It has been a few days since that night, and the internet is noisy with antisemites around the world as they rush to justify or outright deny the record of events on Nov. 7. They recycle rhetorical trick after rhetorical trick in an attempt to rationally explain their blindness. Their blindness to groups that roamed the streets in search of Jews. Their blindness to chat logs where attackers referred amongst each other to their plans as a Jew Hunt. 

Over millennia, different empires and peoples carried out similar hunts against Jews, and this happened often enough that historians coined a term for it: pogrom. 

Yet in the wake of the most recent, widely covered Jew Hunt in history, antisemites desperate to deny their  support for such violence are trying to position what happened in any way other than another pogrom on Jews. 

Over the past year and a half, we have witnessed numerous preludes to the Nov. 7 pogrom. We witnessed an early iteration of it on the New York subway when antisemites demanded Zionists self-identify by getting off the train; we witnessed it when British Jews were detained at Manchester Airport for hours because they were returning from Israel; and we lived alongside it when antisemites vandalised Amsterdam’s Anne Frank statue multiple times in 2024, including the night vandals soaked Anne’s hands in blood red paint.

Anne Frank is one of the most visible faces of the Holocaust and is a cornerstone of Holocaust education. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city. The Museum is less a museum than it is a mausoleum to life for many Jews under Nazi-rule. Thousands of tourists every year visit the preserved house with its coffin of an attic where 13 year-old Anne hid from the Nazis for 2 years, only for the Gestapo to discover and deport her to a concentration camp where she died shortly before liberation. They preserve those two harrowing years, and all they represent, and sell twenty dollar admission to visit it. And if you question the Museum’s capitalisation of dead Jews, their staff practices will quickly prove they see the Museum as a profit machine. After all, Museum staff ordered a Jewish employee not to wear a kippah in public where visitors could see it because it made some people feel uncomfortable. Anne’s diary is similarly commodified. There are over a hundred million reprints in 66 different translations of what to every teenage girl is supposed to be an inviolate and deeply private sanctuary. Anne’s diary was even adapted into a stage play. This is a mockery of privacy. All to say, nothing about Anne Frank is really about Anne Frank, at least not the individual. 

Of the many things she represents, antisemites see Anne Frank as a monolith that stands in for all Jews and Jewish children. In linking Anne to Gaza, people reveal they do not see Jews as individuals. Anne Frank was a 13 year old Jewish Dutch girl from WWII Amsterdam— she has no personal connection to Israel or Zionism. Unless you call celebrating Passover Zionist. Anne and her family would have toasted one another every year to express their longing for Jerusalem like 3,500 years of Jews did before them. Even though antisemites claim they do not target Jews— only Zionists or Israeli Jews — the repeated linking of Anne Frank to Gaza is only possible if you see no difference between one group of Jews and another. 

Similarly, the groups roaming the Amsterdam streets saw no difference between Macabbi fans and Jews. They see Jews as a single entity or as Iran and Hamas call them, the Zionist entity. By homogenising Jewish peoplehood into a single entity, antisemites avoid feeling guilty for dehumanising Jews. This impersonalisation makes violence against Jews palatable and, in their eyes, justifiable. Which is when otherwise humane people cast us as scapegoats deserving whatever treatment comes to us. 

It is not surprising then that the Nov. 7 pogrom unfolded in a city with as much antisemitic history as Anne Frank’s Amsterdam. It is even less surprising that Anne Frank herself is again a prominent victim of global antisemitism, the current rise of which over the past year culminated into a pogrom.

Antisemites claim Jews are overreacting by calling Nov. 7 a pogrom. Like the attack, all violence against Jews is minimised. The desecration of Anne Frank? They wave off these individuals as immature edgelords reaching for the lowest hanging antisemitic fruit. While vandals no doubt capitalise on the provocative nature of Anne Frank with blood on her hands, their message is still a deliberate violation of Anne Frank’s body and everything she represents. She is meant to be a reminder of a violation so deep that humans have no worse violation they can do to other humans, let alone children. 

Anne Frank’s status as one of the most internationally famous Jews isn’t the only characteristic bigots exploit. Her age also makes her a powerful propaganda source because of the “blood libel” conspiracy — a common antisemitic trope where people cast Jews as feasting on the blood of non-Jewish children. One recurring antisemitic argument today uses the number of dead Gazan children as justification for every new attack on Jews. While blood libel conspiracies can include non-Jews of all ages, antisemites elicit the most social condemnation of Jews when they can claim Jews kill babies. In implying Anne Frank is guilty of participating in a genocide, antisemites extend their use of blood libel to Jewish children. 

They ignore the fact that the International Court of Justice’s preliminary judgment found the claim of genocide was not plausible. The head judge who presided over the case even went on the BBC to unambiguously clarify this finding because so many news organisations and protesters on the left misrepresented the preliminary ruling. When confronted by the findings of this international legal body, editors of popular information resources like Wikipedia  overlook such evidence in favor of sources — however anecdotal — that support their anti-Israel narrative. And thus an encyclopedic resource whose homepage garners millions of daily views participates in the antisemitic rewriting of history on a grand scale.

This institutional rewriting of Israel’s and Jewish history makes it not only acceptable to Other Jews, it encourages it by rewarding people for public moral performativity. Maybe your sister-in-law is not a die hard antisemite, but if she wants to stay in her friend group, she will have to perform the proper political position, from resharing infographs calling Israel a white coloniser state or the JVP instagram campaign, Zionism is racism and to her writing her own little screed thread about being heartbroken for the children.

Being seen as doing the “moral” thing has never been so easy for so many people, and why should they let that go to live in a world that requires more work? In their world, Anne Frank was not a child the way Sha’ban Al-Dalou was a child because the label of Jew or Zionist precedes any other identity we possess, and since that identity is the sole determining factor antisemites use when deciding who to hunt, Anne Frank is as responsible for the death toll in Gaza as Ben Gvir and Netanyahu.