Woke Ideology, its Threat to the West, and the Existential Threat to Israel

Abstract

• Israel’s existence rests on the Jewish people’s internationally acknowledged right of self-determination in their historic homeland, achieved through a complex series of international, historic, and political developments, encapsulated in and supported by a solid and incontrovertible divine mandate recorded in sacred scripture. This multiple foundation—theological, historical, legal, and political—has sustained Jewish claims to the Land of Israel, as well as international acknowledgment thereof, through centuries of dispersion and persecution.

• Today, these pillars face unprecedented assault from the disturbing progressive phenomenon of “woke” ideology, which systematically rejects religious authority and attempts to rewrite historical record. The term “woke” in this context claims to be a progressive ideological framework driven by social justice activism while emphasizing systemic oppression and identity-based politics. Originally denoting awareness of racial and social injustice, “woke” has evolved to encompass radical progressive beliefs prioritizing group identity over individual merit, subjective experience over empirical evidence, and revolutionary change over traditional values.

• This modern phenomenon undermines Israel’s historic and national integrity through progressive indoctrination in Western educational systems and media, driving dramatic increases in protests over Israel’s legitimacy based on fabricated narratives portraying Israel as a “colonizing” “apartheid” entity that has transformed from merely oppressing the “indigenous” Palestinian to openly killing their women and children through brutal warfare and starvation.¹ The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, an independent, impartial global monitor that collects and analyses and maps data on conflict and protest, documented nearly 48,000 pro-Palestine demonstrations across 137 countries since October 7, 2023, with over 75 percent concentrated in Western nations, gathering an estimated 25 million people united by anti-Israel and antisemitic ideology.²

• This unprecedented phenomenon is not natural. It has been fueled not only by progressive educational indoctrination but also by billions of dollars in propaganda and social media manipulation by Islamist state actors targeting the 18-24 demographic assessed as cognitively vulnerable to false narratives.³ A 2025 Harris poll found 60 percent of voters aged 18-24 expressed support for Hamas over Israel, despite Hamas’s status as a terrorist organization that has committed atrocities against innocent civilians.⁴

• This paper argues that woke ideology poses an existential threat by weakening the historically accepted cognitive infrastructure that has underscored Western recognition of Israel’s fundamental legitimacy. Israel’s endurance hinges on Western support—military, economic, diplomatic, and moral. When woke ideology teaches that religion is meaningless and denies objective history and historic facts, it removes the foundations upon which that support depends. The result: a generation guided by Islamist-generated woke propaganda that marches for Hamas, chants “From the River to the Sea,” and believes Israel is an illegitimate colonial enterprise. Remarkably, only 31 percent of polled students who support this chant can correctly identify the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—a stark manifestation of declining Western cognitive infrastructure.⁵

I. The Foundations Under Attack

Israel’s foundations are unique in their dual nature. Scripture, including the Jewish Torah and the Bible’s Old Testament, records G-d’s covenant with Abraham granting the land to his descendants—a promise restated at least 55 times in scripture, with 12 explicit declarations that the covenant is eternal. Though the land passed through Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic rule before Ottoman control (1517-1917), Jewish communities maintained continuous presence over thousands of years, and diaspora Jews preserved their connection to Zion through liturgy, literature, and longing.

Modern international recognition began with the Balfour Declaration (1917), continued through the 1920 San Remo Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate (1922) both acknowledging and giving international legal significance to “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” and culminated in the UN Partition Plan (1947) and Israel’s Declaration of Independence (May 14, 1948).⁶ Israel’s legitimacy thus rests on complementary foundations: divine covenant, historic and international legal recognition.

By systematically rejecting religious authority and transcendent moral claims, woke ideology transforms the divine covenant into mythology and biblical promises into ancient fiction. By transposing rigorous historical scholarship and fact with oppressor/oppressed frameworks, it attempts to rewrite history and delegitimize Israel. Jews become “European colonizers,” Palestinians become “indigenous peoples,” and millennia of documented Jewish connection to the Land of Israel disappear into manufactured woke narratives of dispossession.⁷

II. The Systematic Weakening of Western Minds

The “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) framework originated in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.⁸ While initially intended to promote fair treatment and inclusion for historically marginalized groups by addressing systematic barriers,⁹ it has regrettably metastasized into an authoritarian framework undermining the very principles of tolerance and open inquiry it purports to champion. The DEI framework has been largely hijacked by progressive woke ideologists who have turned it into a tool to undermine accepted concepts of history, education, and governance.

First, DEI has transformed educational institutions, displacing classical, accepted, and rigorous intellectual training with ideological indoctrination prioritizing demographic representation over proven intellectual achievement, “lived experience” over empirical evidence, and emotional reasoning over logical analysis.¹⁰ Second, this has undermined accepted modes of culture and education—family structures, religious institutions, and classical curricula—through which societies historically passed knowledge and values across generations.¹¹ Third, these changes have generated historical illiteracy, inability to evaluate complex claims, blind acceptance of illogical inconsistency, and social enforcement mechanisms threatening and punishing dissent—all representing intellectual vulnerability of woke-influenced societies.¹²

When university students and incited masses in the West march in support of Hamas—a theocratic movement that executes homosexuals, victimizes and subordinates women, and openly advocates genocide and anti-Semitism—while simultaneously claiming to champion LGBTQ+ rights and feminist values, we witness the successful exploitation of cognitive incoherence that progressive education deliberately produces.

A. Changes in Curricular Priorities

A 2024 report found 67 percent of major American universities require DEI-related courses for graduation.¹³ These requirements typically displace traditional core requirements, ensuring students invest time on ideologically-inflected classes rather than foundational knowledge. “If you graduated college in the sixties or seventies, then you probably took U.S. history or economics or Western civilization,” notes Jeremy Tate, founder of the Classic Learning Test. “But those days are long gone.”¹⁴

This transformation has profound consequences for understanding Israel. Students who never learned ancient or medieval history cannot understand the Jewish people’s continuous connection to the Land of Israel. Students who never studied the Bible cannot appreciate the covenant’s religious significance. Students who never learned about the Ottoman Empire, World War I, or the League of Nations cannot understand how modern Israel came into existence. This displacement creates “historical amnesia,” leaving students with no basis to recognize accounts grounded in facts, rather than falling prey to false narratives perpetuated by social media.¹⁵

B. Attack on Traditional Family and Religious Cultures

Woke ideology’s assault on traditional family structures and religious institutions directly undermines the transmission of Judeo-Christian values and knowledge. The Black Lives Matter organization’s original mission statement explicitly declared: “We disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure.”¹⁶ This sentiment reflects broader currents deriving from Marxist critique of the family and religion as bourgeois institutions.

Families historically transmitted religious traditions: Jewish families teaching Torah, Christian families teaching the Bible and the significance of the Holy Land, both passing down understanding of the covenant and divine promise. When progressive ideology attacks families as “oppressive structures” and religion as “baseless superstition,” it deliberately severs the mechanism by which knowledge of Biblical history, Judaism, and Christianity passes across generations. Children raised without such education become particularly vulnerable to ideological manipulation—lacking inherited frameworks for understanding religious and historic claims or placing the conflict in context.

C. The Enforcement Mechanism: How Woke Ideology Silences Dissent

Beyond indoctrinating activists, the woke movement deploys enforcement mechanisms aimed at marginalizing and punishing those who oppose it. These mechanisms have become colloquially known as “cancel culture,” manifesting through public shaming, boycotts, and professional ostracization—magnified by social media. This puts Israel and Jewish communities and students in a precarious position, since social sanctions create an atmosphere of suppression where those who oppose anti-Israel rhetoric or present empirical evidence to the contrary are sanctioned and silenced. Nine years ago, Cary Nelson and David Greenberg wrote, “The growing practice of silencing pro-Israel speakers… constitutes a dire threat to academic freedom.”¹⁷ Since then, the silencing has grown exponentially.

According to the Knight Foundation, students describing free speech as “secure” dropped 30 percentage points since 2016; two-thirds now self-censor. One in three faculty “tone down” their writing to avoid controversy.¹⁸ When dissent carries costs, the result is enforced conformity. This accelerates anti-Israel rhetoric, as opposing the trend to isolate Israel is seen as condoning human rights violations.

D. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction

The BDS movement, launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society, copied and co-opted the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa to isolate and punish Israel, relying on false woke-generated narratives seeing Israel as the oppressor. BDS has caused over $2 billion in annual economic losses to Israel, with RAND estimating $400 billion in cumulative losses over the next decade.¹⁹ The BDS movement has gained momentum through the indoctrination of radical progressive ideology combined with massive social media manipulation by Islamist state actors pushing the oppressor/oppressed agenda.

E. The Cumulative Effect

These elements combine to systematically weaken the capability of recognizing today’s realities, directly affecting attitudes toward Israel:

Historical illiteracy: Students cannot evaluate claims because they have never learned accurate history. When told Palestinians are “indigenous” while Jews are “European colonizers,” they lack knowledge to recognize this as false—contradicting documented fact of Jewish indigenous presence long before Islam.

Rejection of religious authority: Trained to view religion and religious claims as equally invalid, students cannot recognize the unique status of Jewish historic and religious claims. The divine covenant becomes one narrative among many, no more authoritative than competing claims.

Binary oppressor/oppressed frameworks: Complex situations cannot be processed through frameworks insisting solely on oppressors and oppressed. Israel, as a prosperous Western democracy, can only be perceived as the oppressor; Palestinians can only be innocent victims. The framework cannot accommodate facts about Palestinian leadership’s rejection of peace offers or Hamas’s genocidal charter.

Comfort with logical inconsistency: When “Queers for Palestine” activists support movements that execute homosexuals, the cognitive dissonance goes unrecognized because ideology has trained students to value group allegiance based on perceived victim status above logical coherence.

III. Foreign Exploitation of Vulnerabilities

A. Billions Invested in Anti-Israel Propaganda

State actors including Iran, Qatar, and Turkey have invested billions in information operations designed to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities created by woke ideology. Iran allocates at least $600 million annually to propaganda operations despite 40 percent domestic inflation.²⁰ Qatar’s Al Jazeera reaches over 430 million people globally as part of a documented influence campaign. Qatar alone has donated $6.3 billion to American universities—Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon—with $2.1 billion in the last three years.²¹ These investments dwarf Western counter-propaganda efforts, creating systematic disadvantage. Authoritarian states wage coordinated information warfare while democracies rely on open information environments that hostile actors exploit. For example, a coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors worked to delegitimize Israel and present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light.²² This affected over 93 million people who searched information about Israel’s war against Hamas on Wikipedia.²³

B. Targeting Strategy

Foreign operations target precisely those demographics woke ideology has rendered most vulnerable: university students aged 18-29 with high social-justice awareness and engagement but limited historical knowledge and no religious education.²⁴ Operations exploit cognitive patterns that DEI education instills: content reinforcing “oppressor/oppressed” beliefs receives uncritical acceptance; emotional manipulation increases sharing; social validation manipulation leverages conformity pressures.²⁵

Polling demonstrates dramatic effectiveness: 33 percent of adults under 30 sympathize primarily with Palestinians while only 14 percent with Israelis—a complete reversal of historical American public opinion within a single generation.²⁶ This shift occurred not through persuasion based on facts but through systematic manipulation targeting specific cognitive vulnerabilities. Successfully implanted false narratives include: claims that Israel was created on “empty land”; assertions that Palestinians are “indigenous” while Jews are “European colonizers”; fabricated timelines suggesting Israel initiated all conflicts; and false “apartheid” claims misrepresenting security measures as racial oppression.²⁷

C. Weaponizing Social Justice Movements

Perhaps most sophisticated is co-opting Western social justice movements to serve anti-Israel objectives: “Queers for Palestine” events proliferate despite Hamas executing homosexuals while Israel protects LGBTQ+ rights²⁸; the Climate Justice Alliance declared “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine”²⁹; and intelligence analysts identify a “Red-Green Alliance” convergence between radical Left and Islamist movements using anti-colonial frameworks and intersectionality terminology.³⁰

D. Weaponizing Terminology

Foreign influence operations have weaponized the gravest accusations in international law by exploiting woke ideology’s emphasis on emotional impact over factual accuracy through deliberate manipulation of accepted international “buzzwords.”

Liberal usage of the buzzword “genocide” has become accepted lingua franca in woke terminology, despite Gaza’s population growing from 240,000 in 1950 to over 2.3 million by 2023—nearly tenfold growth—and despite no proof authenticating this accusation or indicating compatibility with the 1948 UN Genocide Convention definition.³¹ This contrasts starkly with actual genocides: the Holocaust saw European Jewish populations decrease over 60 percent, with global Jewish population still not recovered 80 years later.³²

The buzzword “apartheid” ignores that Israeli Arabs possess full citizenship rights, vote in elections, and serve in parliament and on the Supreme Court. “Colonialism” ignores that Jews are the indigenous people whose presence is recorded long before Christianity and the Muslim invasion—Jews both maintained continuous presence and returned to their ancestral homeland; they did not conquer foreign territory. These manipulations succeed because woke frameworks teach students to prioritize claimed victim status and emotional impact over factual investigation.³³

IV. Strategic Implications

Woke ideology’s contribution to the erosion of Western understanding of Israel’s legitimacy—whether legal, historical, or political—and of the theological sources of Jewish heritage translates directly into strategic vulnerabilities. Israel’s security depends on alliances with Western democracies for military assistance, diplomatic support, and economic cooperation. When Western populations are indoctrinated by woke ideology to doubt Israel’s legitimacy, their governments become increasingly reluctant to provide such support.

Multiple Western governments’ coordinated recognition of Palestinian statehood in 2025 demonstrates this chain from ideological capture to policy change.³⁴ In France, the Interior Ministry recommended recognition to “appease” domestic constituencies shaped by sophisticated social media operations. The UK, Canada, and Australia experienced parallel operations with synchronized timing.³⁵ Democratic governments responded to what appeared grassroots pressure but was in fact the product of coordinated foreign influence campaigns targeting populations made vulnerable by woke educational transformation.

The implications extend beyond diplomacy. Arms embargoes, BDS campaigns, and prosecution initiatives draw strength from populations viewing Israel as illegitimate. Each movement gains momentum as Western populations lose the cognitive framework for understanding Israel’s legitimacy.

V. Paths Forward

Addressing these threats requires systemic reform of Western educational and cultural institutions: eliminating mandatory DEI coursework and restoring classical curricula; protecting religious education; teaching media literacy; requiring transparency on foreign academic funding; and enforcing laws against foreign influence operations.

Positive steps are already being taken. In the U.S., the Trump administration signed three executive orders seeking to end DEI programs in public and private sectors, declaring DEI programs “illegal and immoral.” This would translate into eliminating over $10 billion annually in government grants being used to push the DEI agenda. In the United Kingdom, legislation has passed to curtail non-traditional ideologies in education.³⁶ In Canada, a notable number of professors have formally demanded ending DEI programs.³⁷ Although Australia is lagging behind, opposition Leader Peter Dutton has expressed strong criticism and calls for stopping funding of the “woke agenda.”³⁸

For Israel, effective response requires understanding this is an existential ideological conflict, not merely public relations. Educational initiatives need to be encouraged throughout the Western world aimed at restoring historical and biblical knowledge, supporting institutions transmitting Judeo-Christian values, and countering foreign influence operations. Israel must also become more independent in controlling its security, food supply, and energy. Though daunting, the alternative is increasing dependence on countries that may yield to internal pressures against Israel.

The choice is stark, the stakes existential, and the time for action is now.

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Notes