Tribal exemption: how left and right make space for antisemitism
Who gets forgiven, and why
A group chat leaks. Young Republican leaders. Praise for Hitler, Holocaust jokes.
POLITICO reports it in October 2025.
JD Vance replies with a familiar kind of political damage control. He shrinks it to ‘young boys’ saying ‘stupid things’. He warns against ‘purity tests’. He argues against deplatforming. In one move he makes the behaviour seem trivial, and he makes the act of enforcing a boundary the problem.
That routine shows up again and again, in similar guises, across movements that insist they oppose antisemitism. People want a clean story: the movement is against antisemitism, the leader is decent, the coalition is big and imperfect, the bad stuff is fringe. In reality, when a particular kind of antisemitism is useful, or when the people trading in it sit inside an electorally valuable coalition, the boundary turns soft. You get what I’ll call the exemption sequence.
It tends to run in three steps.
First, minimisation: it was a joke, a misunderstanding, a one-off, a clip taken out of context.
Then deflection: this is really about free speech, Islamophobia, the establishment, smears, elite panic, cancel culture.
Then absorption: the person stays in good standing, because ejecting them costs the movement something it thinks it needs.
You can see it in the formats of modern politics: the clipped video, the quote-tweet pile-on, the conference speech turned into a loyalty test. The content changes. The excuses don’t.
By late 2025, Campaign Against Antisemitism reported that 51% of British Jews say they do not see a long-term future in the UK.
That figure may be disputed, but it reflects a trend of fear pulsating through diaspora Jewish communities. It does not suggest a direct causal chain from any one politician’s rhetoric to any one person’s decision-making. It does locate the argument in a social atmosphere: a crisis of belonging.
Antisemitism does not begin with Israel and it does not end with Israel. There is old religious antisemitism, classic economic conspiracy antisemitism, racial-nationalist antisemitism, Islamist antisemitism, and the modern phenomenon of secondary antisemitism: anger at Jews for naming antisemitism, framed as manipulation or bad faith. None of those require Israel as a trigger.
However, in mainstream Anglo-American politics right now, Israel acts as a filter. It shapes which antisemitic patterns get treated as urgent, and which get waved away as misunderstanding, smear, or policy dispute.
Pro-Israel constituencies show more tolerance for right-coded antisemitic themes: ‘globalists’, ‘New World Order’ talk, Soros-as-puppet-master, conspiratorial elite plots that slide easily into older Jewish coding.
Anti-Israel or Israel-critical constituencies show more tolerance for left-coded antisemitic themes: dual loyalty insinuations, money-and-influence caricatures, ‘Zionists control politics and media’, treating Jewish fear as bad faith or cynical strategy.
The tropes can be structurally similar. The permission structure depends on which side the speaker is on, and what they are ‘for’.
Since 7 October 2023, Israel has shifted into something bigger than a foreign policy topic. It now operates as a moral identity marker. It sits inside wider views about the West, colonialism, security, minority solidarity, and the legitimacy of national self-determination. When an issue becomes that total, it starts to govern what people are willing to see in their own camp. It also governs what they are willing to excuse.
This all unfolds with real-world consequences. The US saw a record 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 140% increase on 2022, per the ADL’s audit. In the UK, CST recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 147% rise on 2022. These numbers do not, by themselves, tell you why antisemitism rose. Social violence has many inputs: geopolitics, online amplification, organised extremists, institutional trust, police response, and the way public elites signal what is acceptable.
What the exemption sequence does, reliably, is signal impunity. It tells audiences that certain antisemitic frames carry little social cost if the speaker is useful to the tribe.
Why movements struggle to enforce boundaries
Every movement is a coalition and coalitions have costs. Enforcing a boundary means losing something: donors, activists, online amplification, street numbers, internal unity, and sometimes seats. Leaders who want power end up asking, explicitly or tacitly, a blunt question. Can we afford to exclude these people?
Then there is identity protection. Within movements, certain identities become symbolically central. Criticism of the movement’s figureheads or core narratives is felt as an attack on the group itself. Boundary enforcement stops being administrative hygiene and becomes personal betrayal. This is also where secondary antisemitism often appears. Jews raise antisemitism, and the response becomes resentment at Jews for raising it, reframed as manipulation, bad faith, or special pleading.
Those two forces create the tribal exemption. When someone is useful, their transgressions get treated as background noise.
The value of the trope
These tropes are not always accidents.
Antisemitic themes function as rhetorical shortcuts. They offer a ready-made villain that makes complex arguments easier to package for a base.
If you want to talk about global trade, deindustrialisation, and the financial system, ‘globalists’ does something emotionally efficient.
If you want to talk about US Middle East policy, ‘the lobby’ can become a suspicious force rather than a normal political actor with competing factions and internal disagreements.
If you want to talk about racism, colonialism and power, ‘Zionists’ can become a cipher for everything you hate about the West.
None of this means that discussing trade, lobbies, or power is inherently antisemitic. The line gets crossed when the story becomes totalising and conspiratorial: hidden coordination, shadow control, money as the engine of obedience, Jews or ‘Zionists’ as the agent behind the scenes. That is the point where politics stops being analysis and starts becoming mythology.
Israel as the filter
This is the crux of the matter:
If your moral anchor is ‘defend Israel’, you tend to interpret right-wing conspiracism as clumsy anti-elite rhetoric. You tend to interpret left-wing anti-Zionist rhetoric as eliminationist, uniquely dangerous, and structurally antisemitic.
If your moral anchor is ‘oppose Zionism’, you tend to interpret left-coded tropes as legitimate critique of power. You tend to interpret right-wing tropes as the core antisemitism, because they often come with explicit racial nationalism and a history of fascist adjacency.
Each side becomes good at spotting patterns in the other camp. Each side becomes practised at looking away from its own.
This keeps antisemitism politically available. Each camp leaves a back door open for the version it finds instrumentally convenient.
Case study 1: JD Vance and coalition maintenance
Vance is a useful case study for how a modern right-wing leader holds a broad church that includes explicitly antisemitic subcultures. He has condemned antisemitism and signalled friendliness towards Jewish communal life. He also resists the act that turns condemnation into something enforceable: red lines that cost support among the most energised nodes of the online right.
The October 2025 group chat story is one example. The rhetoric does the work: shrink the offence, warn against enforcement, treat boundary-setting as dangerous moralism.
In a UnHerd interview and transcript published on 21 December 2025, you can see a second layer of the same move. Vance says antisemitism has no place in the conservative movement, then describes it as vanishingly rare inside the coalition. He claims that ‘99% of Republicans’ do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish, and he frames much of the current argument as a backlash raised to avoid debating US foreign policy.
He then reorders the attention economy. Nick Fuentes, he says, should take ‘one second’ of your attention. He presents a different grievance as the real scandal: institutional discrimination against white men by people with ‘actual political power’.
That is minimisation plus displacement. Antisemitism becomes a sideshow. The coalition’s preferred grievance becomes the main story.
The reason is simple. The ‘New Right’ ecosystem relies on a digitally native vanguard that treats gatekeeping as betrayal. It has become an identity marker on the alt-right, in MAGA and America First. A politician who signals they will start ejecting people for racist or antisemitic humour risks being branded an establishment plant or worse, a traitor to a new dogma. In that environment, minimisation is coalition maintenance.
The enforcer’s penalty: boundary-setting as betrayal
This is bigger than Vance. It is the right’s internal argument, happening in public, about whether antisemitism is a boundary at all.
At AmericaFest in December 2025, Ben Shapiro gave a speech arguing that friendship and coalition unity are no excuse for silence when public figures flirt with conspiracism, and he explicitly named Megyn Kelly in that context. The Free Press published the speech as an article the next day under the headline ‘Only Cowards Tolerate Conspiracy Theorists’. https://www.thefp.com/p/ben-shapiro-only-cowards-tolerate
Kelly’s response, in an interview described by multiple outlets, was to claim that Shapiro and Bari Weiss ‘are making antisemites’, and to frame Shapiro as ‘Israel first’.
The ADL criticised that framing, calling ‘making antisemites’ a form of victim-blaming, and flagging ‘Israel first’ as invoking the dual loyalty trope.
The process here is interesting. Shapiro tries to enforce a boundary. The backlash recasts boundary enforcement as censorship and betrayal. It signals that in modern populism, a wide tent carries moral status, while a red line reads as disloyalty.
Case study 2: Ilhan Omar and identity protection
If the right manages coalitions, the left protects identities. Ilhan Omar sits right on that seam.
Omar has condemned antisemitism. She has also faced genuinely bigoted attacks, including Islamophobia. As she is a visibly Muslim woman in US politics, criticism of her sometimes arrives mixed with racism. That makes it easier for allies to treat antisemitism accusations as suspect by default. A defensive reflex forms. Conceding the point feels like aiding the racist bullies.
In 2019, Omar wrote that support for Israel was ‘all about the Benjamins’ and referenced AIPAC. She later apologised and said she did not intend to invoke antisemitic tropes.
There is a legitimate political topic here: lobbying, foreign policy, influence. The problem is the framing. Money-as-explanation language and insinuations about purchase and control sit inside a long history where Jews are cast as the hidden financial, corrupt engine of politics. Once that framing is installed, critique of policy can slide into a conspiratorial story about who really runs the state.
The exemption sequence shows up here with different emotional fuel. The defence often starts with ‘clumsy phrasing’. It shifts to ‘this is Islamophobia and bad faith’. It ends with absorption: rallying around her becomes part of rallying around the movement’s identity.
Sometimes that defence is necessary, because some attacks are Islamophobic. The side effect is bluntness. The movement loses some of its ability to distinguish legitimate critique of power from stories that borrow older antisemitic motifs.
You can see why the shortcut is tempting. ‘The lobby’ turns a messy, pluralistic reality into a single suspicious engine. Many Jewish views, many pro-Israel groups, many anti-Israel Jews, many non-Jewish supporters. The shortcut makes foreign policy disagreement emotionally legible to a base.
And once that shortcut becomes common sense, Jewish alarm starts to read like manipulation. That is one of the ways secondary antisemitism appears on the left: resentment at Jews for naming antisemitism, because naming it gets treated as a tactic to shut down justice.
Case study 3: Nigel Farage and the bridge from banter to conspiracism
Farage is a useful UK right-wing case study because his rhetoric sits at the junction between populist anti-elitism and conspiratorial narratives that have long carried antisemitic coding.
Throughout his career, Farage has rejected accusations of antisemitism and framed them as politically motivated. In 2025, those denials took on a more personal and historical character.
In November 2025, The Guardian reported renewed allegations about Farage’s behaviour at school, including claims from contemporaries that he targeted Jewish pupils with comments praising Hitler and references to gas chambers.
In December 2025, The Guardian reported an open letter from former classmates and a teacher calling on him to apologise for racist and antisemitic conduct, which Farage dismissed as politically motivated.
Whether every allegation is true is not something this piece can adjudicate. What matters for the tribal exemption argument is the response pattern. Shrink it to ‘banter’. Recast it as ‘smear’. Then absorb, because the movement needs Farage as its symbolic engine.
That personal-history cycle sits alongside a professional rhetorical pattern that repeatedly flirts with conspiracist language. See my article for Socialists Against Antisemitism for more on this.
Farage has been criticised by Jewish communal organisations for amplifying themes associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories, especially via appearances on Alex Jones’ Infowars and repeated references to ‘globalists’, a ‘new world order’, and elite plots. He has also faced criticism over Soros-focused rhetoric that Jewish groups argue frequently spills into portrayals of a scheming puppet-master. In 2022, Farage was criticised for using ‘globalists’ in a way that was described as an antisemitic trope.
This is where the Great Replacement bridge comes in. ‘Globalist’ rhetoric often functions as a connector between generic anti-elite suspicion and a more explicit far-right story about demographic replacement, hidden coordination, and civilisational sabotage. The Jewish coding stays deniable. The conspiratorial structure remains.
The Israel filter shows up here too. Farage positions himself as supportive of Israel. That allows parts of the right to treat him as ‘safe’ on Jews. It creates a strange political loophole: someone can be perceived as pro-Jewish because of their stance on a foreign state, while normalising rhetorical frames that feed hostility towards Jews as an internal enemy.
Case study 4: Jeremy Corbyn and institutional exemption
Corbyn is an important UK left-wing case study because the mechanism was not only rhetorical. It was institutional.
Corbyn has condemned antisemitism many times and insisted he is a lifelong anti-racist. He also insisted that antisemitism allegations against Labour were exaggerated or used as a political tool. His pattern was to continually give with the one hand - antisemitism is bad and take with the other - but it’s a small problem in ‘our movement’.
In October 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that Labour had acted unlawfully in relation to antisemitism, including unlawful harassment and political interference in the complaints process.
After the report, Corbyn said the scale of the problem had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’, which Labour’s leadership treated as undermining trust in the party’s ability to fix the problem.
This is the left-coded tribal exemption in its most durable form. The accusation becomes the offence. The claim becomes: the antisemitism story exists to sabotage a progressive project. Jews, or ‘the establishment’, or ‘Zionists’, become the force behind the sabotage. The movement keeps its moral self-image intact: we are anti-racist, therefore accusations of racism must be bad faith.
What makes Corbyn’s case structurally significant is that the EHRC did not describe a few bad individuals. It described systems that were bent and bypassed, including political interference around disciplinary handling. That is the ultimate exemption. The rules were applied inconsistently because applying them consistently would have imposed costs on allies and on leadership power.
The 2025 atmosphere: belonging becomes conditional
When movements do this, the effect is not only that antisemitism continues. Jewish belonging becomes conditional.
In the first half of 2025, CST recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents, which it described as ‘still at a historically high level’, with a monthly average of 254. CST also noted that this was 58% higher than the monthly average in the two years before 7 October 2023.
Again, this does not prove that rhetoric alone is driving anything. It shows the environment in which rhetoric lands. If public figures repeatedly signal that antisemitic frames are negotiable as long as they are useful, Jewish trust in the future erodes. People stop expecting protection. They start looking for the exit.
A control group: what enforcement costs, and what it can buy
If the thesis is that leaders avoid enforcement because it costs power, it helps to name a case where a leader did enforce boundaries and paid the price.
Labour under Keir Starmer is not a perfect example, but it is instructive.
Starmer accepted the EHRC findings and moved to reform Labour’s processes, including acting against Corbyn. That triggered internal rebellion and membership loss, including sharp drops linked to Gaza politics and internal conflict.
The lesson is plain. Enforcement is a choice to lose people. The movement has to decide that organisational integrity is worth the haemorrhage.
Does enforcement change anything? One piece of evidence is the shift in Jewish communal engagement. Five years on from the EHRC report, the Jewish Labour Movement has published reflections that read less like whistleblowing and more like engagement with a party that, in their view, has implemented a different approach. That does not mean the problem is solved. It suggests the exemption can be revoked if a leader accepts the cost.
This piece focuses on the US and UK because that is where these four case studies sit, and because the Israel filter is especially visible in Anglo-American discourse. The underlying dynamics are wider than that. Wherever movements are coalitional and identity-saturated, you see similar exemption patterns: minimisation when the offender is useful, deflection when enforcement threatens the group’s story about itself, and absorption when the cost of exclusion looks too high.
So what is the diagnosis?
Both left and right have developed efficient systems for excusing the antisemitism they find instrumentally inconvenient to confront.
On the right, the dominant mechanism is coalition maintenance: shrink the problem, warn against ‘purity tests’, keep the online vanguard inside the tent, treat conspiracism as anti-elite energy rather than as a toxic narrative structure.
On the left, the dominant mechanism is identity protection: treat accusations as bad-faith attacks on the movement’s anti-racist identity, convert Jewish alarm into a political tactic, and treat concessions as capitulation to smears or to Islamophobia.
Israel then acts as the moral filter that decides which mechanism gets activated.
Farage can be treated as ‘pro-Jewish’ because he backs Israel, even while amplifying conspiracist language that Jewish organisations have warned about.
Omar can be defended in ways that blur the difference between critique of policy and conspiratorial money tropes, because conceding the point feels like handing
Corbyn can be defended as a victim of smears, even after a statutory body found unlawful institutional failures.
Vance can be treated as an ally, even while he minimises antisemitism and discourages boundary enforcement against Hitler-joking subcultures.
The cost of this is heightened Jewish fear.
It is also a wider kind of decay. Democratic systems rely on the ability to recognise hate and conspiracy as pollutants regardless of source. The tribal exemption flips that. It makes antisemitism legible only when it serves the camp.
Once antisemitic ideas are treated as negotiable, they become permanently available. They can be picked up whenever a movement needs a villain to simplify the world. Ultimately, this is a process that leads to an amplification and a nurturing of antisemitism across the political spectrum, which in turn leads to normalisation. And when ideas normalise, some people act on them.
The tribal exemption does more than excuse antisemitism. It teaches audiences how to use it.