideas”, which is why the Israeli government demanded the Biden and Trump administrations to ban TikTok, a social media app popular with youth, where pro-Palestinian content started gaining momentum (Klippenstein, 2024). Israel decried such content as “anti-Semitic”, attempting to control its circulation.
This is not the first attempt by the Israeli government to label criticism of its governing regime as “anti-Semitic”, despite Israel representing only a certain part of the worldwide Jewish population who may have different opinions. And this is where the political rhetoric of the regime collapses: Jewish populations are truly multicultural; they belong everywhere: in Ukraine’s Odessa, in Europe, in America, Canada, and even in China. Jewish neighborhoods in Europe predate the creation of the state of Israel. The Netanyahu regime cannot possibly claim to represent the views and sentiments of the entire Jewish population, and this is the lever I wish more American and European Jews would push on. This crack in the façade is so glaring that the national narrative spills out of it; supporting the Zionist position without encountering this lapse of reasoning becomes hard, so the regime has no proper words for it besides “antisemitism”. And accusing Jews of antisemitism is quite noticeably absurd.
The accusations of “supporting Hamas” and “being on the wrong side of history” were fired against the Prime Ministers of the UK, Canada and France who put pressure on the Netanyahu government to open humanitarian aid corridors to provide help to the starving Gaza population. Then, Netanyahu attempted to connect the demands to end famine in Gaza with the tragic shooting of Israeli staffers in Washington, implying that the two incidents were non-coincidental, and that attempts to ease famine in Gaza are emboldening Hamas. Interestingly, the tragic incident happened in none of the countries that were accused of “siding with Hamas”, but in America, the cherished ally and supporter, the provider of military AI technologies, where, among other things, claims of “antisemitism” are employed widely and loudly in its own way — to suppress protests on university campuses, choke out the last remnants of American intellectualism, and ruin international relationships thus isolating American population.
Hannah Arendt writes that “totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them” (Arendt, 349). It is evident in how both the Trump and Netanyahu administrations accuse international democracies of antisemitism in order to fight the very democratic principles that allow “antisemitism” to remain a valid critical label. In a document addressed to the UN (and freshly leaked to Ken Klippenstein, but also covered in media), the Trump administration accused the international organization of being anti-Semitic; mind you, not anyone in particular — the whole organization. There is something about this crudeness that is reminiscent of the Russian regime built on ignorance and incompetence: the claims do not have to be true; they have to be plausible for the masses. Multiple publications from The Atlantic to The Hill are weary of how antisemitism is increasingly weaponized, as under the guise of the label, both administrations push policies that actively hurt Jewish populations.
Many non-Israeli Jews are worried that such liberal use of the “anti-Semitic” label in situations where it may be unwarranted weakens the very understanding of antisemitism. Such precedents risk conflating the tragedy of the Holocaust with the pursuit of political agendas. One of my academic colleagues, a university professor and a Polish Jew by descent, explains that it doesn’t make sense for the Israeli population to be immune to criticism of genocide; the phrase “never again”, which is associated with the lessons of the Holocaust, demands accountability for ethnic cleansing regardless of which population it happens to. The phrase speaks to the realities of human suffering, which in itself is a universal concept.
Let The Land Tell its Own Story
At this point in time, Palestine is not a fully realised sovereign self-governing nation with equal legal protection and access to the world market, partially due to prolonged Israeli occupation that denied the development of the Palestinian land and resources like gas and oil.
In 1999, British Gas (BG) discovered the “Gaza Marine” gas field off Gaza’s coast, estimating reserves of up to 1 trillion cubic feet. Under Oslo Accords provisions, in 1999, the Palestinian Authority (PA) granted BG a 25-year license to explore, discover, and develop its natural resources, but Israel repeatedly blocked the development. Proposed pipelines were stalled, redirected to favor Israeli ports, and subjected to below-market pricing demands. After Hamas’ 2007 election win, Israel imposed a naval blockade, halting offshore projects. By 2008, Israel controversially claimed sovereignty over Gaza’s waters, prompting BG’s exit. Shell later acquired the project but withdrew in 2018, leaving the PA scrambling for partners.
According to the UNCTAD study, oil and natural gas resources in the occupied Palestinian territory could generate hundreds of billions of dollars, which would produce critical funds for the development of Palestine as a nation. However, Israel’s control over the occupied territories and maritime claims in the Levant Basin (a global gas hotspot) stifles Palestine’s attempts to develop the land’s resources. Renewed interest in developing Palestinian resources emerged again after 2022, prompted by the war in Ukraine, as Europe sought alternatives to Russian gas. American, Egyptian, and PA officials pushed Israel to greenlight the project, with Netanyahu reluctantly approving it in June 2023, emphasizing that the progress would hinge on “preserving the State of Israel’s security and diplomatic needs” (Piette 2023). At the same time, Hamas official Ismail Rudwan told Reuters: “We reaffirm that our people in Gaza have the right to their natural resources” (Reuters, 2023).
Since the tragic attack of October 7, Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel intends to kill as many Palestinians as possible to pressure the population to leave the Gaza Strip and move to the Sinai in Egypt. However, Israel’s war on Palestinian populations has not stopped the Israeli regime’s plans for further oil and gas exploration. On Oct. 29, Israel announced that it awarded 12 licenses for exploring additional offshore natural gas fields to six companies, including British Petroleum and Italian energy giant Eni. As Betsy Piette notes, the award of these licenses “shows that Israel has no intention of letting the genocide it is carrying out against Gaza’s people interfere with its ongoing theft of Palestinian resources” (Piette 2023).
While of course, Israeli and Russian conflicts are different, we can see a faint parallel in the attempt to seize and control the national gas and oil resources of both Ukraine and Palestine. Russia strategically annexed Ukrainian oil-producing regions, extracting and repackaging Ukrainian oil as Russian and selling it to China, India, and Europe to support its war machine. Similarly, Israel’s interest in the Palestinian territory seems to be heavily resource-motivated, otherwise what would be the goal of global displacement of Palestinian civilians and the hasty re-settlement of the land for which Israel is paying a hefty price tag?
The War that may Never End
In the history of humanity, there’s no claim that justifies war and violence more than fighting for one’s home. Israel takes advantage of this regularly, in international relations as well as in mythologies they weave for their own people: “land without people for people without the land”, which is a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The history of this phrase is quite interesting, as it’s allegedly attributed not to Zionists, but to Christian theologists. In 1843, Scottish clergyman Alexander Keith described Jews as “a people without a country” and Palestine as “a country without a people” in his book The Land of Israel. By 1844, a Scottish church magazine paraphrased it as “a land without a people and a people without a land”. In truth, of course, Palestine was not a land without a people; it has a surprisingly well documented history that includes trade relationships with other Arab countries and Europe.
In 1901, the fateful phrase resurfaced again, this time used by a key early Zionist Israel Zangwill, who declared, “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country”. By 1917, Zangwill retracted this proclamation, stating: “Alas, it was a misleading mistake. The country holds 600,000 Arabs”, but unfortunately, the phrase took off among masses to lay the foundation of Israel’s national identity. The phrase was institutionalized in Israeli state iconography. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, Israel's pavilion displayed murals contrasting “a land without a people” (depicting desolate landscapes) with “a people without a land” (showing Jewish persecution). It underpinned the “negation of the Diaspora” narrative, portraying Israel as the solution to Jewish statelessness while obscuring Palestinian narratives of displacement.
The main issue with this phrase is that it actively attempts to “erase” the long-standing Arab history of Palestine. In the early 20th century, 90% of Palestine was Arabic. The phrase helped perpetuate the false idea that Palestine was “empty,” facilitating policies like the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish “national home” while only fleetingly referencing non-Jewish “communities”. For nearly a century, such framing marginalized Palestinian political rights.
Arendt compares Jewish settlement in Palestine to establishing a colony “on the moon”, emphasizing the pervasive national fantasy woven into the very foundation of the newly established nation-state:
“They escaped to Palestine as one might wish to escape to the moon, to a region beyond the wickedness of the world. True to their ideals, they established themselves on the moon; and with the extraordinary strength of their faith they were able to create islands of perfection” (The Jewish Writings, 349)
While sharing many Zionist ideas, Arendt was a supporter of the two-state solution, believing that the newly formed nation of Israel could only establish and re-assert itself by being good neighbors to Palestinian Arabs. But she also worried that the creation of Israeli state would isolate Palestinian Jews from the international Jewry (which is something we are observing today), and the further occupation of Palestinian territories would lead to the erosion of democracy inside of Israel. In her prophetic essay “To Save the Jewish Homeland”, Arendt writes:
“Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of a Jewish homeland.” (The Jewish Writings, 397).
After the establishment of Israeli state, Arendt critiqued its treatment of Palestinian natives, writing in 1955 that Israel exhibited a galut-and-ghetto mentality and treated Arabs in ways that would “rally the whole world against [it]”:
“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.” (Arendt in correspondence with her husband, 1955)
Arendt expressed deep concerns about the psychological and political readiness of Palestinian Jews to establish a sovereign nation-state immediately after the Holocaust. In “Zionism Reconsidered” (1944), Arendt warned that the traumas of the Holocaust made Jewish people susceptible to repeating the nation-state logic that had failed in Europe:
“Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign power is certainly worse . . . the Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences.” (344-345)
Arendt feared post-Holocaust Zionism would prioritize self-actualisation at all costs (based on certain degree of nationalist fictitiousness) over justice, leading to similar isolationist conditions that served as a precursor to nationalist atmosphere of Nazi Germany.
In the history of humanity, there’s no claim that justifies war and violence more than fighting for one’s home. But what about home of those displaced in Gaza and West Bank? As Israel approves new settlements at record speed to occupy the Arab territories “cleansed” with famine, blood, and suffering - will there ever be peace on that land? Wouldn’t those unjustly displaced also yearn for home? Wouldn’t they fight for home?
In the heat of the conflict, Israel is in the rush to claim the Palestinian territories before the international allies have a chance to intervene. IDF summoned 450,000 conscripts over the next three months, more than during the events of October 7. The mostly civilian conscripts are weary of the burden of serving in Gaza: more than 41% of them are unable to re-integrate back into civilian life, after suffering traumas and PTSD (Yahoo, 2025). More and more IDF soldiers come out to testify against the military actions in Gaza; the same citizen who eagerly enrolled to defend their homeland after the events of October 7 now leave service. “I refuse to commit war crimes” - Yuval Ben Ari, an IDF solider-reservist told NBC News - “The patriotic things to do is to say no”.