Antisemitism: The Sinister Pattern
The enemies of the Jews are the enemies of Enlightenment.
The enemies of Israel are the enemies of reason and civilisation, and of our traditions of criticism. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as defenders of reason have a responsibility to speak out on this here and now, at one of the darkest times in modern history.
There are 7.2 million Jews living in Israel—73 percent of the population. So, less than three-quarters of Israel’s population is comprised of Jews. But Israel is a Jewish state, a state that exists to protect Jews. This is required because there have been systematic attempts over thousands of years to exterminate Jews. And ever since there have been Jews, there have been Jews in Israel. The first Jews populated the land where Israel is today in around 2,000 BCE. In other words, they have continuously occupied the land for close to 4,000 years.
There are around 15 million Jews living on Earth and of those who live outside Israel, most are found in the US, which has a Jewish population of around 6 million. By comparison there are 2.38 billion Christians and around 2.1 billion Muslims worldwide. Jews comprise only 0.2 percent of the total global population. Christians make up approximately 31.6 percent, Muslims around 25 percent, and Hindus 15 percent—even Buddhists make up around 8 percent. There would be many more Jews but for the continued and sometimes almost successful attempts to exterminate them. There is an asymmetry here.
David Bernstein
Mainstream Islam explicitly teaches its adherents that Jews deserve death simply for being Jews. We could illustrate this with many passages from Islamic scripture, but one typical example will suffice, from a Hadith by Ibn ’Umar, reported by Al-Bukhari:
I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) saying: “You (i.e., Muslims) will fight against the Jews and you will gain victory over them. The stones will (betray them) saying: ‘O Abdullah! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.”
Mainstream Islamic scripture is riddled with Jew hatred. Muslim children are taught this scripture. Of course, not all Muslims are antisemitic, but, again, there is an asymmetry here. Jewish scripture does not teach Jews to hate Muslims—if only because, when the Torah was written, Muslims did not exist. The Hebrew Bible predates Islam by around 2,500 years.
Israel has a population of approximately 9.4 million. Compare this to Egypt’s more than 110 million, Iran’s more than 88 million, Syria’s 22 million and Jordan’s 11.5 million. While Jews comprise only 0.2 percent of the global population, they fill our news reports night after night, years after year, generation after generation. Because they are always under attack: for being Jews and for defending themselves.
In 1967, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait together attacked Israel in an attempt to eradicate the country and exterminate its Jews. Israel fought back, survived, and won. Lebanon played a small part fighting alongside those other Arab nations. Today’s Lebanon is ruled in part by Hezbollah—a terrorist organisation which, like Hamas, exists primarily in order to enforce an Islamist vision of the world upon the society it controls, central to which is opposing the very existence of Israel, since it shares Hamas’ visceral, genocidal hatred of Jews.
Jews were once spread throughout Europe, but multiple pogroms—murderous riots and programs to exterminate Jews—happened over and over again across Europe for centuries, culminating in the twentieth century with the Holocaust. The Jews in Europe who barely escaped the Nazi genocide during World War II were forced to flee Germany and Poland—and Russia, since Stalin and many of his allies had no love for the Jews—and they needed a safe place. Since Jews have historic ties to Israel stretching back millennia, a small parcel of land was set aside for them there. As David Deutsch has written:
Most countries in Europe and the Middle East have persecuted Jews for most of their history. Most have expelled and/or slaughtered their Jewish populations at some time or other (often re-admitting them and re-expelling them in a cyclic pattern). They have justified this through a pattern of ideas usually called antisemitism, which include
• the idea that Jews have collectively failed some crucial test (e.g., they rejected Jesus, or Mohammed, or do not have the Aryans’ capacity for ‘culture,’ or do not satisfy Stalin’s criteria for being a ‘nation,’ or lack a mystical ‘connection to the land,’ etc.);
• the idea that Jews cause pollution—for instance that they are poisoning the water supply, or that they desecrate holy sites and artefacts—which is often extended, semi-metaphorically, to the idea that Jews are pollution/vermin/rotten/cancer etc.
• blood libels, the classic one being that Jews kidnap and murder non-Jewish children and consume their blood in religious rituals;
• the incorporation of an entity called ‘The Jews’ deeply into the fabric of many cultures as the eternal enemy bent on destroying whatever that culture values; and
• conspiracy theories, especially theories that ‘The Jews’ are secretly ‘behind’ events of history and current affairs.
Jews have always lived in the area known as Israel, but in 1948 the state of Israel was declared as independent so that the extermination of Jews would never again occur. Many of the Jews who had fled their homes in Europe did not wish to return to live alongside those who had slaughtered their families. In some cases—as in Poland—when they did return, they were killed. If surviving Jews returned to their former homes in Europe, they faced the very real possibility that the simmering antisemitism that remained would lead people to murder them all. Hence: Israel.
How did Israel form? Britain controlled the region at the end of World War II and the US wanted that place to be a refuge for the Jews. In 1948, as Deutsch writes,
The United States put pressure on Britain to allow 100,000 Jews to leave the [refugee] camps and enter Palestine for humanitarian reasons. Britain refused. But it announced that it would withdraw from its Mandate (now a United Nations Mandate) in 1948. The United Nations proposed a partition plan for the aftermath. It allocated the Jews more territory than the Peel Commission had, mainly by including most of the virtually empty (and, at that time, virtually uninhabitable) Negev desert. However, this territory did not include most of the Jewish historic or holy sites, nor many Jewish settlements, nor Jerusalem; moreover, it was not defensible militarily. This plan was a bitter prospect for the Zionists, but they accepted it. The Arabs refused.
When the British left, the Jews of Palestine declared their new State of Israel in the territory allotted to them by the United Nations. The Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, was named Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Israel. The Haganah was renamed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The first two countries to recognise Israel were the United States and the Soviet Union. Most other countries, but no Arab ones, followed suit. The first act of the provisional government was to abolish all restrictions on Jewish immigration. Jewish refugees began pouring into Israel.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East: the only place to hold regular elections with competing political parties. It is the only place in the Middle East where people of all faiths are welcome. Israel welcomes Muslims who are friendly to that nation with open arms. No nation in the Middle East reciprocates this welcome. There is nowhere in Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, or most of Egypt where a Jew can freely walk the streets dressed in such a way as to reveal the fact that they are Jewish. And yet in Tel Aviv, you will see the complete spectrum of people you would see in any Western nation—because it is a Western city in a Western nation, an island of Enlightenment in a region that is still largely held back by tyrants, medieval thinking, stasis, and anti-Enlightenment values, where women are second-class citizens, homosexuals are routinely put to death, and children are used as human shields.
In a regular war, such as the wars that have taken place between North and South Korea or between the USA and Vietnam, there are objectives like gaining or regaining territory, replacing a government or freeing a people from tyranny. But when Jews defend themselves in war, they are defending their very existence.
The Nazis decided on a policy of extermination of the Jews, but at least they attempted to cover up their crimes: to hide, bury, or burn the evidence. Somewhere, deep in their minds, still operated some semblance of an Enlightenment set of values that caused them to feel shame. They knew the world would condemn them and that condemnation meant something to them.
Hamas has precisely the same objectives as the Nazis did in Germany from the 1930s through to 1945. Their stated objective is to commit genocide, to exterminate the Jews. But unlike the Nazis, Hamas and its allies and supporters both in the Middle East and increasingly on the streets of the West—in New York, London, and here in Sydney—are different from the Nazis in that they feel no shame. They are gleeful. Far from trying to hide their crimes, they livestream them. They are literally worse than the Nazis.
This is not a skirmish in a regular war. This is a group of people who are part of the Enlightenment tradition, people of the West: tolerant, enlightened people who want what you and I want—progress, happy family lives, the latest iPhone or Tesla, the ability to travel, to have liberty and pursue happiness. They are fighting for their survival, for their existence. And on the other side is Hamas. They are not asking for territory. They did not parachute into the Supernova music festival to take territory or to fight the Israeli defence forces. They parachuted into Israel to murder as many innocent civilians as possible—babies, infants, children, grandmothers and grandfathers, whole families—to gang rape women and to kidnap hostages, and to livestream it all. They are proud of what they did. And their supporters in Sydney claimed that this was a great day.
Iran’s stated policy is to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea, to destroy the nation altogether and to leave no Jew alive in the Middle East or anywhere on Earth. This Jew-hatred is just the latest example of a pattern of attacks, a pattern that has been repeated over millennia. Most cultures in the West have managed to extricate themselves from explicit Jew hatred at least as a matter of stated national government policy. But Jew hatred still lingers among Westerners and manifests in the form of anti-Zionist sentiments: the idea that there should not be a Jewish state, or that Israel should be held to a different standard from any other country whenever it defends itself against attack.
Only Israel is told to show restraint when it confronts terrorists in Gaza and elsewhere. This double standard stems from the atavistic idea that the Jews somehow deserve it. That there are things that they have done that make it understandable when their children are slaughtered or kidnapped, and their women raped. That the attacks are legitimate. That they had it coming.
Whenever you hear the slogan “free Palestine,” you are hearing the notion that there is some legitimacy in hurting Jews, that they are the ones stopping Palestine from being free. But Hamas is in control of Gaza, not Israel. The Jews in Israel must protect themselves against Hamas by walling in Gaza. If they do not, what happened on 7 October and what happened during World War II and on all those other occasions on which Jews were murdered on an industrial scale, will happen again.
No one can fully explain why Jews are especially hated generation after generation or what has led to what David Deutsch has called “The Pattern”: the maintainance of the idea that it is legitimate to hurt Jews. This pattern manifests itself in the resurgence across time and across the globe of racist canards and tropes. I am loathe to repeat any of them but let me give a single example: the idea Jews are greedy and mercenary, that they care only about money and will use nefarious means to amass it for themselves and to cheat others out of theirs. That trope influences the idea that the Jews control Hollywood, the media, and the world’s governments and that fighting the power therefore means fighting Jews. This perpetuates the idea that bringing down Jews is a way of rebalancing things and is therefore legitimate.
Everything from the idea that Jews are stingy all the way to Hamas’ genocidal rage is part of the pattern: part of a continuum of Jew hatred whose origin we do not know, but which must be resisted. The media is deeply captured by this set of memes and hence so many of the recent news stories use language that casts Jews and Israel as somehow equally culpable for any violence that erupts in that area of the world, whoever the aggressor was and no matter how brutal the initial assault or how horrific the aims of their enemies. We often hear calls, for example, for Israel to respond in a “proportionate” way to Hamas. But should the allies have been proportionate in their response to the Axis powers during World War II? And what would proportionality even mean? What could possibly be proportionate to the killing of over 1,400 innocent civilians, the kidnapping and murder of babies and infants, the gang rapes of women?
There is no requirement for proportionality. If a criminal assaults a man unprovoked on the street, the police will not use a proportionate response—or, at least, they should not. They should use whatever force is necessary to arrest the man and bring him to justice. The Hamas terrorists have killed in cold blood and say they will do so again, given the chance. The only sane response to this is to neutralise the threat by eliminating the terrorists. Until that happens, there can be no way of achieving peace or delivering justice. The two sides here are not in any way equivalent.
Jewish culture prizes debate, discussion, and investigation. Talmudic disputes, in which scholars critique different interpretations of Jewish texts, do not result in the silencing of opponents, but further our ongoing attempts to understand our place in the world. In South Korea, some non-Jewish children even study the Talmud to refine their debating skills. In more authoritarian cultural traditions, children are raised to give over their critical faculties to some single, orthodox interpretation, such as a so-called literal interpretation of scripture. There is another asymmetry there.
The Jews are persecuted almost everywhere they go. When people in the West today promote diversity, it is often at the expense of Jews. It is blind faith in the benefits of diversity of every kind—including in basic ethical values—that favours the immigration of people with ideas that include many ways to legitimise the continued hurting of Jews. Diversity often means importing antisemitism and thus making it harder for Jews to live anywhere but Israel: their one fortified place left on Earth—and the sole nation on earth widely proclaimed to be illegitimate. This is the claim made by the Palestinians and other surrounding nations, who falsely assert that the Jews did not settle the region until after World War II, when in fact they have been there for millennia.
The largely Islamic population that inhabited Palestine in 1948 was not expelled altogether, and they were certainly never at risk of being exterminated. The Muslims that remained in the region over time became known as the Palestinians and formalised Gaza and the West Bank. And there they remain, and could remain, in peace—because that is what Israel wants—if only they did not continue to fire rockets into Israel. There would be peace tomorrow if the Islamists and Jew-haters in Palestine simply laid down their weapons. But if Israel laid down their weapons tomorrow, there would be genocide, as the Palestinians and their allies would rush in to finish the job that Hitler started. This is Hamas’ explicit goal.
This is as bright a moral line as one can draw. One side, Israel, wants peace. The other side—Hamas and a majority of the Palestinians and their allies—want Israel to be eliminated and Jews exterminated. They are not hiding this, as the Nazis did. They are stating it loudly and clearly in words and showing in the most horrific actions just how deathly serious they are.
So, what can we do? Whenever someone says anything that implies that the Jews deserve to be attacked, object. Object to people who say that Israel oppresses its neighbours. They do not. They must defend themselves. Whenever someone claims that the power imbalance between Palestine and Israel is so great that this is the only recourse left to the Palestinians, show them a map of Israel and the deeply antisemitic majority-Muslim nations that surround it. Israel is a tiny island of Enlightenment in a vast ocean of Jew haters who, if we do not take a stand against them, will complete the work of Hitler.
We cannot allow that to happen.
This piece has been adapted, with permission, from a transcript of this episode of Brett Hall’s podcast, The Three Rs: Reality, Reason and Rationality. Although it draws heavily on David Deutsch’s “A Short History of Israel,” any errors are the present author’s.
