It’s Getting Bad for the Jews By Michael Brendan Dougherty
F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.
This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.
Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.
But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”
But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.
It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?
It’s impossible to conclude that it’s something else that causes Europeans to pour out into the streets to swarm their local Israeli embassies or burn Israeli flags. Some of them seem almost like they’ve been waiting devoutly for the right moment to call Jews Nazis.
If I had to speculate, I would say two things are happening at once, and both are bad for the Jews. In the United States, the most active, passionate, young, and growing part of the American Left is determined to read American history — even global history — entirely through the lens of white supremacy. In many ways this ideology is just a form of Marxism in which “capital” and “capitalism” have been cut-and-replaced with “whites” and “whiteness.” In an ideological system so anxious to categorize people as either perpetrators or victims, Jewish success and happiness in America will inevitably cause leftists to categorize Jews as oppressors. Jews will have “become white” or, worse, their success and assimilation into America and appreciation for its political constitutions and social life will be interpreted as an unforgivable betrayal of their true status as victims who must be working to overthrow the system.
In Europe, anti-Zionism is almost a form of pro-Europeanism. My friend Damir Marusic calls it a conflict between Brussels and Jerusalem — and this conflict is almost a sacred one, over the moral status of the nation-state, and of nationalism. The lesson European liberal democrats took from World War II was that ethnic states and national chauvinism were the greatest evils on earth. The European Union is a utopian project aimed at achieving the Marxist dream of downgrading and dissipating the attachment of peoples to their nationalities and religions. Many Jews, looking at the horror of the Shoah, gave up on the liberal dream and turned to Theodor Herzl and the Zionists, who held out that what the Jews needed was a homeland of their own and a state capable of defending their existence.
Now it would be self-serving for a Catholic conservative to tell Jews to give up on the Left entirely and that their interests are with the Right. And I’m not sure that’s true. While many Americans Jews are happy enough to become conservatives or throw their lot in with conservative nationalists, many others sense — correctly, I think — that it would be a tragedy for Jews and a danger for them to be entirely identified with the subaltern side of the Western political spectrum.
Call me a simpleton, but I think it’s a credit to Israel and America that Jews have flourished in these two nations. Also, I happen to have faith that the Jews and the Catholic Church will survive every ideological delusion and every haughty empire on earth. And I suspect that Jewish liberals are going to recover their voice and their pride, and fight for their place in American life from those who would try to chase them over into the conservative ghetto.
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