Israel is hated precisely because it is strong

National Post, 16 December 2023

If the Jewish people are weak, they are despised for being weak, but if they become strong or successful, they are resented as such

The alarming antisemitic outbursts after the Hamas attacks on Israel in October — when, contrariwise, one might have expected expressions of solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people — deserve further exploration.

I wrote in these pages about some causes for what we have seen, rooted in a form of secularism in which Jews are seen as a problem due to their divine election. The enormous outrage over the American university presidents who found it difficult to condemn calls for “genocide” against Jews focused attention on another aspect of antisemitism that also bears examination.

The presidents of the Harvard, MIT and Penn (the last of which has already resigned) marinated for decades in an environment where never is heard a discouraging word about “oppressed” groups, and never is heard an encouraging word about “oppressor” groups. It becomes impossible then, on principle, for the “oppressor” group to be the victim of racial, ethnic or religious discrimination or harassment.

In the campus environment, Jews are considered “white” and “privileged” and therefore part of the “oppressor” class. Their “disproportionate” success in the Ivy League and other elite academic institutions only reinforces that view. That Israel is a strong military power makes it all the worse.

The female presidents who testified before Congress would have found it hard to fathom that they, members of an oppressed class — women — could possibly be guilty of not protecting an oppressor class — Jews. Behind their struggle to answer simple questions — is calling for genocide harassment? — was bewilderment. How could it even be entertained that Jews were worthy of the vast bureaucratic protections offered to approved oppressed groups?

There exists a vast cultural and religious conflict in worldviews. Biblical Israel self-consciously understood itself as a weak nation that only survived by divine providence. The Torah is the story of how the weak prevailed against the superpower of the region, Egypt of the pharaohs. Later, Israel would be subjugated by other powers, Babylon and Rome. The great king of Israel is remembered to this day as the less powerful one, the David facing the world’s Goliath.

So there is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t quality to antisemitism down the ages. If the Jewish people are weak, they are despised for being weak, or thought to be deserving of whatever insults could be added to injury. But if they become strong or successful, they are resented as such.

Hence, early 20th-century antisemitism both looked down upon Jews for not having their own place in the world — a deserved consequence of their perfidy — as well as castigated Jews for “undue” success in business.

The Shoah changed much of that, but not all of it. The horrors of the Holocaust meant that there was a moral imperative to do something to protect Jews from such a calamity again. The key part of that something was the modern State of Israel with its “law of return” — every Jew would have a secure place to live in the world.

The emergence of the modern State of Israel was opposed by its Arab neighbours, despite the United Nations authorization of two states, one Jewish and one Arab, to coexist between “the river and the sea.” Thus Israel had to fight and win its war of independence.

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