Identity, which should serve as private refuge against the world’s indifference, periodically transforms into a weapon of war, and history proceeds in cycles where this metamorphosis repeats with minimal variations on the same monotonous melody of blood and rhetoric, because evidently the human species possesses limited creativity when it comes to justifying hatred and a selective memory that allows it to forget previous horrors with the same ease it forgets a dentist appointment.
In the speech delivered in October 2025 during a Tikvah Fund conference, Melanie Phillips articulated with disarming clarity what we might define as the hierarchy of belonging, proclaiming that Jewish identity must come “first and foremost,” relegating everything else—host nation, citizenship, civic ties, those trivialities that hold pluralistic democracies together—to the rank of secondary concerns, negligible details in the economy of existence. The moment she corrected herself, apologizing almost embarrassedly for having suggested loyalty toward the host country, was not a Freudian slip but an involuntary confession, the type of truth that emerges when one’s guard drops and rhetorical construction collapses for an instant, revealing the naked architecture of thought.
That correction contains the entire tragedy of identity politics taken to its logical extreme, where ethnic fidelity absorbs and cancels any other form of belonging, transforming citizens into sleeper agents of an agenda that transcends national borders and democratic constitutions, creating a network of loyalties operating according to logics other than those of the institutions that should regulate civil coexistence.
But Phillips didn’t stop at the simple hierarchy of loyalties: she proceeded to literally erase from the registry of existence an entire people, declaring with the nonchalance of one who can afford to rewrite reality that “there is no such thing as Palestine” and “there are no Palestinians,” performing that particular form of rhetorical genocide that precedes and prepares the material one, because before physically eliminating people one must convince the world that those people never existed, that their history is an invention, their dead don’t count, their houses built on nothing.
The assertion that Jews are “the only people who have any right to that land… and the only people who have a right to all of that land” possesses the terrible beauty of absolute certainties, those that leave no room for doubt or negotiation because they’re founded on a truth perceived as transcendent, divine, anterior to history and therefore immune to its contingencies, and anyone who has even superficially frequented history books knows perfectly well where these granite certainties lead when translated into territorial politics and military strategies.
During the same conference, figures like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss openly discussed how to use Jewish “capital” and influence networks to pursue community interests, and the fact that these conversations occur publicly, without the modesty that normally accompanies discourse on power and its modes of exercise, reveals a level of security and impunity that should give pause. Shapiro dismissed criticisms of billions of dollars in American aid to Israel as “convenient talking points” for the ignorant, with that particular arrogance characterizing those who know they can speak without consequences, who can insult others’ intelligence knowing that power structures will protect them.
Ethnic networking isn’t inherently scandalous—every community practices it with varying degrees of effectiveness and discretion—but when it’s made explicit with this frankness, when it transforms into a declared political project and accompanies contempt for ordinary citizens’ concerns, it fuels exactly that resentment which then manifests in more or less civilized forms, because people tend to react poorly when they discover that lobbies exist operating above their heads, impervious to criticism and normal democratic mechanisms.
This isn’t about attacking Jewish identity or the legitimate search for security—twentieth-century history has provided sufficient reasons to understand those existential anxieties—but about recognizing that when “us first” transforms into “only us,” when memory of suffered pain becomes justification for inflicting other pain, when the historical victim transforms into contemporary executioner without even noticing the transition, then something has gone profoundly wrong in the mechanism that should translate trauma into wisdom rather than replication of horror.
Democratic societies function on the fragile premise that no identity, no history, no past pain confers superior rights to those of others, that coexistence requires constant balancing of reciprocal claims and that the only non-negotiable principle is the equal dignity of all human beings, regardless of ethnicity or faith. When this equilibrium breaks, when one group positions itself above all others and demands that its concerns prevail over those of others, the social fabric tears and violence becomes inevitable, because no people will indefinitely accept inferior status or denial of their own existence.
The call to defend “Western civilization” by protecting Jewish identity rings particularly hollow when that same defense passes through systematic dehumanization of another people, through denial of their most elementary rights, through construction of a system that separates, divides, discriminates with bureaucratic precision that should belong only to historical nightmares we swore never to repeat again.
The uncomfortable truth is that there are no chosen peoples, there are no historical rights that nullify those of the living, there are no identities so precious as to justify annihilating others, and every time humanity has forgotten these elementary principles it has paid the price in blood and ashes, creating new generations of traumatized who will pass on their pain as inheritance and justification for other horrors, in a cycle that perpetuates with the monotony of a broken clock always marking the same tragic hour.