(Aug. 23, 2026 / JNS)
In War by Other Means: The Delegitimization Campaign Against Israel, Matthew Cohen and Chuck Freilich outlined the vicious cycle linking Palestinian activists and leaders, NGOs and the United Nations—a cycle that much of the press amplifies. Every time Israel resorts to military force, NGOs issue biased “reports” condemning Israeli attacks and demanding a thorough investigation. Notably, condemnation precedes investigation.
The United Nations then obliges with an “investigation,” often led by individuals known for their hostile stance toward Israel. “The published reports contain scathing criticism of Israel, accompanied by NGO reports on alleged Israeli war crimes,” the authors noted.
NGOs and U.N. agencies systematically condemn Israeli actions as violations of international law and war crimes before hostilities end or investigations begin. Such unverified accusations receive widespread media coverage and limit Israel’s freedom of military action.
Thus, Cohen and Freilich said: “Media have become an essential component of modern diplomacy and military action” since “a state’s legitimacy is affected by perceptions of reality as much as by reality itself, especially by images generated by television and social media, which often present a biased and distorted view.”
Compared to other conflicts, including those that are deadlier or more brutal, the Arab-Israeli conflict occupies a prime and disproportionate place in the Western political imagination.
Consequently, through the media’s obsessive lens, Israel falsely appears as among the most significant—and evil—global actors. The more the media portrays the Jewish state as a singular player and diminishes the role of its adversaries, the more it misleads audiences by simplifying the conflict.
A very simple practice reinforces Israel’s contrived centrality: repeat, repeat and repeat. As historian Richard Landes (Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?) noted, “once a journalist formulates and repeats the accusation—even if only as a (plausible) allegation—the denial comes across as unconvincing, defensive and ineffective.”
The sustained condemnation uniquely fixated on Israel fuels selective moral disengagement concerning any issue related to Israel and, perhaps above all, Jews.
Psychologist Albert Bandura (Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency) noted that the selective activation and suspension of moral standards lead to behavioral double standards. He explained that suspension of standards risks using moral justifications to redefine harmful behavior as honorable through moral justification.
Through moral justification, he wrote, people “see themselves as defenders of cherished values, fighters against ruthless oppressors, guardians of peace and saviors of humanity from subjugation.”
Comparisons help shape perceptions. The disproportionately “perverse” Israel serves as the bad-acting “Other,” cognitively repositioning the morality of antisemitism/anti-Zionism, and thereby normalizing and ennobling the bigotry. “What would otherwise be morally reprehensible becomes a source of self-esteem,” summarized Bandura.
The obvious practical application
It is in this context that we should understand the ominous data regarding Spanish-language antisemitism. The Jerusalem Post reported on June 14:
“The level of online antisemitism in Spanish was much higher last year than it was before October 7, 2023.”
“[…] antisemitic content reached its highest level on X, where [it] accounted for 20.68% of all content analyzed. Spain recorded the highest volume of antisemitic content, followed by Uruguay, Colombia, and Mexico.”
“Next was Facebook, where 14.98% of the comments analyzed were classified as antisemitic, making 2025 the year with the highest proportion of antisemitism on Facebook since data collection began.”
Antisemitism surged alarmingly in 2024 in Spain. According to the Annual Report of the Observatory Against Antisemitism, that year saw a “321% increase compared to 2023, when 60 cases were recorded, and a 567% increase compared to 2022.”
According to the report, this increase reflects the rise in antisemitic hate speech across all spheres of Spanish public life—political, educational, cultural, media, social—throughout the year.
As documented by CAMERA Español, Spanish media has contributed greatly to the hostile climate with coverage of the conflict and global geopolitics that demonizes the Jewish state and normalizes the hatred of Jews and Israel. For instance, the Spanish Broadcasting Corporation RTVE has alleged that “war after war, settlement after settlement, Israel has been occupying all of Palestinian territory” and that “the Jewish lobby drives money and votes in the U.S.” Recasting old tropes as a valid prism to understand the present, an El País op-ed ventured that Israel is “the vehicle for a new, extreme evil.”
Within this environment, last month a Basque socialist association unfurled a huge banner at the San Fermin Festival with the unashamed slogan: “Destroy Israel.” It wasn’t the first time: In 2025, the organization had paraded the same toxic goal with the same impunity.
In May 2025, Combat Antisemitism Movement cautioned that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez libelous description of Israel as a “genocidal state” is liable to “fuel hatred and antisemitism.”
It didn’t take long for the organization’s warning to come to fruition. The following August, anti-Israel activists tried to block cyclists from Israel’s team during the Vuelta Ciclista a España bike race, forcing the cancellation of the event’s final stage. The International Cycling Union (UCI) expressed its “total disapproval and deep concern” over the incident and criticized Sánchez for expressing “his admiration for the demonstrators.”
Against the steady drumbeat of NGO condemnation, U.N. “investigations” and media amplification, who could honestly be surprised by the leniency shown toward “protesters” calling for the destruction of the designated global villain?
