Rabbi David J. Wolpe: On the Hatred of Jews
Israel is the only country in the world that is routinely and widely targeted for eradication. So is anti-Zionism synonymous with antisemitism?Yisrael Medad: ‘Palestine’ and the energy of colonization
There are exceptions, but the overlap is striking. I have never heard of activists who are angry with China targeting Chinese restaurants in Paris, but when Hamas terrorists were recently arrested in Europe with plans to blow up Jewish institutions, they were not targeting Israel, but Jews. If someone is angry at Israel, they target Jewish synagogues, businesses, and restaurants — anything associated with Jews, anywhere in the world — no matter their relationship to Israel.
This enmity has deep roots.
I have a position at the Harvard Divinity School, and I often wonder whether we teach students that both the New Testament, and to a lesser extent the Koran, contain messages hostile to Jews. Do the students learn that Martin Luther said Jews “are a serpent’s brood” and their synagogues should be burned, or how during periods like the Almohad persecution, Jews could accept Islam, flee, or die? How Christians persecuted and periodically murdered Jews for some 1,500 years?
Jews experienced more acceptance in Muslim lands, yet still were labeled impure, subjugated, and were often persecuted. Many of my congregants in Los Angeles were forced to flee Iran when the Shah fell in 1979 — their property confiscated, the leader of the community executed, and the Khomeini regime making clear they were unwelcome in the new Islamic republic. Having lost everything and escaping with their lives, years later, they still have nightmares.
Why all this hatred against one small people? We remained different, distinct. We would not become Christian or Muslim. We were outsiders, others, champions of diversity.
Moreover, Jewish culture — portable, book-focused, and one that venerates scholarship and learning — primes us for economies where information and mental agility lead to success. When you don’t like someone, seeing them succeed magnifies the antipathy.
Finally, Jews introduced the idea of ethical monotheism — the moral demands that one God makes on human beings — to the western tradition. As Jewish essayist Maurice Samuel said, “no one likes an alarm clock”; Jews represent conscience and conscience is a disruptive and painful partner in our lives.
The energy and outrage Jews generate — making up 0.2 percent of the world population — is oddly disproportionate. Antisemitism is a wild, irrational eruption.
Harvard has a long and ignoble history of antisemitism, as Harvard President Claudine Gay said in her remarks to Harvard Hillel in October. It is time to admit it, confront it and overcome it. One can criticize policies without calling for the end to the only homeland Jews have ever known. One can demand a Palestinian state without globalizing the intifada — the term for a protest that previously resulted in over 110 suicide bombings that targeted buses, cafes, and malls.
If we cannot learn to argue civilly at Harvard, how can we have hope for the civility of other places in the world?
Jews gave the world a precious gift: the idea that each human being is an image of God. I pray that we all remember and honor that gift.
In what can only be considered as an ironic twist of intention, it has become apparent that not only has the idea of a free Arab state of Palestine become an agenda item of the first degree for the United Nations, human-rights NGOs, and other similar bodies and institutions, but it has become the ideal of these bodies as well. The slogan “Palestine must be free” has literally colonized the minds of intellectuals, academicians, diplomats and university students, thus assuring, at least for the short term, it being a constant of discussion, debate and involvement.How Westerners Empower Radical Islam
In what I have termed as the rhetoric of obversity—that is, the orchestration of language to mean not what was originally intended, as well as the expanding of their meaning to include new definitions—the normative definition of settler colonialism has been modified. Settler colonialism is when invaders occupy a territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers so as to enjoy metropolitan living standards and political privileges. It has been applied, wrongly and falsely, to Zionism.
This allows news items, such as one from Dec. 20, “Illegal Israeli Colonizers Raze Land,” to hammer the term into the heads of Jewish youth who should know better as it more easily does into the thinking of others.
Implicit in applying the “settler colonialism” terminology is to suggest that the goals of Zionism were and are the elimination and exploitation of the “native” population. However, that never happened, nor was it the intention of the Zionist enterprise. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Cary Nelson, is his magnificent “Israel Denial” on the faculty campaign against the Jewish state, notes on pages 120-123 how the older claim of Zionism as a colonialist movement has now been linked to the false assertion not only of a supposed Arab Palestinian identity but an Arab Palestinian indigeneity as well, thereby interlocking the core forces that drive the anger and involvement of college student even while this causes a racialization format.
In an academic treatment, Sai Englert quotes Fayez Sayegh who described the core of Zionism’s ideology as one of “racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy” on p. 22 in a 1965 PLO booklet. Sayegh, the Syrian-born founder of the Palestine Research Center of Beirut, is held to be a pioneering analyst in the field. Perhaps one of the more illustrative examples of language rape practiced by the proponents of pro-Palestine propaganda is the one used at the March 2011 Seventh Annual Conference of the London’s SOAS Palestine Society. It would have us believe that “[f]or over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society.”
To give but one example of the relative primitiveness of the approach in its early period is to quote from Sayegh writing: “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine.” Jews at that time were a permanent feature for centuries in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Leading up to 1740 and in the following decade, thousands immigrated to Eretz Yisrael expecting the Messianic era to evolve, including Rabbi Moses Haim Luzzatto and Kabbalist Rabbi Haim ben Attar.
Indeed, in all the previous centuries, Jews were moving to reside in Eretz Yisrael, including hundreds of rabbis and some of the greatest luminaries of Jewish scholarship. In the mid- to late 18th century, hundreds of Chassidim, many with families, were immigrating to the country. By the early 19th century, the pupils of the Vilna Gaon, too, were making the move. Not antisemitism but religious motivation was the force behind this.
Yasmine Mohammed - not her real name - is the author of the 2019 book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. Born in Vancouver with a father from Gaza and an Egyptian mother, she says, "any criticism of Islamic cultures is deemed xenophobic or racist." But this reluctance to apply to Islam the same pressures for change and improvement we apply to ourselves is a form of the inverse racism of low expectations.
This is evident in the failure of many Westerners to properly condemn Hamas' actions on Oct. 7. Instead of heaping condemnation on Hamas, as we would do with any other group, she feels that many Western universities, media, and politicians imply its behavior is a fitting response to Palestinian grievances.
"After the Holocaust, would you now expect Jewish people to jump into the homes of German people and start slaughtering families and kidnapping people? Of course not." But when it comes to Arabs or Muslims, a different, lower set of expectations is applied - as if barbarism is perfectly OK.