Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro said it plainly: Jews worldwide are not responsible for the actions of the Zionist State of Israel. Israel does not represent the Jewish people. He is absolutely right — and the world must understand why this distinction matters more than ever, because what is unfolding in Gaza is not policy gone wrong. It is policy working exactly as intended.
The Israeli government has been captured by ideological extremists. Itamar Ben-Gvir(National Security minister) and Bezalel Smotrich(Finance minister) are not ordinary politicians. They are disciples of Meir Kahane — a man so extreme that the United States designated his Kach movement a terrorist organisation. These men do not merely tolerate a terrorist’s legacy. They worship it. They have built their careers on it. And now they sit in Cabinet, with their hands on the levers of military power and civilian administration. Let that sink in.
Their worldview is not complicated. Palestinians are subhuman obstacles to a Greater Israel. Ethnic cleansing is not a policy failure for them — it is the policy. Starvation is not an unintended consequence — it is a weapon. Gaza is not collateral damage. It is the programme. And war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, desperate to stay out of prison, has made himself their hostage — a once-calculating survivor now reduced to enabling genocide to preserve his own freedom.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas was entirely correct to call Israel what it is: an apartheid state. This is not the language of fringe activists. It is the considered judgment of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice, and now the mainstream leadership of Europe. When the head of European diplomacy uses that word, the mask is fully off.
And when you say any of this, the machinery activates. You are called an antisemite. Rabbi Shapiro himself — an Orthodox rabbi whose entire life is devoted to Jewish tradition and Torah — has been smeared with that label. The accusation has become the last refuge of those who cannot defend the indefensible. It is cynical. It is weaponised. And increasingly, the world sees through it with contempt.
Israel is on a path of accelerating self-destruction. It has become a pariah state — isolated diplomatically, indicted legally, condemned morally, and abandoned by the conscience of nations that once stood by it. ICC arrest warrants hang over its leadership. Trade relationships are fracturing. The architecture of Western impunity that shielded it for decades is crumbling in real time. When the men driving that collapse are open admirers of a designated terrorist movement, the outcome was not just predictable — it was inevitable.
The Jewish people deserve far better than to have their identity, their history, and their moral inheritance hijacked by fascists and war criminals.
