Everything they once accused the Jews of, they now accuse the Jewish State of. Jews, they said, lusted after the blood of Christian kids – now they say Israel gleefully slays Palestinian kids. Jews, they said, were the Octopus-like controllers of world affairs – now they say Israel is the wily puppetmaster of the Western powers. Jews, they said, sow disruption everywhere they go – now they say the Jewish nation is sneakily disrupting Europe with floods of illegal immigrants.

The speed with which anti-Zionist cranks latched on to the Ceuta crisis was extraordinary. No sooner had 60,000 men from Morocco swam and kicked their way into the Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa than both the woke left and crank right had spied the hidden hand of the Jewish State. This was no organic rush across the borders of a foreign nation, they said – it was a ruthless act of sabotage ‘engineered’ by Israel to punish Spain for daring to criticise its ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Shorter version: the Jews did it.

It really is a mania. The Combat Antisemitism Movement found that within the first 72 hours of Ceuta’s storming, more than 100million people on social media had been exposed to the idea that it was a ‘Jewish plot’. The wild conspiracy theory was summed up in a viral meme showing a monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu with a cavernous mouth, out of which poured scores of Moroccans heading for Spain. The Jews vomit Muslims into Europe like they once poured poison down our wells – that’s ‘progressive’ commentary these days, apparently.

All of the internet’s frothing Israelophobes, of both right and left, waded into the sewer of Jew-blame. Bigot influencers like Dan Bilzerian said Spain was paying ‘the ultimate price’ for its opposition to Israel’s war on Hamas. His proof? Well, ‘Spain condemns Israel – Netanyahu says “Spain will pay the ultimate price” – Spain is flooded with thousands of Moroccan immigrants’. What a classic example of the braindead ‘joining of the dots’ that passes for critical thinking in conspiracist circle-jerks online. And for the record, Netanyahu never said Spain would ‘pay the ultimate price’. That’s as made up as the idea that Jews use blood to make matzah.

From the left, the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said the rushing of Ceuta was ‘completely engineered’ by Israel and its allies. Their dastardly aim? To ‘re-educate’ Spain and force it to ‘fall back in line with Western imperial objectives’. Rich-boy keffiyeh clown Hasan Piker echoed this drivel, titillating his Ivy League followers by saying Israel and America ‘got the Moroccan government to send, like, 40,000 people into Spanish administered territory’. It was ‘classic Israel’, he said: a ‘shameless’ effort to destabilise a critical nation.

That there is no proof whatsoever that someone in the Jewish State phoned up Morocco and said ‘Unleash the migrants’ matters not one jot to the Israel haters. Indeed, conspiracy theorists are positively allergic to facts. Badger them for proof that the Jews engineered the Ceuta crisis, or coolly explain to them how Building 7 fell on 9/11, and they’ll say you’ve been ‘got at’. Evidence itself is suspect in the loony bin of anti-West conspiracism. They just scream ‘Israel launched an Islamic invasion of Spain!’ – as Alex Jones did – and hope that the loudness of their claims will drown out the insanity of them.

In Spain itself, lefty influencer Ana Alcalde – also known as ‘Gaza Barbie’ after she sailed to Gaza on one of those dumb flotillas – said Ceuta was part of a ‘plan’ to ‘take down’ the government of Pedro Sánchez. Even a Spanish official – transport minister Óscar Puente Santiago – hinted that the long fingers of the Jewish State were wrapping round the neck of Spain. ‘Well, things are starting to get pretty clear’, he said in response to an Israeli official’s tweet about Spain’s ‘colonial enclaves’ in North Africa. His tweet was interpreted by many as support for ‘the growing conspiracy theory’ that Israel ‘helped orchestrate the large-scale migrant incursion’.

This Jew-blaming that spread through the digital highways faster than the Moroccan men barged into Ceuta captures how unhinged and lethal anti-Zionism has become. It confirmed that it is the undisputed heir to classical Jew hatred. Jews were once accused of inflicting plague, poison and social mayhem on Europe. Now the Jewish nation is accused of inflicting ‘swarms’ of migrants on Europe. These conspiracy theories might be separated by centuries, but they share two striking things in common. First, a glaring lack of proof, the wilful sacrifice of reasoned thought at the altar of a neo-religious conviction that despicable ‘foreign’ elements are masterminding our moral downfall. And secondly, the Jews. It’s them again. The Jewish people brought plague to Europe, now the Jewish nation is bringing ‘plagues’ of foreigners. Different millennium, same vile racism.

The Ceuta conspiracy theory also shines a light on the double bigotry of the woke ideology. In the woke universe, a demented animus for the world’s only Jewish state sits comfortably alongside a cloying, patrician pity for Muslims. The Jews are seen as the sinister authors of every earthly wrong, and Muslims as the hapless victims of those wrongs. So in the Ceuta theory, we see the Jewish nation re-imagined as demonically powerful and we see the wholesale stripping of Moroccan Muslims of any agency whatsoever. They become mere tools, instructed on how to act by the wily Jewish State. The neo-racialists of the credentialled classes see the world as being inhabited by devils and children, the former requiring their performative fury, the latter their aristocratic sympathy. Muslims are dehumanised too under the rule of the hyper-racialists.

Anti-Zionism has become the suffocating religion of the cultural establishment. Every social ill – from war to broken borders to the rise of the far right – is giddily traced back to Israel. Not only does this hang yet more target signs around the necks of Jews, it also obscures the truth about Europe’s social problems. It is our own governments’ suicidal abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty that has caused the migrant crisis, not the hand-rubbing plotting of the Jews of the Holy Land. Like their forebears in the pitchfork Middle Ages, anti-Zionists prefer to live in a house of lies than to confront the truth of their world, and themselves.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.