Lightning on the Mount: Israel, Antisemitism, and the Crisis of Meaning

When the modern state of Israel was born, it carried the weight of a world’s long shadow. Forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it emerged as a kind of covenant—an existential promise that the Jewish people would no longer live at the mercy of foreign empires, pogroms, or polite indifference.

But no symbol comes uncharged. And Israel, perhaps more than any modern nation, sits at the centre of a storm of meanings—political, mythic, theological, and psychological. What was meant to be a refuge has become a lightning rod: for grievance, projection, guilt, and rage.

This essay asks why. And what that reaction tells us—not only about Israel, but about the West, and the deep fractures now running through its cultural psyche.

Israel as Mythic Object

Israel is not simply a state. It is a symbolic construct—layered with thousands of years of theological, historical, and archetypal resonance.

To the Jewish people, it is homecoming: the end of exile, a rebirth of sovereignty, a sacred thread pulled taut across millennia.

To the Christian imagination, it is both cradle and crossroads—a stage on which divine history played out, and a theological complication that never quite settled.

To the postcolonial West, it has become something else entirely: a cipher. A vessel into which can be poured every unresolved tension of our era:

• Power and victimhood

• Guilt and justice

• Survival and aggression

• Identity and empire

In short: Israel is where the West projects its spiritual confusion.

The Shock of October 7—and the Collapse of Moral Reflex

When Hamas launched its brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, many expected the moral lines to be clear. But they weren’t. Not everywhere. In the days that followed, parts of the Western world responded not with solidarity, but with silence—or worse, celebration.

Protests erupted across Europe and the US—not in mourning, but in defiance. Flags were waved, not at half-mast, but in triumph. On some university campuses, Jewish students were told to stay home, not because of external threats, but because of internal atmosphere.

Something old had stirred. And the reflexes of liberal humanism—pluralism, empathy, care—seemed to falter under the weight of a new orthodoxy.

The Guilt Inversion: Why the West Sides with Hamas

This requires careful navigation. To ask why many in the West seemed instinctively more sympathetic to Hamas than to Israel is not to dismiss Palestinian suffering. But it does ask: why is Israel held to a different moral standard—one applied with such intensity that the right to defend civilians becomes suspect, while the deliberate slaughter of them becomes ‘context’?

Here are several overlapping reasons, each symbolic:

1. Postcolonial Guilt and the Need for Redemption

The liberal West is haunted by its colonial past. Israel, to some, resembles a settler-colonial state—regardless of its unique historical origins. Supporting the “oppressed” becomes a secular sacrament. And Hamas, despite its actions, is cast in the role of righteous resistance.

2. The Binary Collapse of Identity Politics

In much of contemporary activism, nuance has evaporated. Power = bad. Powerlessness = virtue. Israel is framed as powerful; therefore, evil. The Palestinian cause becomes unchallengeable, no matter its methods. The result is a flattening of moral terrain.

3. The Projection of Western Shadow

Israel reminds the West of itself—armed, wealthy, technologically advanced, spiritually unresolved. In disowning Israel, the West is disowning its own reflection.

4. The Mythic Discomfort of Jewish Sovereignty

This is perhaps the deepest layer. For two thousand years, the Jewish people existed largely as guests—tolerated or persecuted, but never sovereign. Now that they are, the world does not quite know what to do. Some unconscious part of the collective psyche seems to prefer the Jew in exile, wandering, suffering—contained within a mythic framework.

A powerful Jew unsettles that myth. A sovereign Jewish nation disturbs it profoundly.

Why Antisemitism Always Finds a Way Back

What we are witnessing is not new. Antisemitism adapts. It evolves with the culture. In a religious age, Jews were accused of deicide. In an economic age, they were called usurers. In a nationalist age, they were deemed disloyal cosmopolitans. In a decolonising age, they are now framed as oppressors.

The content shifts. The form remains.

And when a civilisation begins to unravel—when truth fractures, trust decays, and power hides behind ideology—the old scapegoats return, repackaged for modern palates.

The Danger of the Symbol Consuming the Real

This is perhaps the final warning.

When Israel is no longer seen as a real place—filled with real people, real terror, real grief—but instead becomes a symbol of whatever a culture loves or hates, then violence is no longer about action, but meaning.

When Hamas becomes a freedom movement in the eyes of comfortable academics thousands of miles away…
When Jewish children are told to hide their stars of David in Western cities for fear of reprisal…
When the name Israel provokes disgust before the name Hamas raises alarm…

Something has cracked.

This is not just geopolitics. It is ritual collapse.

Conclusion: What the Lightning Reveals

Israel has become a mythic flashpoint—a place where the tectonic plates of guilt, fear, power, and identity grind visibly against each other.

And when antisemitism rises, whether veiled as critique or shouted from rooftops, it is not simply about Israel. It is about us—about the West’s failure to integrate its own shadow, its own history, its own complicity.

We are not witnessing a rational debate about foreign policy.
We are witnessing a civilisation losing its capacity for symbolic discernment.

The lightning that strikes Israel illuminates the storm in which we are all now standing.