Tuesday, October 08, 2024
From Ian:
Dara Horn: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism
Dara Horn: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism
The consequences for Jews of this hatred are obvious. Indeed, many American Jews have changed their behavior, hiding outward signs of Jewish identity and thinking twice before sharing their identity with colleagues and acquaintances. But its consequences for non-Jews are incalculable—not because of the often inaccurate Holocaust-education claim that Jews are the canary-in-the-coal-mine whose persecution indicates that other groups will later be persecuted, but because this permission structure devours human potential.The 7 October deniers
Imagine how many intelligent people in the 19th and early 20th centuries devoted their talents to justifying “scientific” anti-Semitism instead of doing actual science, or how many years of oppression have been endured by populations duped into thinking that their enemy was “Zionism” instead of their Soviet-sponsored dictatorships or fundamentalist regimes. Human-rights activists have appropriately raised awareness of very real injustices committed by Israel. But the enormous investment in exposing primarily Jewish perfidy—the United Nations Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation in the world—has left fewer resources to address rampant human-rights abuses elsewhere. Meanwhile, any Israeli government is less likely to consider legitimate criticism from outsiders, because the supply of such criticism has been so thoroughly poisoned by those who want Jews dead. Blood, treasure, and talent in the Muslim world have been horrifically wasted in war after war against Israel.
Palestinian Arabs have borne the brunt of their leaders’ and manipulators’ anti-Jewish obsession, winding up subjected to autocratic rule, used as human pawns, and deprived of multiple opportunities for statehood, collaboration, prosperity, and peace. Like Israeli Jews, they aren’t going anywhere; they, too, deserve freedom and dignity, and must build a future with their neighbors. For people in all of these societies, the costs of this fixation are high.
American institutions that cave to this hatred will also face these costs. Schools and universities lose their credibility and their ability to teach when educators let lies undermine learning. The same is true for other sectors of American life. A literary world where conformity is the price of entry is unworthy of the name. A prejudiced therapist is a contradiction in terms, rendering therapy itself impossible. Patients suffer when ideology derails doctors’ training. When swaths of colleagues are blacklisted and ostracized, untold possibilities for research and innovation are blithely destroyed.
The permission structure is here, alive and vivid. It always is. Thousands of years of Jewish experience suggest that we will continue on this course. But Jewish experience is not universal. One revolutionary idea in Jewish tradition, articulated everywhere from the Torah to the Israeli national anthem, is hope: Nothing is inevitable; people can change. Hope and a vision for the future of Israelis and Palestinians will have to come from Israelis and Palestinians themselves. But the future that we choose here in America is up to us.
American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.
But there is indeed something we can learn from the long history of anti-Semitism and the societies it has destroyed: We’ve fallen for this before. After this terrifying year, I hope we can find the courage to say, Never again.
The toxic cynicism that has met reports of Hamas’s depravity has nothing to do with a desire for accuracy and evidence. There is no amount of evidence that will satisfy these people. From the off, there were horrifying indications that women had been a key target of Hamas that day. Footage emerged of kidnapped women with bloodied crotches. Murdered women were found, hands tied and stripped from the waist down. Later on, deeply researched reports by the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times – drawing on eyewitnesses, official accounts and video evidence – detailed rape, sexual torture and genital mutilation (Hamas seemed to extract a particular, perverse thrill from stabbing, shooting and driving nails into women’s vaginas). Even the UN – whose institutional bias against Israel is a running joke – concluded, in a report published in March, that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred’ on 7 October. ‘There are further accounts of individuals who witnessed at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women’, it added. There is reason to believe the rape was systematic, too; documents were found in the possession of Hamas terrorists, explaining how to say ‘Take off your pants’ in Hebrew. But even a year on, with a mountain of evidence beneath us, mention the rape of Israeli women to the apologists and you will get an eye roll.The West has turned its back on Jews
Where the hardliners deny, the more mainstream sow doubt. The anti-Israel types seem to have come up with an entirely new, Israel-specific standard of journalistic proof. Apparently, unless they are presented with a hi-def snuff movie of the specific alleged crime in question, they cannot possibly assess its truthfulness. No amount of eyewitness testimonies or evidence will suffice, it seems. I suppose we should also free all of the convicted murderers, apart from those who were dumb enough to be caught killing on camera. This led Israel to reluctantly publish images of slain babies, and to hold screenings of footage of Hamas’s crimes, edited to protect the dignity of the dead and defiled. But it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Pro-Palestine activists even staged a protest outside of a screening in Los Angeles, denouncing the film as ‘propaganda’.
There are different motivations for this denialism. There are those who simply cannot accept how wrong they were about Israel and Hamas. For many years, Israel’s defences had protected not just Israeli civilians from harm, but also Western woke leftists from the consequences of their luxury beliefs. So long as the Islamist killers were kept at bay, Corbynistas could pretend that Hamas is a group of anti-imperialist resistance fighters – that it didn’t mean all that stuff in its founding covenant about murdering Jews. The pogrom confronted them with the grisly reality. But rather than admit they got this badly wrong, many leftists chose denial instead. They insisted that Our Hamas would never do something like that, even as they were presented with copious evidence to the contrary.
Then there is the anti-Semitism – the unvarnished Jew hatred that drives many of the fantastical and cynical claims about 7 October. This is Holocaust denial redux. For when people deny or downplay the Holocaust they aren’t just dabbling in a deeply offensive and suspect form of revisionist history. Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism – relying, as it does, on age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Namely, that Jews lie and that they exert some kind of hypnotic sway over Western governments and media. Naturally, this has over recent decades become bound up with anti-Israel agitation too, as the more conspiratorial anti-Semites argue that the Shoah was essentially a hoax designed to guilt trip the West into supporting the founding of Israel. It was grimly predictable that 7 October – the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust – would be denied too; used to demonise Israel as a lying, bloodthirsty nation, just as Jews have been demonised as lying and bloodthirsty for millennia.
7 October wasn’t the first Islamist atrocity to be given the tinfoil-hat treatment. More than 20 years on from 9/11, an alarmingly large number of Americans – let alone people in other parts of the world, who have borne the brunt of the American military misadventures that followed – still refuse to believe the ‘official narrative’ about the murderous assault on the World Trade Center. And yet it’s telling that, in 9/11 too, many conspiracy theorists see the secret hand of the Jews. It was ordered by Mossad, they splutter, in league with Jewish American neocons, desperate to invade the Middle East.
Here we see that the world’s oldest hatred is also the world’s most enduring conspiracy theory – ascribing Jews the role of killers, oppressors and master manipulators. Debunking the 7 October denialists is essential, but it sadly won’t be enough, until we can confront the conspiratorial bigotry that sees lying Jews everywhere.
Over time, it’s highly likely that the Democratic Party, despite the resistance of figures like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, will become ever more anti-Israel. The nine congresspeople who voted against supporting Israel in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October pogrom were all Democrats. Hamas supporters even succeeded in partially shutting down the California Democratic Party convention this year. In contrast, the strongest support for Israel now comes from Republicans.
Yet it seems like American Jews are not quite ready to jump ship en masse. Instead, some Jewish Democrats have waged targeted campaigns against the most radical anti-Zionists in Congress. By pouring funds into selected races, they have succeeded in eliminating two members of ‘the Squad’ – Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush – and have been active as well at the more local level. From ascendancy to self-defence
In the longer run, these triumphs could prove to be fleeting. One in five younger Americans believes the Holocaust is a myth, while half think Israel should be ‘ended’ and handed to Palestinians. Particularly troubling is the influence of social media. According to Pew, about one in three Latino teenagers says they are ‘constantly’ on the largely pro-Hamas, CCP-controlled TikTok. Overall, in the US, a country where most still support Israel and express positive views of Jews, blacks, Latinos and even Asians express more negative sentiments, particularly among the younger generations.
These tensions make life difficult even in cities historically friendly to Jews. In southern California, where I live, pro-Hamas demonstrations have forced at least one local synagogue to relocate its services, others have been vandalised, while demonstrators halted traffic in the traditionally Jewish Fairfax District. The home owned by Michael Tuchin, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was recently attacked with smoke bombs and spattered with fake blood. Jews in London, Paris, Berlin, Brooklyn and San Francisco have experienced similar attacks.
Progressive, anti-Zionist Jews are a diminishing force and have little future. They now make up roughly 10 to 15 per cent of the campus Jewish population, according to Hersh’s research. Indeed, for many Jews, 7 October spelled the demise of the whole logic of progressive Judaism – the ‘heal the world’ mantra of Reform and liberal Jews. Such heady notions lose their lustre when Jews’ very survival is at stake. Ultimately, Hersh suggests that most anti-Zionist students, being from secular backgrounds and disproportionately ‘nonbinary’, are unlikely to remain deeply attached to the broader community or produce much of the next generation.
Orthodox Jews already largely segregate themselves in selected neighbourhoods and send their children to religious schools. One recent study suggests that, as a percentage of the American Jewish diaspora, the Orthodox community will likely more than double in size by 2063 – reflecting the below-replacement birth rates among non-Orthodox American Jews. On college campuses it’s the Orthodox Chabad, the ministry of the Lubavitcher movement, that is most present.
Of course, most Jews may remain Reform or non-aligned. But in the current circumstance, even left-of-centre Jews cannot be too picky about allies, such as Christian evangelicals or Hindu fundamentalists, who have generally supported Israel and a Jewish presence in the West.
Author Joseph Epstein suggests that the time has come for Jews to practise some ‘self-segregation’, much as in the past. This new inward-looking turn can be seen in the growth of groups like Hatzolah, which provides free security and emergency services in heavily Jewish parts of New York and Los Angeles. Some of the volunteers come from the ranks of the US military as well as the Israel Defence Forces. Throughout the diaspora, Jewish schools and institutions are paying for elaborate security systems.
Jewish geography is also changing. In a remarkable shift, Jewish students are beginning to migrate away from big cities, ditching Ivy League colleges and their equivalents for more tolerant schools in, of all places, the deep South, which tends to be less hostile to Israel and Jews in general. An exodus of Jewish talent and genius – not yet extinct – could now benefit these red states much as America benefited from the Nazi-induced migrations in the 1930s.
Although some Jews, facing a harsh environment, will choose to hide their identity, there are signs that many are coming together across sectarian lines. On some campuses, such as mine at Chapman University and my daughter’s at ultra-leftist Sarah Lawrence College, students – both Orthodox and Reform – are collaborating to present Israel’s side of the story, and to defend their rights on campus.
This is the new reality of a Jewish community that is both more assertive and less progressive. At a time when the diaspora’s glory days have passed, a shift to pragmatic politics and self-defence has become urgent. It marks a return to attitudes and approaches that have allowed for Jewish survival for the past three millenia.
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