Conspiracy Theories Have Never Been Good for the Jews; They Won’t Be Good for Israel

Conspiracy theories have recently entered Israeli political discourse. Right-wing MKs and other figures on the extreme right have promoted false conspiracy theories concerning the defense establishment, October 7, and other matters. This is egregious not only because it falsely accuses people of severe crimes and undermines trust in the most important security organizations, but also because of the deep connection between conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism.

Antisemitism is not simply another form of prejudice. Jews, like Black people, Asians, and other groups, can of course be subjected to ordinary stereotypes and discrimination. Antisemitic beliefs have portrayed Jews as physically repellent, disease-bearing, stingy, or clannish. But antisemitism has also frequently gone further. As the noted historian Deborah Lipstadt has pointed out, Jews have repeatedly been made the objects of conspiracy theories. Contemporary figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted narratives portraying Jews or Israel not merely as oppressors or colonialists, but as exercising hidden and disproportionate control over major events and institutions – American foreign policy, for example, or migration to the United States and Europe. The classic antisemitic conspiracy text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to reveal a secret Jewish plot to control and enslave the world and to manipulate major historical events.

There is an important difference between ordinary prejudice and the belief that a particular group is secretly conspiring against society or humanity as a whole. Prejudice can produce discrimination, segregation, exploitation, violence, and even mass killing. But a totalizing conspiracy theory adds something particularly dangerous: it presents its target as an organized, hidden, existential enemy. Within that worldview, physically eliminating the imagined conspiracy can come to seem necessary for society’s survival. As Norman Cohn put it, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a “warrant for genocide.”

Jews have not been the only objects of such theories. The European witch persecutions, in which tens of thousands of women and men were executed after being accused of serving the Devil and conspiring against Christian society, provide another example of the murderous potential of conspiracy thinking. But conspiracy theories have shown a remarkable tendency to return to the Jews. Jews were often executed along with “witches,” and narratives about hidden forces behind the French Revolution eventually acquired a strongly antisemitic character. Contemporary conspiracy movements have likewise absorbed longstanding antisemitic themes and images.

In other words, conspiracy theorizing is a way of understanding the world that is not exclusively directed against Jews. But historically it has had particularly destructive consequences for them.

This is why it is so alarming to see this mode of thinking entering Israeli political discourse. Whatever their immediate political purpose, such claims normalize precisely the kind of reasoning that has so often been turned against Jews: the assumption that behind traumatic or incomprehensible events lies a hidden cabal deliberately manipulating them for its own purposes.

There is also a danger beyond Israel. When prominent Israelis themselves embrace conspiratorial explanations involving secret networks of power and betrayal, they inadvertently lend legitimacy to similar forms of thinking about Jews circulating in Europe and North America. The subjects may be different, but the intellectual habits are disturbingly familiar.

The fact that many antisemites are conspiracy theorists does not mean that all conspiracy theorists are antisemites. But in real life, not everything follows the rules of formal logic. Conspiracy theories and antisemitism do have an affinity and important features in common, including the tendency to frame accusations in such a way that refutation does not affect the accuser. Having suffered from this for centuries, do we really want it in our public life?

History gives Jews particular reason to recognize where conspiracy-inflected intellectual habits can lead. Conspiracy theories have never been good for the Jews. There is no reason to believe that they will be good for Israel. 

Dr. Shlomo Fischer teaches sociology in the School of Education at Hebrew University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute.