The current onslaught against the Jewish people is causing many Diaspora Jews to ask themselves profound and unsettling questions.
Israel is being used by its enemies to divide them. The condition of their acceptance as Americans or Brits, they are being told, is to renounce the Jewish state.
Some are doing that. Others are staying solidly in support. Others still, badly gaslighted, are unsure what to think. All are now asking themselves the hitherto unthinkable question: whether there’s now a future for Jews in the United States or the United Kingdom.
Almost every day seems to bring yet another shock to the besieged Diaspora Jewish psyche.
In America, the Democratic Party is steadily recreating itself as the party of West-hating, Islamist-supporting antisemites. In the process, it’s making the destruction of Israel and the demonization of Zionists defining motifs of Democratic politics, as indeed, these have become throughout the progressive Western world.
In such circles, demonization of Israel has been mainstreamed. Appallingly, casting Israel as diabolical and the murder of Jews as accordingly understandable has been framed as conscience itself.
Antisemitism is no longer regarded as the most murderous bigotry in history. It has instead been reframed as an attempt by Jews to mask their own conspiracy against the public good and to conceal the crimes of the State of Israel.
Always unhinged, this witch-hunt has become totally deranged. Scott Wiener, a gay Jewish Californian Democratic senator, supports trans people, voted down a bill to ban pedophiles from office and accused Israel of genocide. Nevertheless, he was abused, harassed and hounded off a pro-trans rally by people screaming he had betrayed the “Queer” cause by refusing to call for Israel’s destruction.
Antisemitism has been reframed as an attempt by Jews to mask their own conspiracy against the public good and to conceal the crimes of the State of Israel.
Wiener may be an extreme example, but he points to a wider issue. Just as the hostile world is trying to use Israel and Zionism to split Jews across the Diaspora, the question is whether they are Jews in name only if they spurn Israel and Zionism.
The suggestion that the game is up for the Diaspora—and that the only future for Jews is to make aliyah and live in Israel—often provokes a furious reaction among Jews in America and Britain.
Some of them are indifferent to or actively dislike Israel. Even those Jews who consider themselves Zionists because they support Israel (and may even have holiday homes there) mostly regard Zionism as an add-on to their all-important American or British identity.
The key neuralgic issue is peoplehood. For some Diaspora Jews, the Oct. 7 attacks made them realize how much they identified with Israel. They reached out to help. They felt the agony of the hostages and their families.
But that very connection made many of them aware of a more uncomfortable reality—that the fight for the life of the Jewish people was taking place in Israel. That was where a seismic chapter in Jewish history was unfolding. And Diaspora Jews weren’t part of it.
However much they may feel Israel’s pain, they don’t identify as the same people. The issues of Zionism and Israel are driving a wedge among Diaspora Jews because so many don’t feel that Israel is an integral part of their identity. They identify instead with America or Britain.
But in allowing themselves to have their Jewishness cherry-picked like this, Diaspora Jews have unwittingly become part of the West’s own existential crisis.
The West’s hostility to Israel is not just a manifestation of the oldest hatred. In turning on the Jewish people, it is, in effect, turning on itself.
For decades, the West has told itself that it was born in the original sins of colonialism, exploitation and whiteness, and that the Western nation state is itself a source of division, prejudice and war. Its elites have accordingly attacked the West’s foundational values, on the basis that particularism is the source of all ills and that liberal universalism is the only basis for justice, compassion and freedom in the world.
In attacking its own identity, the West has made two significant errors.
Telling itself that biblical values stood for all bad things, it failed to realize that the values by which virtually all rightly set such store—such as the equal dignity of every human being, putting the interests of others above your own, and the rule of law based on the consent of the people—are not universal, aren’t encoded within humankind’s DNA and weren’t bequeathed by the ancient Greeks. They derive from the Hebrew Bible, mediated through the foundational creed of Christianity. Western civilization therefore owes its greatness ultimately to Judaism.
The second failure of understanding is one that’s shared by many Diaspora Jews. Many assume that while antisemitism is bad because it attacks Jews as people, anti-Zionism is fine because Zionism is merely a political project, which it’s perfectly proper to oppose.
But anti-Zionism isn’t fine at all. It’s bad in itself because it singles out Israel for discriminatory treatment—systematic falsehoods, demonization and double standards designed to delegitimize and destroy it—meted out to no other country on earth.
More profoundly, Zionism is not a political cause. The religion of Judaism is itself inseparable from the land of Israel. Judaism consists of the belief by the Jewish people that they were given a Divine command to create a particular kind of society in the land that was promised to them.
Jewish religious liturgy is studded with countless references to Zion, the ancient Hebrew name for the land. Zionism, which emerged as a discrete political movement in the 19th century, is thus intrinsic to Judaism.
Of course, Jews who aren’t religiously observant are still Jews, just as are Jews who are anti-Zionist. But in Judaism, the people, the faith and the land are inextricably connected. Trying to pluck Zionism out of Judaism is to destroy it by plucking out its heart.
So, attacking the Jewish world is to attack the West; attacking Israel and Zionism is to attack Judaism.
Many Diaspora Jews won’t acknowledge this because the implications are too devastating. Especially in America, where the majority of Jews have signed up to anti-Jewish liberal ideologies, many of them will therefore dump Israel.
Observant Jews will remain loyal, and more of them will move to Israel. A number of progressive Jews, meanwhile, are agonized. Finding that their erstwhile comrades have now turned viciously against them over their support for Israel’s existence, they feel like politically homeless Jewish orphans.
It’s now more than 1,000 days since the terrible events of Oct. 7. During that traumatic period, which is still far from over, Israel has changed. It has returned to the biblical ideal of the heroic Jewish warrior nation.
This isn’t just because of its astounding military and intelligence prowess, or the awesome bravery of its fighting forces.
It’s also about its moral courage. It’s about the way it surmounted the devastating shattering of its security; the trauma of seeing so many of its precious and beautiful children fall in battle; the nightmarish return of the unspeakable shadow of the Holocaust, from whose ashes it had somehow emerged.
It’s about how it stared down disaster, demoralization and death, determined instead to fight for life—the life of its people in their ancient home.
Israelis fight to live because they passionately love what they are. They aren’t conditional Jews or Jews with trembling knees or confused Jews with hyphenated identities.
They are Jews who are made whole and complete by the land of Israel. They triumphantly reaffirm every single day what Judaism is: the faith and culture of a people created through a sacred covenant in their own land.
Oct. 7 and its aftermath forged the Israeli spirit anew in iron. Oct. 7 and its aftermath left Diaspora Jews terrified and uncertain about what they are.
The Israelis are fighting for the life of the Jewish people. Can Diaspora Jews say the same?
