In his ferocious missive “J’accuse…!” published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair in 1898, the great French writer Émile Zola scorned the “hunting of the ‘dirty’ Jews, which dishonors our time.”
The time in which we live has been similarly dishonored. But while the Dreyfus Affair concentrated antisemitic passions onto one Jewish individual, these days they are targeted against the one Jewish state, as well as those outside who identify—politically, spiritually, emotionally—with that state.
Three years after the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, Jews are once again being hunted. Many of the hunters are communists, who have always excelled at witch hunts. Alongside them are a motley crew of Islamists, Hitler nostalgists, Third Worldists, radical environmentalists, rich kids for whom activism is a career, incels and unscrupulous influencers posing as legitimate journalists, boosted by an army of social-media bots. Their words are nothing more than a tissue of lies, advanced either by those embittered by personal failure and seeking someone to blame or working at the behest of rancid foreign regimes like Qatar.
And yet they have succeeded in transforming our political culture, assisted by the weak, mealy-mouthed equivocations of mainstream political leaders. The age of empowerment enjoyed by successive generations of postwar Jews is over. Our new future may still be taking shape, but its present outlines fill us with a dread borne of historical experience.
Over three years, we have accumulated a dizzying number of examples of how this witch hunt is taking effect, so I will focus on the more recent as an illustration.
In Britain, as everyone seems to know by now, the Green Party of England and Wales adopted a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, much as the U.N. General Assembly did back in 1975 at the bidding of the Soviet Union. Even more disturbingly, an amendment pledging that there would be no consequences for Jewish members of the party who participate in Jewish communal institutions that identify with Zionism—and that’s pretty much all of them, encompassing synagogues, schools and cultural centers—was resoundingly defeated. Supporters of Greens for Palestine, the grouping that moved the motion, left no doubt as to the implications, with the motion’s main sponsor, Lubna Speitan, warning darkly about “surrounding” synagogues and describing Jewish schools as incubators for the next generation of Israeli “war criminals.”
Across the English Channel, France has been convulsed by successive days of rioting, with hundreds injured and thousands arrested. Ostensibly, the subject of this discontent has nothing to do with Jews or Israel: The poor conditions and long hours in French schools have propelled student protesters into the streets.
Yet images of the demonstrations frequently feature Palestinian flags, because—and this is the one unambiguous victory that Hamas can claim in the wake of Oct. 7—“Palestine” has become established as a universal symbol of resistance to “injustice,” eagerly adopted in the teeming suburbs of cities like Paris and Marseille, where large number of migrants, mostly from the Arab and Islamic worlds, are concentrated.
Underpinning the violence are the propaganda efforts of the far-left, antisemitic party La France Insoumise (“France Rising”). One of the party’s representatives in the European parliament, the notorious terrorist sympathizer Rima Hassan, deliberately threw to the ground an Israeli flag in the parliament building commemorating the Oct. 7 victims. There was a time when one could have dismissed a spectacle like this as the antics of a fringe lunatic, but no longer. LFI has pulled ahead of the centrist parties in polling ahead of next year’s presidential election, which threatens to be a contest between the extreme left and the far-right National Rally (RN). It is one of history’s grimly amusing ironies that the fate of French Jews would be more benign under a government of the RN, which started life as a neo-fascist party packed with Holocaust deniers, than under LFI.
The witch hunt is felt most acutely in the worlds of music, literature, art and sport.
Over in Ireland, whose political class has appropriated the Palestinian cause as a sign of its supposed moral superiority, a routine soccer match against the Israeli national team became a battleground. Ireland’s Icelandic coach, who knows nothing about Israel or the region, countered protester calls for the game to be abandoned by claiming that his players would be competing “against genocide.”
But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the legions of Irish antisemites for whom a match against Israel amounted to a pact with the devil. Yet all this opprobrium revealed is that Ireland is saturated with crude, Nazi-like Jew-hatred, sparking a genuine “who knew?” moment among many unsuspecting Jews.
What values are those?
Last, but not least, there is the United States.
Just as Jews began mourning the rape and murder of Oct. 7, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut jetted to Qatar to brownnose the ruling Al Thani family, who openly provided a haven for Hamas leaders at the Four Seasons hotel in Doha while copiously financing the killers who crossed into Israel on that dreadful day. Over the last three years, Murphy has emerged as one of Israel’s leading foes in Congress, this month co-sponsoring the “Stop the Settlements” legislative bill.
During his visit to Qatar, he met with Sheikha Hind al-Thani in the lavish surroundings of “Education City”—built, like everything else in Qatar, by slave labor—gushing that the presence of American universities in this nasty little emirate, where less than 10% of the population are full citizens, “is an important way for the United States to promote U.S. values in the Middle East and create more lasting people-to-people connections.”
And what values are those exactly? Pro-Hamas encampments where Jewish students are forced to run the gauntlet? Sub-standard academics teaching the social sciences in a framework defined by critical race theory and vulgar Marxism?
Murphy may think of himself as a moderate who clings to the “two-state solution,” but by his words and actions, he legitimizes and licenses the most odious elements of our society—from keffiyeh-wearing trust fund brats to barely literate pundits who obsessively push the libel that Israel has committed “genocide” while ignoring the real examples of genocide in our world.
A shift in our own psychology
I could cite other examples (and there are so many of them), but doing so would result in a book-length text. And I would prefer to focus on how Jews and their allies should respond to this latest witch hunt.
Firstly, we need to adopt a helicopter view of these developments, drawing out the connections rather than appraising them individually. To my mind, there are two aspects that stand out.
Firstly, hostility to Zionism is increasingly expressed in candidly antisemitic terms as the postwar taboo against open Jew-hatred is finally excised. Secondly, and consequently, the role of Jewish anti-Zionists in providing cover from accusations of antisemitism is less and less significant. The future of pro-Palestinian activism is firmly in the hands of individuals who wish harm on Israelis and Jews in equal measure, like Laith Marouf, Rahmeh Aladwan and David Miller.
Secondly, we need to press our politicians and governments to adopt new legal measures or apply existing ones against the pro-Hamas movement. In America, the First Amendment is not in competition with anti-terrorism legislation; hence, pro-Hamas organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Within Our Lifetime and “Jewish” Voice for Peace should be continually and relentlessly subjected to scrutiny and punished harshly for every infraction. Elsewhere, and especially in Europe and Canada, a concerted push is required to crack down on pro-Hamas hate marches, reducing them to static affairs well out of the way of any Jewish communal buildings, along with lengthy—no less than two years—custodial sentences for those convicted of antisemitic hate crimes.
Thirdly, we need a shift in our own psychology. We need, frankly, to learn how to hate in a strategic sense—something that American Jews, for whom intercommunal initiatives are second nature, have been loath to do.
That doesn’t mean randomly beating up pro-Hamas activists. It does mean lasering in on as many individuals as we can who have crossed the line into supporting Hamas and its antisemitic crusade, holding them to account and ensuring as far as possible that the consequences they face are a permanent stain on them. We need, in short, to aggressively reform or even dismantle any government body or civic institution that has fallen into the clutches of the political cult of Palestinianism.
It goes without saying that none of this will be easy. The coming decade, which will see a critical presidential election in the United States, will bring to the fore a new cluster of politicians who believe that their careers can be advanced by adopting the Hamas agenda and adapting it to Western conditions. The immediate task before us is to defeat them, armed with the overarching lesson of Oct. 7: Never forget. Never forgive.
