Friday, October 11, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The Jewish Moment
Melanie Phillips: The Jewish Moment
It’s the same environment in which the deranged hatred of Israel and the Jewish people in the general population has become mainstream and is overwhelming the culture.The New Zionist Renaissance
This is obviously very frightening. However, it’s important for Jews to view these tumultuous events not through corrupted Western eyes, which peer through a prism of demoralization and despair, but through Jewish eyes, which gaze through a prism of clarity and hope.
We Jews are not alone. There are good people who support us. They are people who still understand the distinction between right and wrong, truth and lies, victim and victimizer.
Although there are millions of them, they don’t possess cultural and political power. They have been effectively disenfranchised by those who aim to destroy Western civilization, who despise Israel and the Jews, and who dominate the elite positions within Western society.
With the decent millions fighting back through the democratic avenues available to them, a titanic civilizational struggle is under way.
The Jews are the leaders of that resistance. Israel is leading it in geopolitical and military terms, fighting to defeat the forces of evil in Iran and the Islamic world.
More generally, the historic culture of the Jewish people reaffirms the core values of civilization against the forces upholding lies, hatred and the abuse of power.
Those forces are embedded within the left-wing establishment in every country. In the Diaspora, many Jews themselves are signed up to the ideologies that have unleashed them. Some of these Jews have been deeply dismayed since Oct. 7 to find their supposed fellow “progressives” have turned against them.
These Jews have a choice. They can recognize the unique value of the inherited, specific precepts of Judaism that have bound the Jewish people together over the centuries and enabled it to survive every culture that has tried to annihilate it. Or else they can stick with a Western culture which, unless it dramatically changes course, is going down.
This weekend is Yom Kippur. Rarely has its central theme of teshuvah—“return”—seemed more apposite.
In the Middle East, the enemies of the Jewish people are now on the back foot. In Israel, there’s a quiet certainty that we are winning.
More than that, it’s astounding that this tiny country is standing alone to defend civilization against barbarism—a service to humanity that it’s delivering on behalf of the entire world.
No one is under any illusion. Many perils and maybe even more suffering lie ahead. What’s certain, however, is that Israel and the Jewish people will survive and thrive.
As Poilievre so movingly declared: “One thing I know—even a thousand years from now, on Friday as the sun sets and Shabbat begins in Israel, the songs of Shabbat will continue to be heard, and the Jewish people will continue to exist.”
We are living through a seismic chapter in Jewish destiny. The world may rage and shout and scream—because they know it, too. This is the Jewish moment.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent “Iron Swords” war have thrust profound philosophical and political questions to the forefront that will in turn shape the future of Zionism and with it, the fate of the Jewish people. What role should the State of Israel play in the life of the Jewish people? What is the meaning of Jewish consciousness in the life of the individual? What historical lessons should be learned from the events of the past year that might help ensure the survival of the Jewish nation?Andrew Fox: Reflections on a week of remembrance
Grappling with these questions has yielded an unequivocal conclusion: a resurgence of the relevance of the “Zionist idea” in the 21st century, both in Israel and in the diaspora.
Since the dawn of the Jewish emancipation in the 18th century, the Jewish people have wrestled with the question of their collective fate. Some argued that Jews should strive for full cultural integration into non-Jewish society, while abandoning religious, social, and cultural traditions and instead adopting the customs of the host countries. Conversely, others contended that one should not trust foreign societies or rely on the aid of host nations during times of crisis. According to this view, the Jewish people should direct most of their resources and efforts toward building internal Jewish resilience—culturally and politically. After the Holocaust, this debate was largely settled by the comprehensive vision of Zionism.
In addressing the distress among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and assimilation in the West, the Zionist movement sought to revitalize the Jewish people economically, socially, and most of all, politically and culturally. It aimed to ensure the continuity of an autonomous Jewish life through the ingathering of Jews to their ancestral homeland and the establishment of an independent sociopolitical base that would secure their existence, security, and well-being. Otherwise, assimilation within host societies and persecution from without would lead to their physical and spiritual destruction.
The Holocaust proved the prescience of the Zionist prognosis, at least regarding physical existence in the diaspora, in such a definitive manner that even its most ardent proponents could not have dared to imagine. It became evident that the Jewish people could not count on help or shelter from other nations, but must rely solely on an independent army and state.
In the ensuing decades, as Jews integrated into Western society alongside the establishment of the State of Israel, these hard-learned truths began to fade. Many came to believe that this existential diagnosis was a relic of the past with no relevance to contemporary reality. Senior political and security figures, both from within the Israeli establishment and the international community, exerted significant influence on decision-makers in Jerusalem to rely on international guarantees for existential issues concerning security and well-being.
The attacks of Oct. 7 have once again thrown into stark relief the “normal” historical condition of the Jews throughout history, including now. The attacks did not uncover unknown facts. However, only after their occurrence did these facts transform from abstract concepts into a bitter reality that could no longer be ignored. For many Israelis, Oct. 7 catalyzed an experiential and ideological shift in their fundamental beliefs, leading back to the Zionist idea.
Dear all,John Podhoretz: Antisemitism's Rise after Oct. 7 Should Scare Us All
The subtitle of this piece might be misleading, but I’m going with it. This letter isn’t just to the new friends I’ve made this past year, both Jews in the UK and people in Israel. It’s also to my non-Jewish readers who may wonder why I have been quite as vociferous as I have over the last year, on a topic where I don’t really have a dog in the fight.
It starts, as do all acts of remembrance this week, on 7th October last year. I’m a former Army officer; my academic areas of interest were (and are) strategy in the Middle East, and the psychology of disinformation. So when a war began in the Middle East that raised many strategic questions, whilst soaked in the patterns of disinformation I know intimately from my studies… well, I had something to say.
Of course I knew of the events of 7th October: I’m a Middle East researcher. On the day itself, the Telegram channels I follow were writhing like a bag of snakes with snuff movie after snuff movie. All so abhorrent; all so shocking; even for a reasonably experienced soldier.
My early strategic analysis was about right. I guessed Israel’s strategic goals and I looked at their tactics, and felt they all looked logical. They fought a contested urban battle against a dug-in defence in pretty much the same way British Army doctrine advises. Isolation; break-in; seize objectives; clearance.
Obviously, the isolation and break-in phases to Gaza City drew the world’s ire. The global public was unprepared for the live-streaming of the effects of modern weaponry in an urban setting. The closest most people have come to it is Call of Duty. They were primed on decades of Palestinian information operations about Israel, and swam in a rising sea of antisemitism. They didn’t understand what 7th October meant and why Israel had to respond the way it did. When Hamas’ ringmasters presented them with a narrative of genocide that fit their prejudices and biases, they clung to it with both hands.
Israel’s great mistake was in assuming that the horrors of 7th October would buy them some credit. They wildly overestimated their bank balances of sympathy, and as victims of disinformation fraud they rapidly became overdrawn.
So, there was I, in my Twitter/X stovepipe, merrily analysing away in broad support of Israel’s strategy. Until April 2024.
I was invited on a trip to Israel by the Military Expert Panel. We were granted decent access by the IDF and they briefed us their plans, which I noted smugly were just about what I’d predicted. Situation: no change.
What changed everything for me was visiting the massacre sites and seeing those hurt by it: victims and hostage family members. I wasn’t prepared for it conceptually or emotionally. It turned those snuff films of months earlier into 3-D.
Before, it was just another set of horrors in a world full of horrors, of which I had seen my fair share firsthand.
After, it was a lurid kaleidoscope of pain, misery, inhuman rape and torture; sadism, dehumanisation, and bloody, mutilating murder of the utmost savagery, carried out with Satanic glee. I walked in human ashes mixed with the remnants of the fires in kibbutzim where innocents were burned alive. I have seen the evidence of rape. I have seen the sites of these obscenities against humanity.
Before, I knew. After, I understood.
A new study released on the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel finds that 3.5 million American Jews say they have experienced some form of antisemitism in the year since.
The study by the National Opinion Research Council at the University of Chicago found that a quarter of Jewish respondents avoid displaying their Jewish identity in the workplace, an increase of 33% over the past year.
A quarter of those affiliated with a synagogue or other Jewish institution "report that their institution has been targeted with graffiti, threats, or attacks since Oct. 7."
At universities, 39% of Jewish students report they have felt uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event due to their identity, while 29% have felt or been excluded from a group or event because they are Jewish.
We Jews don't just feel like we're in danger. We are in danger.
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