The Oppression Olympics

How the Woke Right Joined the Left’s War on Israel

In the evolving political landscape of the United States, a bizarre race has emerged, one in which both extremes of the ideological spectrum are locked in fierce competition over who can demonize Israel with greater intensity. It’s a full-blown legitimacy war, one that has fused progressive dogma with nationalist disillusionment, forging an unlikely alliance between the radical left and the "woke right."

For decades, the radical left’s animus toward Israel has been overt and well-documented. Israel is cast as the villain in their global morality play, the last standing settler-colonial state, the aggressor in every conflict, the oppressor in every encounter. This narrative was seeded during the Cold War by Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda and matured in the hands of Western academics, NGOs, and campus activists. By 2025, it has metastasized into an all-consuming doctrine. Universities became staging grounds for ritualized public hatred. Anti-Israel protests organized by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine are now commonplace, with most devolving into blatant antisemitism. Intersectional ideology conveniently casts Israel as the white “oppressor,” allowing progressive coalitions to ignore the Jewish people’s Middle Eastern origins, their history of persecution, or the theocratic fascism of their enemies.

But while the radical left’s hostility toward Israel is expected, the mutation taking place on the right is more disturbing, and less understood. What was once a stronghold of constitutional conservatism, Christian Zionism, and pro-Western foreign policy has been infiltrated by a faction that began by envying the left’s power. Watching the radical left rise through narratives of oppression, this new “woke right” adopted the same playbook. They crafted their own victimhood identity, centered on claims of “anti-white racism” and “Christian persecution,” in an effort to compete with the left in moral authority. But that competition didn’t end with grievance narratives, it escalated. In the same way the left used Israel as a symbolic oppressor to elevate their cause, the woke right began doing the same: portraying Israel not as an ally, but as a rival in the moral hierarchy. Competing in the oppression Olympics, they escalated from mimicking the left’s victimhood to outflanking them in anti-Zionist rhetoric, casting Israel as a manipulative force, questioning Jewish influence in America, and increasingly parroting Islamic talking points to prove their ideological purity.