Ken Funston: The endemic hatred of Jewish people continues across the world – where will it end?

The hatred of Jews – antisemitism – is not a new phenomenon; it can actually be traced as far back as ancient Greece. Throughout the millennia, it has evolved, exhibiting itself in various guises, shaped by the prevailing social, religious, and political climates of the time.

These manifestations can be identified at the lower level as ostracization and social exclusion, to ethnic cleansing, and the attempt to annihilate the Jewish race in WWII by the Nazis in what is known as the Holocaust.

Antisemitism is not a rational response to Jewish behaviour, but rather an irrational prejudice held by those who perpetuate it. What Churchill called ‘the anti-semitic lines of prejudice’, it is the ‘hereditary antipathy which exists all over the world to the Jewish race’.

As Theodor Herzl wrote in the late 19th century: ‘We might perhaps be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if they were to leave us in peace for a period of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace… We are one people; our enemies have made us one without our consent.”

How prophetic would his words become, with the significant Jewish minorities in many countries being ethnically cleansed, and many of those people moving to Israel for comparative safety.

What I have remarked on recently is the attempt to hide the mass antisemitism by denying it and claiming they are either anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli. This facade is easily penetrated when we daily see the abject hatred faced by the minority Jewish population within our own shores.

The reality is that it is pure unadulterated hatred of Jews; calling someone a Zionist is a thinly disguised form of antisemitism.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism suggests that language relating to Israel may in fact be a conduit for the expression of antisemitism rather than legitimate criticism of Israel: ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities’.

The Israeli war against Hamas and Hezbollah has enabled the hate mob’s world view; daily marches purporting to support the people of Gaza may as well scream ‘we hate Jews.’ Last year we heard the ‘death to the IDF’ chants at Glastonbury.

It appears that anti-Jewish statements are acceptable and calls for the annihilation of the Israeli state is okay. If one was to make comparable chants about another state, that would leave one open to immediate arrest. Wars continue in many parts of the world in which many hundreds of thousands are being killed, yet the media condition us to believe that it is the Israelis who are the world’s terrorists.

The Jewish population of England and Wales is approximately 0.4% of the entire population; the most recent records show there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents documented in 2025.

The breakdown of the ‘hate crime rate’ in the year ending March 2025 revealed 106 offences targeted Jewish people per 10,000 population, whereas there were 12 offences per 10,000 Muslims; every one of these crimes are abhorrent. But politicians and prominent individuals must indirectly bear some responsibility for empowering those involved in antisemitism, the continual criticism of the Israeli state leads to attacks on individual Jewish people.

The Republic of Ireland state is now outwardly hostile towards Israel, which has led to Israel withdrawing their ambassador. There is some merit in the theory that the hostility is derived from the anti-British, anti-imperialist perspective of Irish history.

There is a societal impression that the Palestinian experiences are comparable with that experienced by the Irish with the British, and the simplistic theory that the Palestinians are oppressed by the iniquitous Israelis.

The Jewish population of all of Ireland is now less than 2,000, yet the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland was able to collect 143 self‑reported antisemitic incidents between July 2025 and January 2026. The incidents documented include overt threats and intimidation, but also the more subtle incidents such as removal of services, hostile graffiti and Holocaust distortion. It is now a trend to relate the Israelis with the Nazis.

At the National Holocaust Memorial Day in Dublin last year, President Higgins made critical comments of Israel’s actions in Gaza, observations that were particularly inappropriate considering the event. Those in positions of importance have to be particularly careful as their words could be twisted and used by others to meet their warped ideals.

As a society, we are principally informed by a hostile anti-Israeli press and social media. We fail to take a world view and follow tribal thought processes that largely seek to marginalise Israel and typeset Jewish people with ugly caricatures in the manifestation of Shylock the money lender. It was Jean-Paul Sartre in ‘Anti-Semite and Jew, An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate’, 1944’ who wrote that, ‘If the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him.’

Hitler’s theory was that a common enemy would unite the people, and that focus by Germany in WWII was on the Jewish people; that endemic hatred of the Jewish people continues today across the world.

The question we have to ask is, where does this hatred end?

l Ken Funston gained his PhD from Ulster University in 2020, and recently co-authored, with Cillian McGrattan, The Northern Ireland Conflict on the Margins of History: Protestant Memory on the Border