Is it antisemitic to refer to Zionists being “drunk on Palestinian blood”?

27 August 2025

Is it antisemitic to refer to Zionists being “drunk on Palestinian blood”? I ask because yesterday I saw an old friend from my Jewish youth movement days. We’d barely said hello when he volunteered, “What’s going on in Gaza is awful, just awful, but I want to make a comment about something you posted on Facebook during the summer. Do you mind if I do that?” I decided to ignore the total inadequacy of the word “awful” to describe the genocide and invited him to go ahead. He said that he thought a reference I’d made to “Zionists being drunk on Palestinian blood” echoed the medieval Jewish blood libel and was antisemitic. He wondered if I was aware of this and if I’d consider editing or removing the reference.

So there we were. He’d dealt with the genocide—not that he’d ever previously acknowledged that the genocide is a genocide—as “awful”, he wasn’t interested in discussing the actual content of the post, he wasn’t even able to tell me which post he was referring to. All that mattered was that I’d made a comment that he thought was antisemitic. To put it another way, genocide, not yet named, wasn’t really the issue, antisemitism was the issue. Once again the story wasn’t Israel’s colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide, it was Jewish suffering and the persecution of the Jews.

I told my friend that, yes, I did know about the Jewish blood libel, I was conscious that the reference to blood might lead some to make that association, but I didn’t feel that it was reasonable for Zionists to lay some kind of totalising claim to the use of the word “blood” in everyday speech. Nor did I think it was reasonable for Israel to cause blood to flow through Gaza like never before only for its supporters, sympathisers and apologists to say that nobody should use the word blood to describe what’s going on.

My friend maintained that he still didn’t feel it was right to label Jews as being bloodthirsty, as if murdering Palestinians was something they enjoyed. I replied with four points.

First, I very specifically wrote that it was Zionists (and not Jews) who were drunk on blood . There are more non-Jewish Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists. Antisemitic tropes can’t be layered onto Zionism given that Zionism can’t be singularly equated with Jewishness.

Second, many millions of Jews don’t identify as Zionists, have been active in the solidarity campaign and abhor what Zionists have been perpetrating in Gaza (and beyond).

Third, had my friend spent much time on social media? He acknowledged that he hadn’t. Well, if he had he’d have seen the incessant stream of videos posted by Zionists, most of them apparently Israeli, on Instagram and Tiktok that gleefully celebrate the genocide and openly call for the death of all Palestinians, including babies and kids. For a particularly revealing collection see Hamzah Saadah’s brilliant interviews with Zionists, posted on instagram at @hamzahpali.

I acknowledged to my friend that while not all Zionists are blood-thirsty in the same way, they have also shown themselves to be unusually callous, plus 82% of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—in effect the genocide of Gaza. Even in the recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv there’s no real sign of empathy for what’s happening to the Palestinians, just a desire to “get the hostages back” (even though there are no more Israeli civilians being held in Gaza—only IDF soldiers, who are prisoners of war, quite unlike the thousands of Palestinian hostages who are still being held in Israel’s prisons).

Fourth, "drunk on Palestinian blood" is a metaphor. In contrast to the historic Jewish blood libel, there is no suggestion that Zionists are literally drinking Palestinian blood.

Fifth, I’m sick and tired of being accused of being antisemitic when my critique is directed towards Zionists and not Jews, especially I’m a Jew, and everyone I have met in the solidarity movement is tired of the same thing. We’re tired of being policed about what we can and can’t say, as if the only thing that matters is the wellbeing of emotionally fragile Zionists. We’re tired of Zionists weaponizing antisemitism as well as the German genocide of the Jews to distract from the horror Israel is perpetrating in Gaza in particular as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran. Note: we’re not supposed to ever talk about the way Germany also tried to eradicate the disabled, gypsies and communists.

What I forget to mention to my friend, but did note in the post, is that the people on board the cruise liner were actually partying. As the ship docked we could see and hear them singing, cheering and dancing, clearly intent on showing us, the solidarity demonstrators, that they didn't care about our opposition to genocide nor the genocide itself. They were on holiday, they were proud Zionists, they were holidaying on an Israeli-registered vessel with Israeli Jews who were opting into to a collective Israeli-Zionist experience, they were intent on having a good time, they were behaving as if they were literally drunk. Many of them would have been doing this while their children, relatives and friends, or the children and relatives of their friends, were shooting Palestinian kids in the forehead and their government was preventing food and medical supplies entering Gaza. They had also paid for their tickets via a system that has profited from genocide, the Israeli stock market having doubled in value since 7/10. They were high on fascism.

I asked my friend if he even remembered the piece where I made this comment, just so I could revisit it. No, he wasn’t too sure. After some probing it turned out that it was indeed my report of the solidarity protest in Syros. That prompted a memory. One well-circulated Zionist response to the Syros protest was to say that the act of turning away a boat load of Jewish Israeli holidaymakers was antisemitic because it would remind them of the trauma of boatloads of German Jews being turned away by the allies in the run-up to the Second World War. I had gone on to do some research, I told my friend, and in fact one boat was turned away from Cuba/the US/Canada, the St. Louis, but in the end all of the passengers had been admitted by the UK, France, the Netherlands and one other country (I forget which one). The talk of Holocaust trauma was all bullshit manipulation designed to assume the position of victimhood while talking a cruise liner holiday while Israel perpetrated a genocide. Plus there were IDF soldiers—war criminals—on that cruise boat. In fact, who in Israel isn’t IDF or the relative of someone in the IDF given that military service is compulsory?

I also told my friend that a couple of weeks ago I’d checked the FB profile of one of his oldest friends, someone who’d been living in Israel for more than thirty years. In a recent post this person had announced his regret that Israel’s humanitarian food programme was failing (for real!) yet to his deep regret he’d seen that someone had circulated a post in relation to the food programme that included a reference to the Jewish blood libel. He was so, so tired of witnessing antisemitism, wherever he turned, he continued. I told my friend: this person is deluded, Israel’s perpetrating a genocide, the IDF are deliberately starving an entire population, Israel’s leaders have been declaring that they want to remove the Palestinians from Gaza since 7/10, and he thinks that Jews are the victims because one person has dug out a social media post that might or might not be real. When will he wake up? Does he realise that when he does it’ll be too late? That it’s already too late? That Israel cannot save its reputation at this point? It’s over. Israel and Zionism will be forever tarred with genocide. GENOCIDE.

The “drunk on Palestinian blood” episode reminded me of a point early into the genocide when during a conversation I expressed reservations about the use of the term “Zionist power”. My initial response was to feel that “Zionist power” sounded very much like “Jewish power” and so played into the antisemitic myth of the Elders of Zion, or Jews wanting to take control of the world. The person I was discussing this with replied: but the Zionist movement and the Zionist lobby—is—extremely powerful. John Mearsheimer has written a detailed, celebrated book that establishes that the Zionist lobby is—easily—the most powerful lobby in the United States. How can it be antisemitic to describe something as it is? How else are we to analyse and explain why the United States and so many other western powers are so determined to support Israel with military equipment, diplomatic support, spying information and trade relations if we can’t say that the Zionist lobby is powerful. Plus non-Jewish people make up an extremely influential part of the Zionist lobby, from Christian Evangelists to the likes of Joe Biden to Keir Starmer.

The critique was so obviously correct I felt embarrassed to have expressed concern at the use of the “Zionist power” term in the first place. But then even though I have long been critical of Israel and signed up to BDS maybe a decade ago I and many others have gone through an accelerated process of education since 7/10. There’s blood on the hands of Zioinists. Whether they’re Jews or not is irrelevant.

Back to the dinner. I asked my friend if he’d read any of my other posts on Palestine. No, he replied. Oh, so not the one about Zionism and Nazism, I asked. No, he just read parts of the one about the Israeli cruise liner, not even all of it. Ah, well, I wrote one about Zionism and Nazism as well. Zionism and Nazism? Yes. I understand that it’s taboo but we have to be able to use language to speak about what is obvious.

I’ve since been wondering, should I edit out the “drunk on Palestinian blood” reference? For the time being I’m not persuaded that it’s antisemitic so have left it alone.

The solidarity protests in the UK continue on a daily basis. The next national demonstration takes place on 6 September assembling at Russell Square, 12:00 noon. Free, free Palestine!