How should the Jewish world respond to the nightmarish onslaught that we’re living through What’s happening is unprecedented. We’re not merely dealing with antisemitism roaring out of control across the west.
Antizionism is being deployed as an obscene moral prism through which society is being reframed. It’s redefining lies as truth, casting victims as oppressors and defaming Israel’s defensive war against genocidal extermination as a genocide itself.
It’s attempting to erase the heritage of the Jews in their ancestral homeland, erase the victimisation of Jews in the State of Israel, and even erase the attempt to erase the Jews from the face of the earth in the Holocaust. Antizionism is being deployed to erase reason itself.
It’s coming mostly from the left but also from the right; from nurses wearing a “Palestine” pin and from a Scout leader wearing a keffiyeh to a Beavers’ meeting for children aged six to eight; from the Encyclopedia Britannica renaming Israel as Palestine on its map.
It’s coming from thugs abusing diners in Israeli-owned restaurants, abusing Jewish passengers on Tubes and buses and preventing a Jewish MP from visiting a school in his constituency. In short, we’re looking at a collective madness.
In a lecture to the 92nd Street Y community centre in New York last week, the journalist Bret Stephens addressed the question of what to do about all this. He made many characteristically insightful remarks. But he was also profoundly wrong.
Rightly observing that antisemitism could never be eradicated and that constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy to win the world’s love was a fool’s errand, he said: “We need to stop being wounded, aggrieved or indignant. We need to stop caring”. And he recommended that Jews ignore antisemitism because we can’t do anything about it.
This is misguided on several counts. First, Jews have a duty to speak out and must always care about such terrible wrongdoing.
Second, while antisemites may be beyond reason many others who have turned against us are not. Framing the problem as antisemitism misses this point by a mile. That’s because the key issue is antizionism. People are being bombarded with what purport to be reliable reports of appalling Israeli behaviour.
These are all obsessive lies, wild distortions and blood libels which portray Israel as the most evil regime on the planet just for existing as a Jewish state. This demonises in turn all those who support Israel’s existence – which means most Jews.
The belief that the Jews collectively do terrible things has been given rocket fuel by the belief that Israel is doing terrible things. Antizionism, ludicrously claiming that Jews are oppressive colonisers of their own ancestral homeland, is principally responsible for this tsunami of antisemitism and is therefore an evil in its own right.
Stephens is absolutely correct that Jewish leadership has failed, not just in America but in Britain too. But it failed not because resistance is hopeless but because the strategy has been totally wrong.
It’s focused on identifying the evils of antisemitism and on promoting Holocaust education. But great swathes of the west bitterly resent claims of antisemitism and having the Holocaust – as they believe – rammed down their throats.
That’s largely because they think Jews don’t fit the profile of the world’s victims of oppression or hardship. They think Jews are like themselves but infinitely more successful. They’re jealous and resentful about the Jews’ achievements, they think Jewish power dominates western society, and so they assume that the Jews are claiming to be victims solely to sanitise the presumed crimes of Israel.
Stephens says the response should be to ignore all such bigotry and focus instead on building up Jewish identity and peoplehood. This is indeed absolutely critical. But turning inwards, as he suggests, simply to produce thriving Jewish communities will do nothing to address the rapidly rising threat to those communities.
Before the Holocaust, Polish Jewry was a thriving community distinguished by immense learning and Jewish culture. That did nothing to prevent that community from being almost totally wiped out.
Jews must “thrive” for a purpose. This is to live by Jewish precepts to enable them to fight for truth, justice and their own continued existence – for which their grasp of peoplehood is essential. As my new book being published next month lays out, we need to assert confident Jewish peoplehood in order to fight the hate harder and smarter.
We should be out-and-proud Zionists. We should be saying loud and clear that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel, that the Arabs are the colonisers, and that Zionism, the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancestral land, is the ultimate anti-colonisation movement.
We should also be saying that Zionism is an inseparable part of Judaism, and so antizionism is an attempt to destroy not just Israel but Judaism itself.
Jews have a moral obligation to fight for their survival. We just need to stop playing defence, get onto the front foot and for the first time start taking the fight to the enemy.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist.
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