RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-evil-of-anti-semitism/

Incredible as it may seem, it is now no longer possible to ignore the growing parallels between the present onslaught of anti-Semitism in Australia and elsewhere in the West, and the situation of the Jewish people in Germany and Europe during the inter-war years, culminating in the Holocaust and the attempted extermination of the Jewish race. Above all, there should be no doubt that the well-organised coalition of Progressivist and Islamist forces wishes the greatest possible harm upon not only Israel but the Jewish diaspora as a whole.

This danger is especially acute in a multicultural society like Australia which has imported entrenched anti-Semitism, and where key sections of the political elite and civil society, including academia, the education system, the media and the arts have been captured by these forces, while federal and state governments are seeking to withdraw or render incapable all relevant levels of protection for Australian Jews. This deliberate anti-Semitic policy has already been implemented by the New South Wales and Victorian police forces in their refusal (presumably under political instruction) to apply the laws relating to hate-speech and anti-Semitic demonstrations, while the Australian Human Rights Commission has similarly remained deliberately inactive in the face of clear violations of human rights suffered by our Jewish citizens.

It is possible to illustrate the great dangers, especially of complacency and disbelief, that exist by focusing on the experience of Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, as she was brought from her comfortable and beloved “life of the mind” to confront the dark malignancy that came to convulse Europe during her lifetime, and that led her to write two of the most important books of the century, exploring these issues. The principal message here is that nothing can be taken for granted, there is no room for complacency, the horrific times could well return, and the most vigorous resistance to the age-old evil of anti-Semitism must be mounted.

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On May 22, 1960, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, rose to his feet in the Israeli parliament to announce that ex-SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial facing fifteen charges including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people for his part in the murder of six million Jews. Eichmann had escaped the Allied authorities after the Second World War and had joined many other Nazi fugitives in South America. Eventually, he was tracked down to a suburb of Buenos Aires by Mossad agents after he became careless and began to boast. (“I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”) He was kidnapped, sedated, disguised, taken to the airport, placed on an airliner and spirited away to Israel. His trial (below) ran from April 11 to August 15, 1961.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20885/pogrom-at-kibbutz-beeri

“As word came that murderous hordes were approaching, the Jews attempted to flee. Those who could not, barricaded themselves indoors and prayed for a miracle.”

This moving narrative describes not the shocking events of October 7, 2023, at Kibbutz Be’eri and other communities in Israel, but the massacre of eastern European Jews nearly 400 years earlier by Cossacks during the 1648 Khmelnitsky pogroms, in what is now Ukraine.

Although Jewish settlements in the greater Kievan Rus region, Ukraine and Crimea included, can be traced to the 8th -10th centuries, a record of pogroms took some time to emerge. Not limited to the Rus region, pogroms were widespread in middle ages Europe as a whole. In the Rhineland area, the First Crusade of 1096 led to mass slaughter of Jews who had settled there, and the same later in Palestine when the Crusaders arrived. In England, the York pogrom of 1190 resulted in the expulsion of Jews from the land for nearly 400 years.

The long and woeful history of eastern European pogroms: the massacre of innocent, peace-loving Jews in their small villages, their shtetls, commenced about a thousand years ago and continues today. Out of these pogroms came the words of Rabbeinu Gershom, who in the 10th century wrote in his work, Zechor Brit Avraham (Recall the Covenant of Abraham):

“Wounds, bruises, and fresh blows
are inflicted on the daughter of Israel
She is pained and embittered in a foreign land
hunted like a bird from Mt. Moriah.”

The year 1391 witnessed the infamous Spanish pogrom in which Sephardic Jewish communities were destroyed, and those who refused to convert to Catholicism were murdered. By 1492, the date of final expulsion, there were few, if any, openly practising Jews left in Spain.

Nearly 400 years later, in 1881, a continuous four-year pogrom occurred in southern Russia, when thousands of shtetls with their Jewish occupants were eliminated. With numerous pogroms in between, some 40 years thereafter, between the years of 1918 and 1920, major pogroms were instigated throughout Ukraine, in which more than 250,000 Jews were murdered. The mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and Russia to America can be traced to those events.

Only one day after Israel’s declaration of Independence in 1948, “murderous hordes,” like the Cossacks of before, once again sought to purge Jews in the region through an existential attack by five Arab armies. This time was different, however: the Jews had weapons and successfully fought back against the intended massacre.

In 2021 at the city of Lod, Israel, an intended pogrom of “violence and terror” by contemporary “murderous hordes” was attempted, but fortunately with limited success. In a repeat of history, and despite relocation to their ancestral homeland of Israel, Jews were forced once again to “barricade themselves in their homes in fear of the rampaging mobs while others chose to flee the city until calm was restored.” Still, this was not yet the Be’eri pogrom of 2023.