The proper response to this war against a people is not to deflect it, but to fight it better.

By: Melanie Phillips

The tsunami of global antisemitism in the wake of the massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and during the Gaza war that followed, has caused as much bafflement as horror at the sheer perversity of this malevolence.

It’s now become clear, however, that what we’re looking at is an even more sinister pattern of behavior. Appallingly, the slaughter of Jews excites a large number of people so much that it galvanizes them to howl for the blood of more.

This was manifest on Oct. 7 itself, when mobs started pouring onto the streets of Western cities screaming about genocide and “intifada now,” even while the Israelis were still battling the Hamas terrorists perpetrating the slaughter.

This week, Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Australia to express solidarity with its beleaguered Jewish community, six weeks after the Bondi beach terrorist atrocity when 14 Jews and one off-duty police officer were murdered by Islamist gunmen.

Obscenely, the memory of those victims was desecrated by a hate-fest on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne. Herzog was greeted by mobs screaming “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalize the intifada!”(Gadigal being the Aboriginal name for Australia), and promoting the same lies about genocide and war crimes that had incited the pogrom-style atmosphere culminating in the Bondi Beach atrocity.

The same shocking phenomenon has been on display in Britain. The latest report by the Jewish defense body, the Community Security Trust, which recorded last year the second-highest number of attacks in a calendar year, says that the Yom Kippur terrorist attack on a Manchester synagogue that left two Jews dead triggered an immediate spike in antisemitism.

On the day of that attack, the CST recorded 40 antisemitic incidents, with a further 40 the following day—the two highest daily totals during the year. And, in December, it recorded a similar if smaller spike in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocity.

In other words, terrorist atrocities against Jews have produced not sympathy or horror, but rather, spikes in Jew-hatred, even in other countries. This isn’t just confined to a few cranks and nut jobs on the fringes of society. It involves many thousands of people.

There’s nothing remotely normal or explicable about this. It’s a form of madness that’s taken widespread hold.

Even if Israel is hated, that doesn’t explain why so many regard it as the single greatest threat to the world, deserving a level of opprobrium meted out to no other country on earth, including the world’s great tyrannies such as Russia, China or Iran.

What can explain such an obsession with Israel and Zionism? What is driving people in the supposedly civilized West to call in their droves for the killing of Jews?

This deranged and murderous hatred is, of course, standard fare in the Muslim world, and Muslims have been leading the charge against Israel and the Jews ever since Oct. 7. But plenty of non-Muslims have been pitching in alongside them.

One reason is Palestinianism: that exterminatory creed whose aim is the destruction of Israel, and whose antecedents lie in both the murderous Islamic theological hatred of Jews and in the Nazi party of the 1930s to which the Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine were allied.

Deploying the Nazi demonization of the Jews and Soviet-style inversion of language and reality, the Palestinian cause has acted as a Trojan horse for antisemitism among the liberals and leftists who control Western culture and for whom “Palestine” has become their moral lodestar.

Grotesquely, this has reframed bigotry as conscience. This week, a new and sinister low was plumbed in the politically liberal British seaside resort of Brighton. Keffiyeh-clad activists went door-knocking from house to house asking residents to boycott Israeli goods—and noting down those who didn’t agree to do so—to turn the town into a “Zionist-free” zone.

Many reasons can be adduced for this wild and venomous hostility. There’s the grip of “anti-colonialist” dogma that’s now standard in the universities, along with the “intersectional” network of so-called “oppressed” victim groups. There’s the fact that the idea of Israelis as victims can’t be allowed to get in the way of that “colonialist oppressor” narrative.

These and more are valid reasons. Ultimately, however, this obsession defies rational explanation because it is a form of Jew-hatred—and that’s a pathology, a paranoid neurosis, a collective derangement that defies reason itself.

In a thoughtful but provocative lecture last week at New York’s 92nd Street Y, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said that since antisemitism is immune to rational engagement, Diaspora Jews should stop trying to defeat it. Instead, they should concentrate on building and maintaining thriving Jewish communities devoted to instilling Jewish knowledge and culture among their young.

Building up Jewish identity and peoplehood is indeed absolutely critical. However, that’s no reason to abandon the fight against the madness engulfing the West.

First, Jews have a duty to bear witness against such a monstrosity and to stand up for truth and justice. Second, it’s wrong to cast the issue as antisemitism. While anti-Jewish feeling is certainly at its core, it expresses itself through anti-Zionism. And this has gained such traction because it uses claims that purport to be observable facts.

Even though these are wildly distorted and false, they derive from actual events, such as the war in Gaza, which gives these claims a level of plausibility. That has persuaded many who are not antisemites to believe them as true, and therefore to hate Israelis and Zionism.

Those lies can and should be fought. Indeed, anti-Zionism is an evil in itself and should be attacked as such.

It is bizarre and wrong to single out one country for double standards—to demonize it alone by wall-to-wall lies and distortions, to deny to one people alone the right to their own ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism should be fought as a form of bigotry in itself.

But while there are good reasons for not publicly identifying this onslaught as antisemitism, the fact remains that bigotry against a country doesn’t have the same level of evil as bigotry against a people—and this bigotry only happens with Jews.

We need to face squarely what we’re up against. Jew-hatred isn’t just another kind of prejudice or racism. It’s a unique desire to rid the world of a people because their very existence is felt to be unbearable.

Such haters don’t think Jews are victims because they don’t behave as victims. They are instead conspicuously successful. This inspires resentment and jealousy among Westerners, who therefore think claims of antisemitism and Jewish victimization must be a Jewish scam to sanitize Jewish wrongdoing.

And the really terrible reason that the murderous attacks on Jews incite and inspire such Westerners to double down with calls for more attacks on Jews is that, like the Islamists, they believe they’re now within sight of their goal to get rid of the “Jewish problem” once and for all.

They treat as gospel what’s said by the entire global humanitarian establishment that has framed the demonization of Israel and dehumanization of Zionists as “anti-racism” and has cast Israel and its supporters as pariahs. They hear no push-back whatever from the lily-livered liberals and revolutionary fellow travelers that form the governments of Britain and France, Canada and Australia.

Hypocritically wringing their hands about Bondi, Manchester and Oct. 7—and professing falsely that there’s no place for antisemitism in their own countries while doing nothing to stop it—these governments parrot propaganda that incites hatred of Israel and have given way to Islamist intimidation and cultural creep at home.

So Jew-haters think their time has come. If they now pile in to kick the Jews in the gut when they’re down and vulnerable, they may get rid of them altogether from their heads, their conscience and their world.

In other words, the Jews are facing a cultural war against them. The proper response to such a war is not to give up or deflect it. It is to fight back better.

          (JNS.org)

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.