The Jewish Scapegoat in Progressive Fantasy

Instagram is full of activist slogans these days — from “From the River to the Sea,” “End the Occupation,” and “Free, Free Palestine” to “Silence is Violence” and “Educate Yourself.” The content spreads quickly. The posts get reposted. The algorithm rewards the performance. Somewhere, a humanitarian identity is born — curated, shareable, and morally effortless.

This is the era of aesthetic protest: where grief is curated, outrage is performed, and political consciousness arrives as a swipeable slideshow. The cause matters less than the catharsis. The world is burning — and you can be on the right side of it, so long as you hit “share.”

But every performance needs a villain.

And in the progressive fantasy — the one built on flat narratives and filtered pain — Jews, specifically Zionists, have been cast as the problem that makes everything else make sense. We are the oppressors that give the influencer their conscience. The colonizers that give the carousel its arc. The complexity that ruins the binary — so we’re erased from the frame entirely.

Zionist isn’t just a word anymore. It’s a placeholder. A stand-in for everything that feels wrong in the world: whiteness, nationalism, empire, capitalism. It’s not about what Zionism is — it’s about what people need it to be. They don’t have to read a book. They don’t even have to know what “indigenous” means. They just have to say “Zionist = settler” and the moral math checks out.

This is not about caring too much — it’s about how easy it is to care selectively. About how outrage becomes dopamine. Gaza has become the humanitarian crisis of choice, not because of its geopolitical complexity, but because it’s usable. It’s viral. It delivers. It provides clean binaries, aesthetic grief, and an already-assigned villain. You don’t have to know anything. You just have to repost.

When Greta Thunberg shifted from the climate to Gaza, it wasn’t surprising. She’s not unique — she’s a mirror. An emblem of the curated protester: white, photogenic, and addicted to indignation. Her power isn’t in her politics — it’s in her performance. And in the attention economy of activism, Gaza became the next high.

This moral performance only works if someone’s left out. Jews, uniquely, break the script. Because we don’t stay in the boxes we’re assigned. We’re indigenous, but we’re told we’re white. We’ve been refugees for millennia, but we’re called colonizers. We exist in-between — and that in-between makes people uncomfortable. So it’s easier to write us out.

It’s not just ignorance — it’s function. Jewish exception is the mechanism that makes the fantasy feel whole. Our history, our presence, our survival — they all disrupt the tidy dichotomy of good vs. evil, victim vs. oppressor. So we are flattened. Or vilified. Or simply erased.

The Mizrachi Jews expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Iran — their stories are inconvenient. The Jews who never left the Middle East don’t fit the colonial narrative. The Ethiopian Jews who walked to Israel — barefoot, through Sudan — are never part of the conversation. They complicate the narrative. And there’s no space for that here.

Online, the language of justice has become a ritual. And like all rituals, it needs sacrifice. Scapegoats. René Girard wrote that societies maintain order by projecting guilt onto a chosen victim, who is then cast out to restore moral purity. Today, “Zionist” is that scapegoat — a symbol onto which progressives project everything they hate but refuse to examine.

This isn’t about Israel’s policies. This isn’t about borders. This isn’t about Palestinians, either — not really. It’s about the emotional utility of a conflict that delivers outrage on demand and a villain that never asks to be understood. Gaza is the one place where the script is ready-made. Where the blood flows, the images trend, and the morality is performative but satisfying.

And still, we’re told to explain ourselves. To disavow. To earn the right to exist in the margins of movements that don’t want us unless we’re ashamed. Unless we’re post-Zionist. Unless we cut off parts of ourselves to stay invited to the party.

But what if we stopped trying to get invited?

What if we stopped apologizing for survival? What if we stopped auditioning for movements that only want us if we come fragmented and self-hating?

There’s nothing radical about erasing your own history. There’s nothing moral about letting your people be flattened to fit someone else’s fantasy. There is nothing brave about abandoning your wholeness to get likes.

Jewish pride doesn’t require permission. It doesn’t wait for solidarity. It doesn’t ask to be palatable. It exists — fully, fiercely, unapologetically. Our liberation is not a prop. Our presence is not a metaphor. And our people are not your scapegoat.

We're not playing the victim anymore.