They were chased from their homeland thousands of years ago, and have been harassed, expelled, persecuted or exterminated ever since. Thrown out of Rome in the first century. Massacred in Galilee in the seventh century. Slaughtered ruthlessly during the Crusades. Expelled from parts of France, England, Hungary, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany and Spain in the centuries that followed.
And, less than 80 years ago, all but wiped off the European map.
In 1948, mourning their millions murdered by the Nazis and shrunken to a fraction of the world’s population, they were granted, by the United Nations, one small piece of land the size of New Jersey — land their ancestors had called their own — to establish the only place in the world where they would be safe.
One Jewish state in a world of 158 Christian and 57 Muslim nations.
Yet this week, on the one-year anniversary of the worst slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust, with that Jewish state under siege, with hate crimes against Jews dominating all religious hate crimes in America, with Jews around the world attending high holiday services under police protection, it is time to read the scoreboard of Oct. 7, 2023.
Hamas is winning.
Hate is winning.
And antisemitism is winning.
Consider these four points
It is not winning based on body count. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died in Gaza. But terror groups like Hamas do not measure victory in human lives. If they did, their leaders wouldn’t hide beneath schools and hospitals, using their own people as cannon fodder.
It is not winning based on land gains. No borders have changed. Gaza is in ruins. Entire regions are uninhabitable.
It is not winning based on high moral ground. If murdering, raping, and mutilating 1,200 innocent people, including women and children — and kidnapping 250 more, still holding those who haven’t been killed hostage even a year later — if that is moral ground, there is no such thing as morality.
No, Hamas and hate are winning because the brutal massacre, one year ago, of Jews just living their daily lives was designed to do four things:
- Derail further progress between Israel and its Arab neighbors
- Invite retaliation so Hamas could point to Israel killing civilians
- Deplete Israel’s military forces by attacking from the west in Gaza, then bombarding from the north with Hezbollah and from the east with Iranian missiles.
- Stoke the misguided fervor around the world that tiny Israel, bordered directly by four Arab states and surrounded by 22 nations in the Arab League, is somehow the aggressor, the colonizer, the big bad wolf, and therefore oppressed groups should join in the call for its elimination.
Check. Check. Check. And check.
Antisemitism, robust and loud
How does this keep happening? How does the sad old joke continue to be true, that if the nations surrounding Israel would lay down their arms, there would be peace, but If Israel would lay down its arms, there would be no Israel?
It keeps happening because the oldest hatred in the world is like a cockroach that cannot be killed. Antisemitism has existed not for centuries, but for millennia. It is robust and loud and powerful today, largely because those practicing it — some of whom are not just in Hamas, but on college campuses and in intellectual circles — tell themselves they are on the side of the angels.
They are not. When people cheerfully rip down posters of Hamas hostages, when a Columbia student posts “Be grateful I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” when a University of Michigan student is approached by a group asking if he’s Jewish, and, upon answering yes, he is assaulted, or when an American lawmaker, Pramila Jayapal, labels the raping of Israeli women something that “happens in war” before turning quickly back to criticism of Israel, that’s not righteous.
It’s part of the oldest form of hate in the world that, like a parasite, find its home in the bloodstream of more defendable causes: in the accusations that Jews caused the Bubonic plague in the 14th century, in Hitler’s exultations that Jews were the source of Germany’s distress in the 1930s, and in the current chest-pounding over the war in Gaza that leads to chants of “Judaism, yes, Zionism, no! The State of Israel has got to go!”
A resonating threat
The hypocrisy of such slogans cuts the flesh. No less a progressive bastion than the New York Times recently ran a column that stated “’Zionist’ has become just another word for Jew” and that “the distinctions between antizionist and antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.”
It also points out that while Zionism — the desire for a single Jewish homeland — has been “the most enduring anticolonial struggle in history,” it has now somehow become the epitome of what angry activists label colonialism, “the only solution to which is its eradication.”
But when you call for the eradication of Israel, when you chant “From the river to the sea,” you must realize that to Jewish people you are saying, “No, you don’t have a right to be safe. No, that land which is a part of your history must be vacated. No, that place which is in your prayers, in your rituals, in your Psalms — ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth’ — must be eliminated from Middle Eastern maps, like those used in UNRWA schools, or one that was discovered in a New York public school classroom earlier this year.
When people think, “Jews don’t need Israel, it’s a religion, not a nationality” ask yourself this. If Israel were gone, how safe would Jews in the world feel? Given the history of how they’ve been treated elsewhere?
Logic plays no role here
Please understand. This is not about Israeli politics. It is fair to criticize those. Nor is this about innocent Palestinian lives lost. Those losses are tragic. Every one of them. Most Israelis, Jews, and their leaders will at least say as much.
But has Hamas said the same about the 1,200 they murdered? Have they lamented innocent deaths? Or has that act, like so many anti-Jewish acts that have happened in the 364 days since, been glossed over by the soothing justification of “oppressed vs. oppressor?”
Logic would suggest a religious group that represents .2% percent of the world’s population would have a hard time oppressing anybody. But logic plays no role here.
So a people that has, for thousands of years, been ostracized, blamed, and chased out of countless corners of the world, is again being told it has no right to one safe place. No wonder so many Jews today are scared, laying low, or afraid to even speak out. If this were a sport and the game ended Monday, on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, Hamas would be declared the victor.
But it doesn’t end Monday. It goes on. As it always has. That psalm, 137, about “If I should forget thee, O, Jerusalem?”
It’s a lament by a Jewish man forced to sing songs of his homeland after being driven out of it by the Babylonians.
A tale as old as time.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.
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