To see how paranoid, how unhinged, how downright scary the left’s loathing for Israel has become, look no further than the green-ink missive signed by 180 showbiz folk this week.

It is ostensibly a defence of Mark Ruffalo, Hollywood’s shrillest hater of Israel, who’s been facing accusations of anti-Semitism. But it reads more like the ravings of a mental patient. It’s like something vomited up by the murkiest Subreddit. With its demented, infantile blather about the hidden links between Gaza, oligarchic power and our ‘Orwellian’ overlords who are watching our every move, it is the clearest proof yet that the anti-Israel crusade has curdled into a vicious bigotry with eerie echoes of ancient hatreds.

It all started when Ruffalo – best known for turning the Incredible Hulk into a mumbling, effete sap – let rip against the $111 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery. ‘WarnerMount’, as the merger is known. Like all Gazaholics – people so inebriated by Israelophobia it clouds their every waking thought – he couldn’t resist dragging Israel into his nutty tirade. What does a state the size of Wales and more than 5,000 miles from America have to do with the big-bucks merger of two Hollywood giants? Sweet FA. Yet like yer man from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in front of his crazed, conspiratorial corkboard, Ruffalo found a way to link them.

Paramount Skydance is run by David Ellison, he said. And David Ellison’s father is Larry Ellison, the chief technology officer of tech company Oracle. And Oracle has provided software to the Israel Defense Forces. And the Israel Defense Forces are committing ‘genocide’. And so the same money-grubbing oligarchs who have ‘powered’ Israel’s ‘genocidal’ mania will soon be the masters of ‘one of the largest media conglomerates in the world’. And one day this vast and blood-fuelled empire will be ‘used on you’. Jesus Christ. Is he auditioning for a remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? I bet his eyes hadn’t bulged so much since he last turned into the Hulk.

As many commentators pointed out, the Ellisons are Jewish. And it is iffy in the extreme to see Jews as being at the centre of a tangled spider’s web of global oligarchical power. Indeed, Paramount issued a rare statement in response to Ruffalo. It said it was ‘troubled’ by the invoking of what seem to be ‘anti-Semitic tropes’. Applying words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ to a ‘corporate transaction’ isn’t just wrong, said Paramount – it’s a ‘bridge too far’, with its sinister depiction of normal media business as a genocide-enabling enterprise puppeteered by dark forces. Perhaps I’ve been brainwashed by the blood-soaked plutocrats, but I agree with Paramount.

Ruffalo, of course, pushed back, denying he is anti-Semitic. And now we have the open letter from his Hollywood comrades. Seriously, hand on heart, it is one of the maddest things I have ever read. Signed by 180 creatives of Jewish heritage, it sees shady links everywhere, tying the ‘genocide’ in Gaza with the oligarchical destruction of life and liberty at home. ‘The… road to WarnerMount runs through Gaza’, they say. The blood money of that ‘genocide’ will now be turned towards fashioning an ‘Orwellian world’ in which a handful of oligarchs will ‘consolidate control’ over the masses. This ‘corrupt cohort’ will not only dictate ‘what we watch and how we watch it’ – they will also ‘be watching us’. Nurse!

The way the letter talks about the Israel-Hamas War is unhinged. It describes Gaza as an ‘open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies’, as essentially a blood-spattered testing ground for the ‘Orwellian’ tools that will one day be turned on us in the West. It’s hard to decide what’s worse: the insanity or the vanity. The insanity of seeing a war between the Jewish nation and the army of anti-Semites that invaded it as a dystopic ruse for sharpening murderous AI tools, or the vanity of watching the Jewish State defend itself from Islamofascists and thinking: ‘Oh no, what if this limits what I can stream on my 98-inch TV in my airport hangar of a home in the Hollywood Hills?’

It’s the obsessive drawing of links between the Jewish State and the parlous state of the Western world that feels most chilling. There is a ‘connection’, the letter froths, between ‘the criminal impunities that have led the US and Israel into unending disaster [in Gaza]’ and the ‘oligarchic powerplays’ of the super-rich men who are ‘working to dismantle our democracy’. Gaza, it says, has become a cauldron of ‘war, oligarchy and, now, AI domination’. ‘The assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected’, it says.

That’s it, the core commandment of the morally deracinated left – that the oppression of Palestine is the oppression of us all. That none will be free until Gaza is free. That Israel, darling of the oligarchs, bloody laboratory of the plutocrats, isn’t only physically shackling Palestinians – it is metaphorically shackling all of us. As Sally Rooney says, ‘the liberation of Palestine really does represent the liberation of the world’. Somehow, perhaps by demonic osmosis, Israel is keeping all of humanity subdued. And only her defeat can secure our freedom.

I’m sick of tiptoeing around this. You don’t need a PhD in either medieval hysteria or 1930s Europe to clock how dangerous it is – not to mention disgusting – to depict the Jewish nation as having its boot on the neck of the world. And to view that tiny state as the source of global tyranny. And to accuse it of building the ‘road’ towards the ‘Orwellian’ and ‘oligarchical’ deprivations us Gentiles will shortly endure. Pointing out the ‘crucial connections’ between what Israel is doing and what the West is experiencing is the ‘opposite of anti-Semitism’, says the pro-Ruffalo letter. Oh stop it. Insisting on a dark, twisted link between some Jewish entity and the suffering of humankind is the OG anti-Semitism.

This letter provides unwitting proof of the bigotry of anti-Zionism. All the things that hysterics and scum once said about the Jews, people now say about the Jewish State. They once said Jews sacrifice children, lust after blood and puppeteer the world with their long fingers and ‘Jewish finance’. Now they say the same – virtually word for word – about the Jewish nation. The idea that Israel is the melting pot for oligarchical ideas about global control and the industrialisation of murder is naked hatred masquerading as virtue. The actress Ellen Barkin gave it away in her defence of Ruffalo. ‘Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism is a hatred of Israel’, she tweeted. And there it is. We don’t hate Jews, just the country that’s full of them. We see you.