US National Security and Antisemitism Initiative

The US National Security and Antisemitism Initiative is a new project by Hudson’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East that examines how rising antisemitism affects American national security.

Analysts usually treat this issue as a problem of prejudice, discrimination, or domestic extremism. Those dimensions remain important, but they understate the problem. Antisemitism increasingly intersects with larger ideological and geopolitical challenges that the United States faces.

Russia, China, Iran, and other hostile actors understand that American power rests on more than military and economic strength. It also depends on domestic cohesion, confidence in American institutions, durable alliances, and a belief that the US has legitimate interests and purposes in the world. These adversaries therefore work to exploit divisions inside American society and discredit the alliances and institutions that sustain American influence. Whether antisemitic or anti-Israel campaigns originate abroad or are homegrown and amplified by foreign actors, they offer American adversaries useful instruments to undermine American power and purpose.

Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Americans argue over settlements, particular wars, and the shape of the alliance. These arguments are normal in democratic politics, not evidence of foreign manipulation. But Israel occupies a special place in great power competition. The ideological campaigns that portray Israel as uniquely illegitimate travel much further and faster than comparable claims against any other American ally. Israel serves as a gateway into the perspective that sees American power, American alliances, capitalism, Western institutions, and sometimes the West itself as fundamentally predatory. Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and Islamist influence networks have amplified antisemitic and anti-Israel content across the political spectrum precisely because it corrodes so many targets at once. What starts with Israel almost never ends with Israel.

That is why this initiative approaches antisemitism as a national security question. It seeks to understand when hostility toward Jews and Israel becomes a vehicle to erode the cohesion, institutions, and alliances on which American power depends. Rather than examine individual incidents or ideological factions in isolation, the project will map the networks, ideas, institutions, foreign actors, and information campaigns that connect antisemitism to the wider struggle over America’s role in the world.

The project is also intended to build something lasting: an intellectual community capable of studying these questions with the rigor the subject demands. The initiative will bring together scholars, policymakers, journalists, security experts, and younger researchers to develop a clearer understanding of the relationship between ideological conflict at home and strategic competition abroad. The team aims to document antisemitism and understand what it does, how it spreads, who exploits it, what institutions it corrodes, and how it affects US interests and power.