The progressive left has perfected a modern form of the oldest hatred. Its practitioners insist, with practiced sincerity, that they do not hate Jews. They merely oppose the nation-state that is home to nearly half the world’s Jewish population, the only place where Jews exercise self-determination in their ancestral land.

This distinction is a lie.

It is not a nuanced policy disagreement. It is the deliberate rebranding of antisemitism under the language of human rights, decolonization, and social justice. And it flows directly from the progressive movement’s rejection of the particularism at the heart of the Abrahamic covenant—the very foundation of Jewish peoplehood and the biblical roots of Western civilization that progressives have spent decades seeking to dismantle.

Roughly 45 to 46 percent of the world’s Jews now live in Israel, according to recent demographic estimates placing the global Jewish population near 15.8 to 15.9 million, with approximately 7.2 million in the Jewish state. The modern State of Israel is not some distant abstraction or colonial outpost invented by Europeans. It is the political expression of the Jewish people’s return to the land promised to their forefathers.

The overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state. Targeting that state while claiming indifference to the people who built and sustain it is not coherence. It is gaslighting.

The Bible states the terms plainly. In Genesis 12:3, God tells Abraham: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Genesis 15:18 grants the land “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” to Abraham’s seed. Genesis 17:7–8 establishes it as “an everlasting covenant” and the land of Canaan as “an everlasting possession” for Abraham’s descendants.

Romans 11 affirms that God has not cast away His people Israel and that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. A literal reading leaves little room for the progressive claim that Jewish nationhood in that land is an optional or illegitimate project.

Most of the progressive activists driving the anti-Israel campaign are secular or atheist. They do not accept the Bible as authoritative. Their rejection of the Abrahamic covenant is therefore not a theological dispute among believers but an ideological rejection of Jewish particularism itself.

Progressivism’s core commitments—radical egalitarianism, selective anti-colonialism, and the elevation of group grievance over individual rights—cannot tolerate a people whose identity is rooted in a specific land promise, a covenant relationship, and historical continuity that predates modern leftist categories. Jewish difference becomes “supremacy.” Jewish return becomes “settler-colonialism.” The only Jewish state becomes the primary obstacle to justice.

This is supersessionism secularized: the old Christian replacement theology stripped of its church and repurposed for the oppressor-oppressed framework. In this telling, Jews are no longer a people with a claim; they are the ultimate white Western colonialists whose success must be pathologized.

The operational evidence is not subtle. BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has stated repeatedly that he opposes “a Jewish state in any part of Palestine” and that implementation of the right of return would mean “there won’t be any Zionist state.” Other BDS voices have been equally clear that the goal is the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

“From the river to the sea” functions, in the mouths of many who chant it, as a call for that outcome rather than peaceful coexistence. Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and various Palestinian Youth Movement chapters celebrated the October 7 massacre as legitimate resistance or “decolonization.” After any pause in fighting, they reaffirm the larger project of dismantling Zionism. This is not criticism of a government. It is eliminationism.

Campus data confirm the pattern. Faculty and classroom environments have embedded anti-Israel framing as moral orthodoxy. The selective outrage is glaring: progressive institutions and activists devote far more energy to Israel than to larger-scale atrocities elsewhere. Double standards, demonization, and delegitimization—the classic markers of antisemitism applied to the Jewish state—are not bugs.

They are features.

The lying tongue of the movement is the insistence that none of this is about Jews. Token anti-Zionist Jews are elevated to prove purity, the political equivalent of “some of my best friends.” Ordinary policy disagreements are inflated into existential crimes. Blood-libel-style charges of deliberate baby-killing and genocide are recycled.

Conspiracy tropes about Jewish or “Zionist” control of governments and media persist under progressive branding. The result is harassment of Jewish students, exclusion from progressive spaces, and a climate in which affirming the Jewish right to self-determination is treated as bigotry. This is the same hostility directed at the people who, in the biblical account, were chosen for a specific land and mission.

Zechariah 12 describes the end-times burden of the nations against Jerusalem: God will make Jerusalem “a burdensome stone for all people,” and “all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” He will “seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.” T

he contemporary global fixation on isolating the Jewish state, while ignoring or excusing far greater evils, fits the pattern of that opposition. Progressives who reject the covenant place themselves in the position the text warns against.

Conservatives should not treat this as a mere foreign-policy disagreement or a debate over settlements. The progressive left’s campaign against Israel is an attack on the particular peoplehood, historical continuity, and biblical foundations that undergird Western civilization itself. It is selective anti-nationalism that spares every other ethno-national project while targeting the one Jewish one.

It is the logical endpoint of an ideology that treats the success and survival of Jews after the Holocaust as an embarrassment to the narrative of permanent victimhood for preferred groups.

The claim that one can hate the nation that shelters nearly half the world’s Jews, demand its dissolution as a Jewish state, and recycle ancient libels against it—while insisting one does not hate Jews—is false on demographic, historical, and moral grounds. Under the plain terms of the Abrahamic covenant, it is also a position that carries consequences.