The cease fire has temporarily halted Hamas rockets. The anti-Semitism it has unleashed is permanent, I’m afraid.
I remember many years ago, while I was still living in Israel, arriving at the airport and waiting in line for a taxi. Drivers waiting for passengers crowded around. The ones around me were foreigners. Middle Eastern. We got into a friendly conversation. My luggage tags were evident. They indicated Israel. The driver offered, he’s not against Jews. He has nothing against Jews at all. It’s Israel as a state he has an issue with. I said, who do you think Israel is filled with? Jews. What do you think Israel is? It’s the Jewish state. Its one and the same. It might sound like a deep intellectual distinction, but its not.
Since that day at the airport long ago, the mantra “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti Zionist” has taken hold in activist circles fighting Israel. Of course, we knew it was just another excuse in a long chain of excuses in history to feed the beast of anti-Semitism. Now these activists’ cover has been blown on this tagline of their own making. Because of a conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas, supporters subscribing to this mantra have, at worst, attacked random Jews in major cities across our land and in the world; at best, remained coldly silent in the face of these attacks on Jews.
I’ve seen many Jewish progressives on social media in crisis. They are being rejected by fellow progressives, being told there are no two sides to this conflict — either you sign onto the narrative of Israel committing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or you’re out.
I see people bemoaning how they supported BLM and changed their Facebook profiles to BLM last summer, to declare their allyship-alliance with the black community, yet now they feel abandoned. Their sentiment is not only not being reciprocated in support of their Jewishness under attack or of Israel’s right to exist, but it’s almost as though the silence feels like a complicit silence, an alignment with terrorists, or at least with those condoning anti-Semitism in the face of Israel’s fighting to defend itself.
The disappointment is palpable and tangible. Someone started a chain, suggesting the posting of a blue box on social media pages to reflect standing with the Jewish community. Did they really think it was going to take off? I’m incredulous at people’s shock. Did they really think Facebook was going to light up into one big blue square, one after the other, declarative of support?
Sadly, we know, Jewish lives matter when it’s dead Jewish lives we are talking about. Why are Jews always looking for affirmation from non-Jews that Jews are not, to a certain degree, Othered, that we must become accepted at all costs?
Be proud you are Jewish. Be Jewish! It’s who we are. You and me, both. All of us. Regardless of other differences. We are one nation. One of the most ancient, and greatest, of all time.
Am levadad yishkon — ultimately, in difficult moments of truth when history tests us, we are, it seems, a people who dwell alone. Yet, we have endured through the ebb and flow of history, where others have come and gone. We remain netzach yisrael lo yeshaker — enduring.
It’s striking to see so many people’s silence when it comes to the many painful conflicts in the world — the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma), or the refugees in Syria; yet when it comes to Israel, they seem, overnight, to have grown into anti-Israel activists.
These are new, more subtle, forms of anti-Semitism. For anti-Semites, in every generation, there is a “reason” for the hate, Oftentimes, whatever ills plague a particular society, somehow they become grafted onto the Jews. Today it’s defensive military power, yesterday it was capitalism, and the day before that it was blood in the matzah.
It has morphed from the primitive blood libels of yesteryear, the poisoned wells and matzah baked with non-Jewish blood, into the guise of sophisticated, intellectual, anti-Israel activism, which then gives credibility to anti-Semitic hate acts perpetrated against random Jews in the world. The distance from one to the other was never that far. It seems that now it has caught up and consolidated into one.
True, Israel is a political entity. Its government, policies and practices can be debated, just like every other flawed country’s policies on this earth can and should be.
That is not what we are witnessing. Make no mistake, this is not a good faith debate about Israeli policy.
Throughout the 11 days of Israel fighting, I was immersed in all things Israel. I grieved with them its losses, and read about each and every one of these precious people, including the tragedies of the little boy, the three foreign workers whose destiny became one with Am Yisrael, and the complexity that encompasses so much of the Arab-Israeli story in the story of Yigal Yehoshua. After being lynched by local Arabs, his kidney went to an Arab woman (he was an organ donor).
Once the conflict subsided, once the rockets on Israel stopped, I was able to step out of my mental “fight or flight” on behalf of Israel and felt compelled to speak on behalf of Israel’s right to defend herself in the face of so much hostility (I usually don’t make a peep on Facebook). Once that fear of the threat to the lives of Israelis, among them many dear ones of mine, passed, I sat down and watched the news coverage of the conflict in Gaza. Video after video. Interview after interview. Wake after wake. Heartbreaking. Simply heartbreaking. Little Susie who was saved from the rubble of her family’s destruction. The young guy who gets choked up and can’t finish speaking, as he is saying he has no future in Gaza, how he sees pictures of mountains and places on social media and dreams he can one day see them, yet knows he won’t, and so many other personal testaments.
War is hell, and terrorism breeds hell. Loss of innocent human life. Unspeakable pain.
Israel’s breathtaking surgical precision strikes saved many civilian lives in Gaza. Aviv Kochavi’s shrewd maneuver to separate the terrorists from civilians by deceptively leading terrorists to think he was commencing a ground invasion, causing them to scurry to their terrorist tunnels for cover, and then proceeding to bomb them only, was brilliant.
But the factor of human error in war is never avoidable. Which is why Israel tries to avoid war in the first place. Even if, as King Solomon says, “To everything there is a season,” and sometimes the season is a necessary “season of war,” it is a deeply regrettable state.
Seeing and hearing the voices and pain of innocents suffering from Gaza was important to me. While I unconditionally stand with Israel’s right and obligation to her citizens to defend herself, we can never forget the very real people, the other very real victims of Hamas, living through the hell of a terrorist reign.
As I watched these clips, important as they are, I thought to myself about war reporting, too. There’s a subtle anti-Semitism that invades the minds of the masses when coverage of Gaza and the damage inflicted there is shown time and again through a prism of “proportionality.” While most of the Gazans are innocent, and getting their voices and stories out is indeed important, to conflate them with sympathy for the terrorist regime that is responsible for their suffering, and that explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel, is not.
Because as that taxi driver and I discussed, Israel is filled with Jews. It is the only state of the Jewish people. So targeting Israel for extinction is the ultimate anti-Semitic act.
People, journalists, professors, activists can all intellectually pontificate about the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. But ultimately and practically, when people stand with Hamas, they stand for nothing short of the extinction of the Jewish people.
There are rough times ahead. Anti-Semitism may have always been there, even in our society, but for decades it has been politely dormant. We have seen it grow more acceptable to publicly express it. This is the time to be strong together. To be more Jewish than ever. To stand with our non-Jewish friends who speak up for what’s right. To unite and live the words netzach yisrael lo yeshaker — the Jewish people endures!
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
