I’m going to start out with a confession.
When my younger son told me that he and his Israeli girlfriend would be heading to Italy for a short vacation in a month or so, my brow furrowed immediately. “Do your old Dad a favor,” I told him. “Please don’t speak Hebrew in public or tell anyone that you’ve traveled from Israel. Just stick to English and say you’re from New York, OK? Otherwise, I’m going to be nervous the whole time you’re there.”
I’m admitting this not because I’m proud of having made that request, but because I think it will resonate with a lot of other Jewish and Israeli parents in a similar position. In truth, I loathe having to advise my son and his girlfriend not to converse in our ancient tongue, the national language of the State of Israel. But I’m a parent before anything else, and so obviously, I want to do what I can to minimize any risks my two boys and their partners might face when they are among strangers.
As much as I might be faithfully mimicking the stereotype of the anxious Jewish parent, I would challenge anyone who thinks I’m being overcautious by way of a series of incidents last week targeting Israeli tourists in Vietnam.
Video of the three incidents was widely distributed online and picked up in a couple of media reports as well. The offenders were the same in all three: two British women—by some accounts, a mother and her daughter—harassing Israelis they encountered with the foulest screeched abuse.
One might reasonably conclude that the sole reason these two creatures traveled thousands of miles to Vietnam was not to imbibe its fascinating culture, or its breathtaking vistas, or its French-inflected cuisine. They went there to harangue Israelis, among whom Vietnam is a popular destination, proudly broadcasting the results on their social-media feeds.
The incidents are instructive because they show the depth to which the antisemitic tropes promoted by the pro-Hamas movement in Western countries have infected its acolytes.
In the first incident, the women—who are always behind the camera, so you can only hear their voices—were inside a casual dining restaurant where an Israeli couple were quietly enjoying their lunch.
When the young Israeli woman they were harassing calmly told them to desist, the British women responded in taunting tones. “Oh, they’re gonna cry, ‘I didn’t have my lunch in peace,’” one of them said in the voice of a playground bully. “Oh dear, victim, victim,” the other one chimed in. “Because we’re goyim aren’t we, we’re just goyim, we’re just worthless animals.”
Actually, most Jews will tell you that animals carry far more worth than a couple of gutter antisemites who have no idea about the provenance of the word goyim, which in its original meaning is the Hebrew word for “nation,” and who have eagerly swallowed lies spread online about “Jewish supremacism.” But they weren’t done. The two women began singing (or at least attempted to do so), the words: “Boom, boom Tel Aviv, this is what you get for all your evil deeds.”
They then started to laugh hysterically before interrogating the couple as to whether they opposed “genocide.” “Say ‘Free Palestine,’” they urged, as the Israelis calmly carried on eating.
When the Israeli woman eventually responded, saying “we got your opinion, now can you shut the f**k up,” the women answered as though they had been insulted. “Don’t you dare,” one of them screamed. “Everywhere you go, you are hated; nobody likes you.”
Then their unvarnished antisemitism emerged: “110 countries you’ve been thrown out of,” said one of them, citing one of the most popular (and laughably inaccurate) antisemitic barbs that mocks the historic persecution of Jewish communities. As the Israeli couple exited the restaurant, the women called them “rats,” invoking the same term for Jews that the Nazis used.
It was a similar story at the next venue where this pestilent duo appeared. At the entrance to what looked like a Buddhist temple, they regaled a group of fit, tanned young Israelis with chants of “Free Palestine” before challenging them to a fight, which, fortunately for them, the bemused Israelis turned down, because these women wouldn’t have lasted a minute.
In the last venue, again a restaurant, the women had the temerity to present themselves as “documentary filmmakers.” When an unsuspecting young woman replied “Israel” to the question “where are you from?” the abuse followed like clockwork. Discovering that most of the diners were Israelis, one of the women burst out, “You lot are Zionists, you don’t belong in … in … .” Having apparently forgotten where she was, the other woman helped her out by finishing her sentence with the word “Vietnam.”
Even 10 years ago, spectacles like these would have largely been dismissed as regrettable yet marginal phenomena. That is no longer possible.
The scenes from Vietnam that I described are not an aberration. Rather, they are a faithful representation of what the movement to eliminate the State of Israel has become: openly and proudly antisemitic, and an unmistakable physical threat to Jews. It’s no accident that its crudest motifs—“baby-killers,” “inbreds,” “110 countries” and so forth—are also its most popular because we are not dealing with a mere political campaign, but with a hate movement.
Ironically, many of the thinkers and writers who historically framed pro-Palestinian discourse would probably be dismissed for being too “zio-friendly” among the new crop of activists, who crave simple, bombastic slogans and eschew more nuanced critique. As an illustration, I recently revisited an essay by the late Columbia University academic Edward Said (author of the oft-studied Orientalism), who probably did more than any other late 20th-century intellectual to position Israel in the public mind as a colonial interloper occupying Arab land.
Yet in that essay, Said offered such observations as, “Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists or Hamas”; “The notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency”; and, most of all, this: “There is now a creeping, nasty wave of antisemitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric.”
It’s bizarre to say so, but one can imagine Said being howled down were he to return from the dead and direct these words to the blue-haired identitarians, unreconstructed communists and Western Islamists who run the pro-Hamas movement in our own time.
It’s equally bizarre to say that, on this point, it’s hard to find fault with Said. The “creeping, nasty wave of antisemitism” he warned of has finally overwhelmed the movement he helped to nurture.
