“Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”
– Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s phone call to his wife – his voice likely filtered through the sterile hum of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre, his words undoubtedly tempered by the weight of impending exile – was more than a moment of personal anguish. It was the rupture in a circular argument that has ensnared the West for over a century; the very dialectic James Renton, a leading historian on the construction of Jewish identity, dissects in Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. A Palestinian, with an Algerian citizenship, and a US green-card holder, Khalil’s identity is a palimpsest of colonial histories and racial exclusions. He now stands at the intersection of two hatreds that are framed as oppositional yet remain inextricably linked.
The logic that undergirds his detention is at once familiar and paradoxical. In the official narrative, to stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is to wade into the murky waters of antisemitism – a conflation Renton traces back to European colonial projects that cast both Jews and Muslims as suspect. And yet, in its zeal to combat antisemitism, the West seamlessly reproduces the very structures of racial exclusion that once targeted European Jews.
Khalil’s arrest and the invocation of ICE – a mechanism of state violence weaponised against predominantly Muslim and brown bodies – demonstrates how Islamophobia is not the negation of antisemitism but its continuation. The state now takes on the role of protector, defending Jewishness from what it deems an external threat, all the while perpetuating the same racial logic that once made Jews the unassimilable ‘other’.
The double marginalisation of pro-Palestinian protestors
Khalil’s detention is not an isolated event but part of a broader repression. In London, a protester scaled the Elizabeth Tower, unfurling a Palestinian flag in defiance of silence. In a video documenting his prolonged demonstration, the man remained perched atop the clock tower of Big Ben for over 16 hours, barefoot, holding a Palestinian flag, before finally descending past midnight. His act – less about spectacle than about the vanishing space for Palestinian solidarity – was met with immediate criminalisation. The West’s selective commitment to free speech was on full display.
This duplicity is also exposed in a video that captures the contradictions of Western engagement with Palestine. The language of democracy is wielded selectively; protest for some causes is championed, and for others, it is met with brute force. The exclusion of Palestinians from public discourse is not incidental – it is foundational to the maintenance of Western moral authority.
Nowhere is this erasure more evident than in the arts, where Palestinian solidarity is increasingly censored. Creative Australia’s decision to rescind the participation of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino at the 2026 Venice Biennale is emblematic of a broader pattern. Their selection was deemed a “divisive risk,” reinforcing the message that Lebanese identity – even in artistic form – is a liability. The art world, often mythologised as a bastion of free expression, reveals itself as just another apparatus of ideological containment.
Matti Bunzl, known for his scholarship on the shifting nature of antisemitism in contemporary Europe and its intersections with Islamophobia, would argue that this is not merely a cultural dispute but a structural one, where the ‘Palestinian question’ is absorbed into the racialised logic of Islamophobia. Palestinian art, politics, and identity are rendered suspect, not because they pose an actual threat, but because their very visibility disrupts the West’s self-image as a neutral arbiter of justice.
These incidents unfold against the backdrop of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the White House, an event that further illuminated the West’s compartmentalised approach to human rights. While European and American leaders rallied behind Ukraine’s resistance, they maintained a deafening silence on Gaza. Not a single statement of solidarity was extended to Palestinians despite the catastrophic loss of life. Even Zelenskyy, whose cause is framed as a struggle for sovereignty against the occupation, offered no recognition of the Palestinian struggle – a paradox of victimhood laid bare.
A dialectic of exclusion
Renton’s work, particularly on Britain’s role in defining Jewishness and its intersection with imperial politics, establishes him as a key authority on the structural links between these two forms of racialised exclusion. In his diachronic framework, Renton maps the parallel histories of both hatreds, demonstrating how their discursive function has shifted to accommodate the political needs of the moment.
The emergence of antisemitism as a term and concept in the 19th century coincided with the rise of racial thinking and nationalism across Europe. Coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, it signified a shift from religious hostility toward Jews to a racialised form of exclusion – one tied to notions of biological determinism and national purity.
Jews were no longer seen merely as followers of a different faith but as an alien, non-European race. This categorisation placed them outside the nation-state’s imagined community, rendering them permanent outsiders., culminating in their full integration within the political and intellectual spheres of Europe and the United States.
The anthropologist and historian, Bunzl, in Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New (2007), refines this argument, demonstrating how the function of exclusion has shifted over time. Whereas historical antisemitism sought to expel Jews from the national body, contemporary Islamophobia polices Muslims within it, framing them as internal threats incompatible with liberal democracy. The mechanisms have changed, but the structural purpose remains: to define who belongs by demarcating who does not.
Jewish integration and the West’s selective memory
Despite centuries of exclusion, Jewish communities in Europe were ultimately absorbed into the political and intellectual fabric of the West – albeit at an unspeakable cost. The Holocaust and the moral reckoning it forced upon Europe and the US, culminating in their full integration within the political and intellectual spheres of both, catalysed a reframing of Jewish identity.
In the US, Jewish immigrants – many of whom fled pogroms and genocide – became key architects of liberal thought, shaping academia, civil rights discourse and even foreign policy. From the New Deal coalition to the anti-war and feminist movements, Jewish Americans forged a space of influence that had eluded them in Europe for centuries.
This integration, however, also marked a transformation in the West’s racial imagination. Where antisemitism had once placed Jews outside the moral community, post-war America and Europe rebranded them as integral to the liberal democratic order. This repositioning, Renton and Bunzl argue, coincided with the rise of a new racial antagonist: the Muslim, now framed as the primary cultural and security threat. The same states that once wielded racial exclusion against Jews now invoke Jewish suffering to justify the marginalisation of Muslims and Palestinians.
Unlike antisemitism, which was historically intertwined with European nationalisms, Islamophobia gained traction in a post-colonial context, where former colonial subjects arrived in the metropole and were treated as perpetual foreigners. Islamophobia is a term of much more recent provenance, emerging formally in the 1990s, mainly through the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 report.
Islamophobia, then, is not a historical rupture but a reconfiguration of the racial logic that once targeted Jews.
This logic extends to the ‘Palestinian Question’, a term Edward Said deliberately invoked to mirror the infamous ‘Jewish Question’ of 19th-century Europe. Just as Jews were historically rendered superfluous within Christian Europe’s political imagination, Palestinians today are denied political and existential legitimacy within the West’s moral calculus. The Jewish Question was ultimately “resolved” through the establishment of Israel – a resolution that, paradoxically, has produced a new question: the fate of the Palestinian people.
For Said, this is no mere geopolitical issue but a racialised problem structured by the same logic that once made Jews perpetual outsiders. The West’s refusal to see Palestinian resistance as anything other than fanaticism mirrors the way European nationalists once dismissed Jewish emancipation movements as subversive threats to state stability. The moral arc that once demanded Jewish liberation now bends toward the negation of Palestinian sovereignty.
Challenging the binary
In light of these events – Khalil’s detention, the Elizabeth Tower protestor’s arrest, the artistic censorship in Australia, and the global hypocrisy on Gaza – the Palestinian cause must be reframed beyond the binary of antisemitism vs. Islamophobia.
Palestinian solidarity must not be reduced to hate speech or terrorism but recognised as a legitimate political struggle for freedom, human rights, and justice.
To confront the intersection of antisemitism and Islamophobia is to dismantle the exclusionary frameworks that sustain them. The Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to hate speech or terrorism – it is a political struggle for freedom, as legitimate as any other. The West’s inability to reckon with this truth exposes the hypocrisy that underpins its moral posturing.
The series of incidents unfolding in recent weeks has illuminated, in stark and troubling ways, the circular argument between antisemitism and Islamophobia that continues to dominate the Western discourse surrounding the Palestinian Question. This paradox, which hinges on the conflation of anti-Zionist sentiment with religious and racial animosity, has not only been weaponised by political forces but also systematically marginalised Palestinian solidarity. At the heart of this process is a narrative in which Muslim and Arab activists – who have long fought for justice and against the colonial dynamics of Israel – are increasingly criminalised and dehumanised.
Renton’s work reveals an inescapable truth: antisemitism and Islamophobia are not oppositional forces but twin reflections of the same racial order. They are wielded selectively, used to include or exclude depending on the needs of the state. By exposing their shared genealogy, we move closer to an honest reckoning with how race, religion, and power function in the Western imagination. And so the cycle continues.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
