Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attends a press conference in Jerusalem on Sept. 7, 2025. Photo by Ida Marie Odgaard / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP) / Denmark OUT

Joel Swanson March 25, 2026

The octopus — with tentacles splayed, gripping the globe — was a staple of European antisemitic caricature in the lead-up to the Holocaust. It was first popularized at the turn of the 20th century, and Nazi propagandists later developed it into a recurring motif: the Jewish people as a malevolent, multi-armed creature strangling the nations of the earth.

That imagery became so infamous, so freighted with historical horror, that when climate activist Greta Thunberg posted a pro-ceasefire photograph with a small stuffed octopus toy in 2023, the resulting outrage pushed her to issue a public apology.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, it seems, feels no such compunctions. This weekend, the ministry’s official account on X posted an image depicting the Iranian government as an octopus extending malevolent tentacles — precisely the visual grammar that organizations like the ADL have long trained the world to recognize as antisemitic shorthand.

The irony might seem almost too pointed to be real. Sadly, it fits a pattern that has been developing for years: the Israeli government has increasingly adopted the symbolic vocabulary of classical antisemitism and redeployed it, directing its logic not at Jews, but at Iran, Gaza, progressive diaspora organizations — and sometimes even at diaspora Jews themselves.

The puppet master

Consider the case of George Soros.

The Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire has long been the target of a global antisemitic conspiracy theory, one in which a cosmopolitan, stateless Jewish financier is suggested to have secretly orchestrated the erosion of national borders and democratic governments. This myth has inspired mass murder. In 2018, Robert Bowers slaughtered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in part because he believed Soros was orchestrating a Jewish plot to replace white Americans.

In September 2017, Yair Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, posted a meme to his Facebook page captioned “the food chain.” The image showed Soros dangling the world before a reptilian humanoid, who in turn dangled an Illuminati symbol before a hooded, hook-nosed figure — a direct echo of the “Elders of Zion” caricatures that served European antisemites.

The ADL condemned the image as containing “blatantly antisemitic elements.” But while Yair Netanyahu deleted the image — without issuing an apology — his father declined to comment. The implicit message: Netanyahu did not see the image, which also took aim at several of his political enemies including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, as beyond the pale.

The episode was not an isolated youthful indiscretion. As J Street noted at the time, the younger Netanyahu drew the image from an extremist Israeli Facebook page with aesthetics transparently borrowed from the American alt-right. While the page was taken down after the incident, a replacement immediately appeared in its place.

This is not a story of a young man carelessly sharing content he did not understand. It is a story of an entire media ecosystem — developing in parallel in Israel and the American far-right — in which the enemies of the right wing are mocked with an antisemitic iconographic vocabulary.

The Israeli government has not merely tolerated this conspiracy theory. It has, at times, actively promoted it — albeit in more covert terms.

When Israel’s ambassador to Hungary condemned an antisemitic ad campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that targeted Soros in 2019, Netanyahu officially countermanded the ambassador, insisting that the Foreign Ministry issue a statement saying that Soros “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected government.” The words clearly invoked a widespread antisemitic trope that suggests Soros works to insidiously undermine governments across the globe. And in 2023, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, whose portfolio included combating antisemitism, doubled down on similar attacks against Soros — despite widespread criticism from the Hungarian Jewish community that the rhetoric was an antisemitic trope.

The “fifth column”

Another example of the Israeli government’s growing penchant to draw from the catalogue of Nazi rhetoric and imagery: an August 2025 post by the country’s official Arabic-language X account warning that the growth of mosques across Europe — from “fewer than a hundred” in 1980 to “over 20,000 today” — represented the development of a “fifth column.”

The phrase “fifth column,” which originated during the Spanish Civil War, will be immediately familiar to any student of antisemitism. It is intrinsically connected to one of the oldest and most lethal charges in the repertoire of European Jew-hatred: the idea that the Jew is not merely a foreigner, but a domestic enemy — an agent of alien interests lurking inside the body of the nation. The accusation that Jews constituted a fifth column, loyal not to their country of residence but to shadowy transnational forces, was used to justify expulsion and extermination across Europe.

As one observer on X pointed out in response to the post, with devastating brevity: “I remember when another entity called Jews a fifth column in Europe. How did that go exactly?”

There is a further layer of irony here. The post was published in Arabic, not in any European language, meaning its primary audience was not the European governments it claimed to be warning, but the Arabic-speaking population within Israel. It was, in this sense, not so much a diplomatic communiqué as a declaration of civilizational alliance with Europe’s far-right, broadcast to audiences who would understand its implications most keenly.

A shared ideological structure

In late 19th and early 20th century nationalist antisemitism, the figure of the Jew represented a specific kind of threat to the nation-state: the enemy of hard borders and ethnic particularity — the solvent that dissolved the nation. The octopus was an effective image for this threat because it depicted placeless power — power that extended everywhere because it was rooted nowhere.

Where European nationalists said Jews were a problem because they had no land, early Zionists offered to solve the problem by giving Jews their own territory. If the antisemitic nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke could call Jews “a foreign element that has taken up too much space in our life,” then the Zionist activist Leon Pinsker could respond by agreeing that “the Jews are not a living nation; they are everywhere aliens… the only remedy would be the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil.”

The far-right revisionist politics that came to characterize the strand of Zionism originated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from which Netanyahu’s Likud party directly descends, fetishized national identity, biological determinism, and hierarchy, while building heavily on the frameworks of European nationalist thought. The diaspora Jew, in this view, was not merely unfortunate but defective — a rootless product of historical deformation.

This means that right-wing Zionism has not come to use antisemitic tropes opportunistically. Instead, it does so through a quality it shares with classical antisemitism — that of a deep suspicion of the values that the “globalist” and “fifth column” tropes were designed to attack. Internationalism, universal human rights, liberal diasporism; in this vision, all are dangerous.

Soros embodies a diasporic Jewish archetype that right-wing Zionism has long defined itself against: that of the cosmopolitan Jew, the liberal committed to abstract principles rather than to one particular nation. And when the Israeli state deploys the fifth-column accusation against Muslims in Europe, it is not merely borrowing far-right vocabulary as a tactical convenience. It is expressing a genuinely shared ideological premise: that pluralism, open borders, and minority religious communities are threats to the integrity of a national body.

This explains something that might otherwise seem paradoxical: the Israeli right’s simultaneous performance of Jewish victimhood and its actual hostility to large segments of actual Jewish life.

The Israeli government has refused to recognize non-Orthodox conversions, blocked left-wing Jewish critics of the occupation from entering the country, and treated liberal American Jewish organizations — the majority form of Jewish communal life in the United States — as adversaries.

The same ideological movement that styles itself the defender of the Jewish people treats the largest Jewish community in the world with contempt, because that community is largely defined by exactly the values that nationalist antisemitism — and nationalist Zionism — were both built to oppose.

That’s why the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s octopus post matters. Not just because its resonance with hateful imagery used against Jews is shocking, but because that resonance helps to reveal the structure of a worldview in which the central categories of antisemitic ideology have been detached from their original target — and retrained on new enemies.

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