We are at a point in our history when, once again, a civilizational weakness, confronted by a fanatical combative ideology, chooses to prefer the sacrifice of the Jews in a vain attempt to ignore the real dangers it faces. Moreover, that perceived palliative sacrificing of the Jews, which is expected by them to save the civilization, or at least alleviate the pressure they’re under, will do nothing of the sort. Unless, that is, the forces of good – and those foreseeing what will be their own end result – are kept from assuming the helm of state and culture so as to steer their societies away from collapse.
What we have witnessed over the past few years, and ever increasingly since October 7, 2023, is the playing out of a long-term investment and development: a plot by pro-Palestine forces. As David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt put it in a recent Free Press article, “the attacks on Jews – including physical assaults, social media campaigns and, most tragically, the murders in Australia – are part of a purposive campaign.”
Indeed, this was what the intersectionality maneuvers were all about: the aligning of as many negative cadres as possible, primed for the execution of a coordinated effort not so much as to attack Israel but to undermine the Jewish state’s greatest asset: the Jews. The excusing of and the purposeful ignoring of Islamist jihadism has not only undermined the West’s ability to defend Israel, and now its Jews, but to prevent the West’s own coming collapse.
The focus on indigeneity, the emphasis on a false “settler colonialism,” identifying suffering Arabs as a version of oppressed Blacks – and other instruments of fakery, falsehood and fallaciousness – has seeped into the minds of college students, many who go on to positions in government, diplomacy, academia, and the arts – including trend setters, influencers, and those who are “with it.”
Foremost among those generating and facilitating this campaign, alongside the puppet masters from Moscow, Tehran, and Doha, are the proud Jewish anti-Zionists promoting a Diasporic counterbalance to the historic Jewish homeland. They thus undercut the genuine national identity, both religious and secular, that has kept Jews together as a community for over 3,000 years. Whether the latter are antisemites or not is not the point. What needs to be made clear is that they are assisting antisemitism and bringing about Jewish deaths.
Applauding the chants of “from the river to the sea” or “Zionism is racism” is not an expression of support for a people deserving of a “liberation” or a country that must gain its “freedom.” All of that could have been achieved, also with Jewish help, multiple times over the last century.
THROUGHOUT THE Mandate era, during when the British were charged by the League of Nations to reconstitute the Jewish national home, several advantageous opportunities were given to local resident Arabs in the political sphere. In the first instance, the British overlooked the fact that their first census revealed that only 50% of the Muslim population then present had actually been born in the country.
Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill had lopped off some 75% of the territory that could have been the Jewish state-in-the-making and awarded it in March 1921 to a refugee from Saudi Arabia who arrived in the area just a half-year earlier: the great-grandfather of the current king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
In 1924, a Legislative Council that would have been Arab-dominated was rejected by the local non-Jewish population, as were the 1937 and 1947 partition plans. Incidentally, all of this was helped along by the right-wing British press barons Northcliffe, Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who were sympathetic to anti-Zionism. A biased media was a factor even then.
The Communist anti-Zionism of the 1920s continued on through in the 1950s and 60s to culminate in the 1975 UN “Zionism is racism” resolution. All that ideology has been repackaged as neo-Marxist progressivism today in its modernized forms. With the NGO coalition that kicked off at the 2001 Durban Conference, here we are, a quarter century later, with all the clamor, chanting and pillorying Israel and Zionism.
What causes the wave of violent antisemitism?
We may be reading opinions that “The new wave of violent antisemitism was never about Israel,” as Noah Rothman published in the National Review on December 15, but I am not sure that is a correct observation. The violence has been generated, in the first instance, because of an inherent, ever-present Jew hatred – whether theologically motivated, racist, commercial, or getting back at the White establishment (because Jews are the easiest of targets).
THE VIOLENCE, though, other than being a shared social activity because “everyone is doing it,” is primarily energized to proceed in the campaign to eliminate Israel.
Of course, Jews suffer. Their lives, their property, their businesses, and their reputations are liable to be ended or seriously hampered. The damage caused is physical, economical, and psychological. And, yes, even if Israel would not exist, Jews would still find themselves the object of attack.
Some people, perhaps, Jews and non-Jews, wonder what they would have done if they had been alive in the 1930s to better protect the Jews and avoid what happened in the 1940s. Well, that time seems to have returned – and there is much to do.
What we are witnessing on college campuses, in city streets, at restaurants, synagogues and other Jewish-identified institutions and places of gathering – like a Hanukkah concert in Amsterdam or the lighting of Hanukkah candles on an Australian beach – and the massacres, the pogroms and the terror, are focused on Israel’s eradication: to be achieved by crushing Jews and the Jewish spirit.
Our response must be the message of last week’s Hanukkah festival: to resist and to wage battles of genuine liberation, both cultural and physical.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.