Anti-Semitism, an irrational hatred of the Jewish people, is a hatred from the most ancient of times. As Jews are among the most ancient of distinct faiths, cultures, and ethnicities, they have long stood apart from the mainstream of those surrounding them.
In the language of our blood, to be an individual is to be indecent. Our most visceral human nature is fundamentally xenophobic. Jews have ever provoked the antipathy of their neighbors because of their cardinal sin of not being like the rest of us.
Jews are different — different from whatever passes for the norm in countless times and places over nearly four millennia of human history. They were lone monotheists among animists and polytheists. They retain their hope for a Messiah other than Jesus of Nazareth. They refused to accept the revelation of the prophet Mohammad, instead cleaving to the prophet Moses.
When blood and soil nationalism captured the fascination of the West, Jews had been living in other nation’s communities for well over 1,500 years. In all this time, Jews never allowed themselves to be fully assimilated into the societies around them. Nationalistic purists have repeatedly asserted that only the excision of the Jews from their body politic would bring social health.
Economically, Jews were the bankers of medieval Europe. Christians were banned from lending money at interest because the Church of that time deemed this to be usury, a mortal sin. So it fell to Jews to be the moneylenders that fueled economic activity in the cities.
Another shameful trait of human nature is that we are more likely to bite the hand that feeds us than to kiss it. While Jewish loans made many commercial dreams come true, gratitude was most often eclipsed by resentment. Grumbling over the humiliating experience of being a suppliant, or complaints over interest rates and repayment schedules were most common reactions.
When tragedy struck, the Jews were there to take the blame. The Black Death was blamed on Jews poisoning wells. Pogroms, officially sanctioned anti-Jewish riots, resulted. When a child went missing, and sadly children always go missing, the Jews were blamed. The despicable Blood Libel made the utterly false claim that Jews baked matzo with the blood of gentile children. Pogroms resulted.
This was nothing new. Jews were targeted for destruction by Kings of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Macedon. Rulers of Rome, the Arabs, the Turks, Russia, and countless European nation-states kept Jews repressed, in ghettos, and vulnerable to popular discontent.
Theodor Herzl’s answer to the perennial problem of being a detested minority in someone else’s community was for the Jewish people to establish a nation of their own. When he wrote, in the late 19th Century, the concept that people of common blood, history, culture, and soil have a shared glorious destiny was the most powerful idea in Europe.
Nationalism was the answer to Karl Marx’s fractious identity politics of social and economic class warfare. Those traits that obsess communists, occupation and wealth, were less important to a nationalist than if an individual was of the common folk. It was and remains utterly sensible to see the Jewish people as a distinct nation. The Romans who had cast the Jews out of the Holy Land were long gone. Why not make a Jewish homeland? Why not return to Israel?
At that time, there was absolutely no distinctly “Palestinian” Arab cultural identity. Those Arabs who lived in the region called Palestine were culturally indistinguishable from other Syrian Arabs.
Only after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which made it British policy to establish a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land, did a reaction among local Arabs against Jewish immigration produce a unique Palestinian Arab identity.
After Herzl, the bloodiest half-century in all of Jewish history had to pass before this dream of Israel could be achieved. Grand Pogroms, a world war, a Communist Revolution, National Socialism, Nuremberg Laws, Reichskristallnacht, a second world war, and a Final Solution nearly achieved all bolstered Herzl’s contention.
The only assurance of ongoing Jewish survival must be the existence of an independent Jewish nation. After the Holocaust, only in Israel could Jews be even remotely secure. The USA and USSR in the UNO agreed, and in 1948 the State of Israel was born. It was immediately attacked by five Arab armies, pledged to drive the Jews into the sea.
Since the voluntary mass exodus of Palestinians during this war, an evacuation ordered by the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini, other Arabs and Muslims have done far more harm to the now-homeless Palestinians than have the Israelis.
These other Arabs refused to accept Palestinians as fellow Arabs, instead treating them as a suspect people apart. For over 70 years, these fellow Muslims persistently refused to allow stateless Palestinian Arabs out of squalid refugee camps into their wider societies.
Since the 1990s, everyday life in the Palestinian Arab territory of Gaza and on the Jordan River’s West Bank, lands that had been abandoned by Israel as part of the peace process, has remained wretched. Almost all international aid was funneled to the terrorists. The decades-long terrorist regime of Mahmoud Abbas has sacrificed civil life in the Palestinian Authority in hope that enmity-without-end will outlast Israel, as if it were some latter-day Crusader Kingdom.
To the extent that there is a Palestinian identity, it’s chiefly a negative construct, and more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian Arab. The only outcome that will satiate their ambitions appears to be the forcible removal of all living Jews from the Holy Land.
Israel is the only functioning multi-party democracy in all the Middle East. It is the only society there that has genuinely left Medievalism behind and entered the modern world. It is the only place on Earth that a Jewish people, which has been persistently targeted for genocide since before the Mosaic Exodus from Egypt, can call their own.
It is, along with Britain, America’s greatest natural ally. Ties of blood, culture, and faith connect our two nations. Israelis have consistently been willing to trade land for peace. Israelis still hope that an Islamic Arab civilization that stretches from Morocco to Iraq will someday be willing to allow Jews to live peaceably in a land of their own, no bigger than the size of New Jersey.
For the words, “Never Again!” to have any meaning, for our longstanding commitment to stop genocide to be true, we cannot allow Israel to be overcome. On purely humanitarian grounds, we should stand with the government in Jerusalem.
However, we Americans have a selfish reason for standing with Israel. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, American aid prevented Israel from a desperate use of its semi-secret nuclear deterrent. That atomic arsenal is much greater today.
This, coupled with the Obama and Biden Administrations’ disastrous appeasement of an atomic-minded Iran, has created a nuclear powder keg. An atomic exchange between Tehran and Jerusalem could spark a global nuclear exchange.
Once again, Islamist Terrorists are attacking the State of Israel. Their savage crimes remove all legitimacy from their cause. They are the enemies of all mankind.
Here in the U.S., the usual apologists for America’s enemies haven’t lost a moment in praising the Palestinian cause. These apologists are almost all left-wing woke Social Justice Warriors (SJW).
The alliance of Islamist Fundamentalists and SJWs would be laughable if it weren’t so utterly tragic. Progressive Americans, who care more about the alphabet mafia of the ever-fluid gender identity community, have made common cause with devotees of Sharia Law who condemn to death every homosexual that they find.
In fact, all that woke “snowflakes” and those who would die Shaheed (as martyrs in an Islamic Jihad) have in common is their shared enemy, those of us in the Western world. In order for either cult’s Millenarian Utopia to be born, our Judeo-Christian Western Civilization must die.
So, “The Squad” of American communist women in Congress agitates for shifting American support from Israel to the Palestinian Arabs. The same ahistorical emotionalism used as agitprop for their stoking of endless grievances through divisive identity politics is now being used to paint the poor Arabs as victims of Jewish white settler colonialism.
Unfortunately, the masochistic political left is not the only refuge for American anti-Semitism. How many supposedly Christian Fundamentalists take one line from the Gospel of John out of context to justify their abhorrence for all things Jewish? How many self-identified Christians believe that it is their duty to damn all of today’s Jewish men, women, and children as Christ’s killers, in need of perpetual punishment ?
How many unhinged conspiracy theorists imagine that our world is governed by some latter-day “Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” This false document was a product of the Tsarist Okhrana, used to justify endless Russian Pogroms. How many seemingly well-adjusted and decent people harbor a viciousness towards Judaism at variance with the rest of their character?
Consider whether any supposed Jewish conspiracy, which is claimed to have governed humanity for millennia, would have made anti-Semitic genocide a perpetual element in world history? It seems to me that such Illuminati-by-any-other name would have done a better job at protecting themselves.
No, there is no Jewish conspiracy, nor is there a monolithic Judaic identity. Jewish people are as morally, intellectually, ideologically, and philosophically diverse as anyone else. For example, many secular American Jews are not even very pro-Israel. Some small Jewish groups even oppose Israel’s existence as an affront to the Messiah.
We Americans have a critical role to play in the current war that was just begun by Hamas. If, and only if, U.S. policy is unambiguously clear that we will not allow anyone to profit by a conventional or nuclear attack against Israel can we hope to discourage a nightmare scenario of endless escalation. As with Taiwan and the rapacious Chinese Communist Party (CCP), America’s commitment to Israel must be so solid as to plausibly be able to deter more serious Iranian and Arab attacks.
The Hamas organization that launched a general attack against Israel is trained, equipped, funded, and directed by Iran. A proxy war between Jerusalem and Tehran has already begun. Only Washington’s deeds can keep this struggle from expanding out of control.
We must stand with Israel for many reasons. Chiefly, we must do so because preventing Armageddon is its own reward.
