While international media has rightly focused on the genocide and mass displacement in the Gaza Strip, alongside the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the occupation of East Jerusalem, the 300 murders in Israel in 2025, of which 252 were Palestinian victims, have received little coverage from media outside of Israel. But last year was the deadliest year on record for murders among Israel’s Palestinians, who make up 21 percent of Israel’s population but accounted for 80 percent of its murders. This equates to one murder every 36 hours.
International media has also covered the rise of anti-Semitism around the world, but little has been reported on how Israel is exaggerating and instrumentalizing the concept of Zionist anti-Semitism, creating moral panic among Jews around the world. In fact, when I talk to my Jewish friends in Israel, they often ask me how I deal with anti-Semitism living in London. As consumers of Israeli news, it is no wonder that we believe that Jews around the world are in imminent danger.
These two phenomena—the prevalence of crime within Israel’s Palestinian communities and the weaponization of anti-Semitism to amplify Jewish fear—may seem completely unrelated. But there’s a clear thread that connects them, and it’s called demography.
basic acts
Population engineering is central to the Zionist project. During the 1948 war, some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by what Faiz Sayegh called “racial exclusion.” As part of this process, Palestinian cities were depopulated and approximately 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed. By 1951, refugee Palestinians had been “replaced” by an equal number of Jewish immigrants, both Holocaust survivors from Europe and Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries, thus changing the ethnic composition of the nation without changing its overall population size.
Immediately after the war, Israel not only ignored UN Resolution 194, which affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in 1948, but also passed the Law of Return in 1950, giving “Jews from all over the world the right to enter Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship, regardless of their country of origin or whether they can demonstrate Israeli-Palestinian ties, while reserving equal rights for Palestinians and those with a recorded ancestral home in the country.”
Over the past two years, many Israeli politicians and influencers have characterized what Israel has been doing in the territories it occupied in 1967 as completing the work left unfinished in 1948. “A second real Nakba to finish[former Israeli Prime Minister David]Ben-Gurion’s job,” one journalist quipped. At the same time, different types of population strategies are being developed within Israel, even though the overall objectives are the same.
Crime leads to retirement
Itamar Ben Gvir is not the first national security minister to authorize criminal organizations to carry out terrorist acts against Palestinian communities. But under Ben Gvir’s watch, murders have reached record levels. And 2026 looks set to continue that trend, with 31 more Palestinians killed in the first month.
On the one hand, Israel uses the surge in crime to portray the Palestinian people as uncivilized and barbaric, extending its dehumanization from stateless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to its own citizens. On the other hand, it has also enabled criminals to terrorize Palestinian towns.
In fact, while police solve only 15 percent of murders within Palestinian communities, they do little to stop criminals from collecting “protection fees” from businesses, an estimated 2 billion shekels (about $650 million) a year from communities.
On January 22, Palestinians began their largest demonstration since 2019, waving black flags and chanting slogans denouncing the complete abandonment of police. The next day, organizers called for a general strike, with one of the organizers, Mohammed Shurata, blaming the authorities for the violence and saying: “We are in a state of emergency.” “We have a clear finger of blame. We blame the police.”
When I talk to my Palestinian friends, some say they want to leave the country because they fear for their children’s lives, while others pack up their belongings and leave. It is true that the number of people leaving is small, but the Palestinian people are reaching a boiling point.
antisemitism and negative immigration
The government has done nothing to quell criminal and illegal behavior within the Palestinian community in Israel, while at the same time exaggerating and exploiting Zionist anti-Semitic notions to continually reassert Jewish victimhood.
While much has been written about using the false concept of anti-Semitism (which confuses criticism of Israel and Zionism with hatred of Jews) to silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, little has been said about mobilizing anti-Semitism to address Israel’s reluctant immigration problem.
Since 2023, more Jews will be leaving the country than entering the country. In 2024, the number of citizens leaving Israel was 26,000 more than the number of immigrants entering the country. In 2025, the difference was about 37,000 Israelis. In other words, negative immigration has surged by more than 42 percent, and Israeli authorities are concerned that this trend is taking root and accelerating.
Both the Israeli public and the Jewish diaspora are thus repeatedly informed of the prevalence of anti-Semitism around the world. Jews say Australia’s horrific Bondi massacre is a sign of new global trends, with anti-Semitism becoming the norm in Britain and Jews in Europe fearing wearing the kippah.
Anti-Semitism has undoubtedly skyrocketed in the past two years, and there is clearly a kernel of truth in these articles. However, in the case of anti-Semitism, the state dramatically exaggerates and instrumentalizes the evidence to create moral panic, in contrast to the real panic of the Palestinian people, which the state has ignored. The message is clear. While Jews around the world should fear for their lives and therefore those living in Israel should be wary of leaving Israel, the only way for Diaspora Jews to be safe is to immigrate to Israel.
Supremacy as an adhesive
The glue that holds all of Israel’s demographic strategies together is a belief in Jewish exceptionalism and superiority. Genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank are justified by the dehumanization of Palestinians. The neglect of murders and crimes in the Palestinian community in Israel is due to racial discrimination that has continued since 1948. And Israel has weaponized racism against Jews to suppress negative immigration. The ultimate goal is to guarantee the racial and religious character of Israel as solely Jewish; the dream is a purely Jewish state.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
