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.
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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.
Jews thought this to be David and Goliath all over again. But if David wins, then David is less a David the next time. And if David wins repeatedly — 1956, 1967, 1973 — then perhaps he is no longer David at all.
That’s the consensus in the woke corners of the campus environment — and in the UN General Assembly. Israel is the strong one, the mighty one. If Israel defeated Egypt three times in the 20th century, then David is the modern pharaoh.
Hence the prevalence of, and tolerance for, antisemitism in recent months. Israelis still understand themselves as a small nation — a little Vancouver Island — fighting for survival in a vast region of hostile powers. The woke world of universities does not see it that way. Israel is strong, and is demonstrating that daily in Gaza. And if Jews are strong, then they ought to be opposed and subject to obloquy and opprobrium. It’s what oppressors deserve.
And if Israel were to become weak, would it then “earn” the sympathy of the Ivy League and the General Assembly? Unlikely. The perniciousness of antisemitism is such that it may be thought that the Jews got what was coming to them.
Friends of Israel and the Jewish people have been disconcerted, even destabilized, first by the brutality of the Hamas attacks — murder compound by rapes, mutilations and beheadings — and then by manifestations of antisemitism.
Yet the perception of David as the new Goliath requires a genuinely new strategic response from Israel. That has been lacking. More on that next week.
National Post
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