2023 & The Apparent Virtue of Anti-Semitism

Warriors of tolerance and diversity cannot condemn the murder of 1300 civilians on the basis of their religion. Champions of feminism refuse to decry the rapes and kidnappings of women and children. Advocates of LGBT rights, social justice, and legal entitlements align with a cause that imprisons and tortures gays and spends its foreign aid on terror rather than material improvements to civilian life. Prominent intellectuals cannot recognize the basic moral differences between the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the collateral damage accrued in self-defense. Sanctimonious politicians and media outlets immediately and decisively broadcast libels from a designated terrorist group before examining any hard evidence presented by Western intelligence.

How can it be? How did we get here?

If the events of October 7 were not a stark enough reminder that Jews face an existential threat, perhaps the ongoing demonstrations and rise in domestic anti-Semitism should serve as warning that the West’s self-destruction begins with the abandonment of Jews. While the rhetoric from Islamists includes Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, and blatant genocidal intentions, the far-left cultural relativist camp is unbothered. They excuse and enable this shocking, tribalistic hatred as an expression of indigenous struggle over Western colonialism. The problem, they say, is not the Jews per se but the existence of a Jewish state and the circumstances that led to it. Their stance is motivated by a facile belief that victims – at least non-Western ones – are always morally preferable regardless of the actions that led to their victimhood.

The anti-Zionist interpretation of Israel’s existence, starting even before its War of Independence, is informed by an ahistorical, anti-intellectual position that Jews are mostly or entirely responsible for the plight of Palestinians. They omit historical examinations and obscure important questions about international human rights and other responsible parties. Their brand of selective moral outrage perpetuates violence against Jews and willfully paints Israeli society – the only tolerant and democratic society in the Middle East – as malicious, oppressive, and institutionally discriminatory.

Jewish values and history in Israel date back some 4000-plus years, and the Zionist movement within Judaism was less of a choice than a desperate resort for recognition and survival. Without any nuance or any moral consideration for the alternative timeline (in which Jews are invariably murdered or relegated to nonpeople), Israel’s detractors attempt to distill Jewish history into a tale of belligerence and cunning usurpation. On the contrary, Jews have accepted or proposed Arab/Palestinian statehood four times (1937, 1947, 2000, and 2008). Israelis have also made peace with other Arab nations (Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain) and have made concessions to the Palestinian National Authority countless times.

In every instance when the door to peace and statehood was open, Jews were instead met with terror and violence. Israel pulled out of Gaza unilaterally in 2005, and one year later, Palestinians elected Hamas – a designated terrorist group whose charter calls explicitly for the obliteration of Israel and the murder of Jews. Hamas has not held an election in 17 years and has no interest in one, considering they murdered their political rivals immediately after taking office. Since then, they’ve turned their coastal enclave into a police state and base of terror by spending almost all of its foreign aid on terrorist infrastructure rather than basic human needs. Their evil is overt, and yet the world is shocked that Israel would restrict movement from Gaza?

The simple fact is that Hamas prefers to keep Palestinians immiserated. Their recent attack was meant to undermine Israel’s peace agreement with Saudi Arabia - a deal that would have almost certainly reignited the peace process and given Palestinians hope. We think Hamas is on the fringe of Muslim society, but in fact the larger institutional players are not innocent in the campaign to destroy Israel at the expense of Palestinian livelihood. Indeed, there is very little tangible evidence that Iran, the Arab states, or the Palestinian National Authority (PA) care about improving the lives of average Palestinians. They are far more concerned with enriching their political class, holding onto their existing power structures, and delegitimizing Israel for its role in Arab humiliation in 1948, 1967, and 1973.

Indeed, these authoritarian governments that routinely arrest and torture their own people for dissent are not that different from Hamas. Just as Hamas uses human shields to wage a war of propaganda and rally the cries of disproportionate retaliation, Palestine’s champions have been weaponizing Palestinian suffering as a flashpoint in their campaign to accrue foreign aid and unite the Arab and international community to hate Jews.

Palestinians (or their government caretakers) receive billions of dollars every year through UNRWA, USAID, the World Bank, and other foreign donations. But they live in squalor. Where does this money go? Consider that the PA Premier Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, like Yassar Arafat before them, are extremely high net worth individuals despite presiding over people whose GDP per capita is about $3600. Consider further that some $300 million of Palestinian money is diverted to a Martyr’s Fund every year to compensate the families of terrorists (including suicide bombers) that were killed or imprisoned after attacking Israeli civilians or soldiers. In the October 7 attack, the families of dead terrorists received $2.3 million dollars.

This policy, combined with a well-documented anti-Jew indoctrination in Palestinian schools and media, is highly effective at incentivizing terror and ensuring the complicity of noncombatants. In fact, many of the Gazans that participated on October 7 were not card-carrying members of Hamas but rather opportunistic civilians hoping to kill, rape, and kidnap any Jew they could find to support the cause. For the average Palestinian, death or terror are the only ways to out of their life of destitution and refugee camps. Many of these camps are in other Arab nations who have passed laws restricting movement and forbidding Palestinians from citizenship and assimilation. Why are these countries not censured and only Israel? If Palestinian and Arab leaders really wanted to improve the daily lives of Palestinians and end the “humanitarian crisis,” they would stop embezzling foreign aid and funding terror, and they would start treating their people like people. But if they did all that, they would end up with a state. Worse yet, they would have to stop blaming Jews for their problems.

In the Middle-East, Jew hatred is in plain sight. In the West, evil hides behind tolerance. To the cultural relativist and the Islamist alike, human rights abuses in Arab countries don’t count. They’ll continue to promote a shamefully disingenuous claim that Arab-Palestinian leadership and the Arab world in general do not bear any responsibility for the continued suffering of Palestinian people. Of course, the underlying themes of these libels are indistinguishable from age-old anti-Semitic tropes that led to the mass extermination of Jews. But how can that be? The better question is how do we get out of here?