Collective Guilt, Individual Responsibility, and the Instrumentalization of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Abstract: The Day of Remembrance should not be reduced to a ritual commemoration of the past, but understood as a legal and civic practice oriented toward the present. This article examines contemporary forms of antisemitism through the lens of the concept of “new antisemitism,” which frequently manifests through the instrumentalization of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In particular, it analyses the discursive shift by which legitimate criticism of governmental policies or individual political responsibility — including cases subject to international criminal proceedings — is transformed into the collective condemnation of the Israeli people. Through a historical, legal, and sociological approach, the article highlights the structural continuity between this phenomenon and the traditional antisemitic device of collective guilt. It also proposes analytical criteria to distinguish political criticism from identity-based hostility, warning against the risks of selective memory and competitive victimhood. In conclusion, the article reaffirms the centrality of individual responsibility and the universalism of human rights as essential safeguards against new configurations of antisemitism in contemporary public discourse.
Keywords: #DayOfRemembrance #Holocaust #Antisemitism #NewAntisemitism #HistoricalMemory #CollectiveGuilt #IndividualResponsibility #AntiZionism #InternationalLaw #InternationalCriminalCourt #IsraelPalestine #HumanRights #SelectiveMemory #UniversalHumanRights #FrancescoMancini #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasJournal #AcademicJournal #HumanSciences #SocialSciences #EthicaSocietasUPLI
The Day of Remembrance as a Civic Practice and a Tool of Democratic Vigilance
The Day of Remembrance cannot be reduced to a ritual commemoration of the past, nor confined to an emotional or symbolic exercise devoid of consequences for the present. Rather, it constitutes a legal and civic practice oriented toward the present: a tool of democratic vigilance aimed at recognising and preventing the re-emergence of the mechanisms that made the Shoah possible. From this perspective, memory is not merely a “retrospective” dimension, but a political and cultural duty measured by contemporary societies’ ability to interpret their own forms of exclusion, stigmatisation, and symbolic violence.
As Hannah Arendt observed, totalitarianism does not arise from exception, but from the normalisation of categories that dissolve individual responsibility and legitimise the symbolic and material annihilation of the other.[1] It is precisely this normalisation that memory must interrogate: the moment in which language prepares violence, rhetoric precedes action, and dehumanisation renders “tolerable” what would otherwise appear intolerable. The Shoah, indeed, was not only a historical event of industrial destruction; it was also a long process of the social production of hatred, constructed through stereotypes, narratives of danger, and collective figures of culpability.
Within this framework, the Day of Remembrance takes on a meaning that concerns not only Jews as the historical victims of genocide, but the democratic sphere as a whole: whenever a community is transformed into an identity-based target, whenever individual responsibility is dissolved into collective guilt, mechanisms compatible with the cultural genealogy of antisemitism are reactivated.
“New Antisemitism” as a Discursive Form: Concealment, Displacement, and Legitimation
Over recent decades, antisemitism has taken on renewed discursive forms, often disguised as political or moral critique. Several scholars have defined this phenomenon as new antisemitism, characterised not by the direct reproduction of older racial stereotypes, but by the collective delegitimation of the State of Israel and of the Jewish people.[2] In this configuration, anti-Jewish hostility does not necessarily present itself through the biological language of race or the imagery of the “internal enemy” typical of twentieth-century Europe; rather, it reproduces itself through a political-moral rhetoric: Israel is treated not as a political actor open to criticism, but as an absolute symbolic category, a principle of evil, an ontological figure of guilt.
In this context, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict becomes a symbolic vehicle through which anti-Jewish hatred is reorganised in forms that appear acceptable within the public sphere. The point is not to deny that the conflict produces suffering, violations, and responsibilities, and thus legitimate political and legal debates; rather, it is to observe how, in many contexts, it is employed as a totalising interpretative framework capable of transforming historical and geopolitical complexity into an identity-based simplification: “Israelis” as a unitary subject, “Jews” as a collective entity, and “Israel” as a synonym for absolute evil.
This discursive shift is crucial: contemporary antisemitism often does not declare itself; it disguises itself. It does not present itself as hatred, but as “justice”; not as prejudice, but as “morality”; not as racism, but as a “political stance”. It is a form of antisemitism that no longer requires biological arguments, because it operates through the semantics of guilt.
Political Criticism, Criminal Responsibility, and the Individualisation of Guilt
In international law and democratic systems, criminal responsibility is strictly individual. Contesting the choices of a government or a prime minister — even when such conduct is subject to investigation or indictment by the International Criminal Court — falls within the legitimate exercise of political criticism.[3] Criticism, protest, denunciation, and even the moral condemnation of state policies constitute ordinary features of the democratic public sphere.
However, when such criticism turns into a generalised condemnation of the Israeli people, one witnesses a violation of the principle of personal responsibility, replaced by a logic of collective guilt. Here a decisive threshold emerges: criticising a government means contesting political decisions; condemning a people means transforming identity into guilt. The former is a democratic practice; the latter is a discriminatory mechanism.
In other words, the issue is not the legitimacy of criticism, but its transformation into identity-based stigmatisation. When one shifts from judging policies to attributing a criminal essence to a collective, the logic historically sustaining antisemitism is reactivated: the idea that a group is “guilty as such”, and therefore always imputable, always suspect, always responsible.
Collective Guilt as the Historical Matrix of European Antisemitism
The attribution of collective guilt to the Jewish people constitutes one of the founding devices of European antisemitism, from the myth of deicide to modern conspiracy theories.[4] The long duration of antisemitism is precisely the long duration of a mechanism: the Jew as a figure upon whom to discharge social anxiety, political instability, economic crisis, and collective frustration. The Jew need not commit any action; mere existence as a symbol is sufficient.
The contemporary reappearance of this schema, through expressions that assign to “Israelis” a unitary and undifferentiated responsibility, represents a structural continuity with these traditions, even as the vocabulary and context change. The signs change, but the function remains: identity becomes accusation. This is particularly evident when public discourse resorts to ethnic generalisations (“Israelis are…”) or religious generalisations (“Jews do…”) and when the conflict is used to circulate older stereotypes in new forms.
History teaches that antisemitism does not require logical coherence: it requires social utility. It serves to produce an enemy, to simplify complexity, to provide a total explanation. For this reason, the memory of the Shoah is not only the memory of victims, but also the memory of mechanisms.
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Criteria of Distinction and Thresholds of Transformation
The distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is necessary, yet not always respected. Criticism of Zionism as a political or historical project falls within the pluralism of ideas; it becomes antisemitism when it results in the denial of the right to collective existence, the systematic application of double standards, or the essentialised demonisation of the Jewish state.[5] In such cases, the object of critique is no longer a policy, but an identity.
This threshold can be identified through several typical moves:
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Identity-based generalisation: shifting from government actions to “Israelis” as a moral category.
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Absolute demonisation: Israel not as a political actor, but as a principle of evil.
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Double standards: evaluative criteria applied selectively only to the Jewish state.
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Denial of legitimacy: rejection of the right to collective existence or security.
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Transposition onto Jews everywhere: attributing responsibility to Jewish communities worldwide.
These elements do not necessarily coincide with political criticism; rather, they indicate a transformation into identity-based hostility. In this sense, contemporary antisemitism often operates through “slippage”: it begins from a real event, but turns it into a pretext for reproducing an older structure.
Selective Memory and the Risk of Instrumentalisation: When the Shoah Becomes Rhetoric
A further risk lies in selective memory, which uses the Shoah as a contingent rhetorical instrument, emptying it of its universal meaning. As Todorov notes, memory loses its ethical function when it is bent toward legitimising hatred or indifference.[6]
Selective memory manifests itself in two opposite yet convergent directions:
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memory reduced to a symbol, used as a formula of legitimation without critical responsibility;
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competitive memory, which places suffering in competition and produces a hierarchy of victims.
Both forms weaken the civic function of memory: they transform it into an instrument of identity rather than a practice of universalism. The Shoah, however, cannot become a rhetorical currency; it must remain an ethical and historical paradigm capable of interrogating contemporary structures of exclusion.
Universalism of Rights and the Non-Competitive Nature of Victimhood: A Necessary Framework
The struggle against antisemitism is not in contradiction with the defence of the human rights of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, both are grounded in the universalism of rights and in the rejection of any identity-based logic that justifies violence.[7] Defending human rights means rejecting the idea that dignity is a privilege reserved for some. It also means rejecting the notion that justice is a zero-sum game, in which recognising one form of suffering implies denying another.
The competition of victimhood is a product of a regressive vision of rights, because it turns suffering into a political weapon and reduces ethics to factional alignment. It is precisely this dynamic that makes the instrumental use of the conflict possible: solidarity is transformed into hostile identity, criticism into stigmatisation, politics into hatred.
Conclusion
The Day of Remembrance imposes an intellectual responsibility: to keep political criticism distinct from identity-based hatred, and to defend the principle of individual responsibility against any temptation toward collective guilt. New antisemitism thrives where this distinction is erased, where complexity is replaced by absolute categories, and where a people becomes an accused subject by definition.
Remembering the Shoah today means opposing this erasure through the tools of law, history, and critical reason. It means defending the universalism of rights against the logic of identity-based demonisation. And it means reaffirming, ultimately, that no democracy can survive if it accepts that identity itself becomes guilt.
Notes
[1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
[2] Pierre-André Taguieff, La nuova giudeofobia (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003).
[3] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998, 2187 U.N.T.S. 90, art. 25.
[4] George L. Mosse, L’antisemitismo nella storia europea (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2004).
[5] Per la distinzione concettuale e i criteri analitici: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), Working Definition of Antisemitism (2016), accesso consultato il [inserire data], https://holocaustremembrance.com.
[6] Tzvetan Todorov, Gli abusi della memoria (Milano: Garzanti, 1996).
[7] Norberto Bobbio, L’età dei diritti (Torino: Einaudi, 1990).
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