by Nils A. Haug
Israel may stand pretty much alone against the haters of this world. Depending on the political climate at the time, it can be expected that international leaders will remain absent, even silent, for the most part when Israel's enemies once again attack it – as they surely will. As historic events reveal, Israel and Jewry at large cannot fully rely for protection on the West.
[M]any in the West who sympathize with Islamic terrorists were, within hours, trying to justify Hamas's atrocities by blaming Israel. The allegations against Israel were that it was denying supposed rights of an invented Palestinian people that "does not exist," as admitted by senior PLO official Zoheir Mohsen in 1977 in the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw. They nevertheless repeat spurious claims to the Jews' ancestral land, on which Jews have lived continuously for nearly 4,000 years, explicitly named "Judea," and to the failure by Israel to implement what -- according to the Palestinians themselves -- would be a "two-state solution" dedicated to taking whatever land they can get and using it as a base from which to conquer the rest.
There is invariably a grim consequence to constant vilification of minorities; the current slandering of Jews is no exception.
Israel may stand pretty much alone against the haters of this world. Depending on the political climate at the time, it can be expected that international leaders will remain absent, even silent, for the most part when Israel's enemies once again attack it – as they surely will. As historic events reveal, Israel and Jewry at large cannot fully rely for protection on the West.
"Many things will be forgiven," observed Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973. "but one thing will not—weakness. The moment we are marked as weak—it is over."
On October 7, 2023, the moral corruption of Western politicians, journalists, radical feminists, and social commentators was exposed in all its fullness. On that morning, thousands of Hamas's jihadists invaded Israel and murdered some 1,200 people and wounded thousands more, with many victims being raped or tortured. Defenseless civilians were slaughtered, including elderly men and women, and babies in their cribs. Hamas terrorists kidnapped 251 others and dragged them to Gaza's terror tunnels as hostages; 85 of them did not survive.
Possibly motivated by Jew-hate cloaked in self-righteous neo-Marxist "social justice," many in the West who sympathize with Islamic terrorists were, within hours, trying to justify Hamas's atrocities by blaming Israel. The allegations against Israel were that it was denying supposed rights of an invented Palestinian people that "does not exist," as admitted by senior PLO official Zoheir Mohsen in 1977 in the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw. They nevertheless repeat spurious claims to the Jews' ancestral land, on which Jews have lived continuously for nearly 4,000 years, explicitly named "Judea," and to the failure by Israel to implement what -- according to the Palestinians themselves -- would be a "two-state solution" dedicated to taking whatever land they can get and using it as a base from which to conquer the rest.
Whatever the best political solution might be for the Palestinians, nothing can justify Hamas's October 7 atrocities, which then backfired into the deaths of many Palestinian civilians. Hamas's jihad that day seems to have been an attempt to start eliminating Israel, and instead may end up, thanks to US President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, eliminating Hamas and its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Much of the international media has inexplicably accused Israel of being responsible for deaths that were caused by Hamas's use of Gazan civilians as human shields. The irrationality of this evaluation by Islamist sympathizers might be explained as just the latest installment of the West's extensive romance with hating Jews. This hatred, even apart from its Islamic component, also is now directed against the state of Israel. It appears, therefore, that much of Europe and other nations have for decades remained fertile ground, albeit sometimes dormant, for a modern-day revival of orgiastic anti-Semitism.
Columnist Melanie Phillips noted on March 12 that Jews now have the dubious honor of being defamed by both sides of the political aisle, currently framing their grievances once again with updated, anti-Jewish blood libels:
"There's been growing concern in America over the increasingly mainstream belief that Israel drags it into foreign wars, a belief given rocket fuel by the war against Iran.
This belief not only ignores demonstrable reality—the thousands of Americans who have been killed by Iranian-backed terrorists or militias for almost half a century; the accelerated progress by Tehran towards nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could reach the United States; and the Iranian regime's implacable goal of destroying America (the 'Great Satan') as well as Israel (the 'Little Satan').
"It also channels the odious image of war-mongering Jews straight out of the ancient antisemitism playbook. It's an image reflecting the belief embedded in Western culture of the demonic, cunning Jews acting covertly in their own interests to put others in danger.
"This belief was formerly confined to cranks and nut jobs on the fringes of society. No longer. Mainstreamed by the Tucker Carlson faction, it's cutting a swath across the ranks of conservatively minded, mainly young Americans.
"Last week, Brian McGinnis, a veteran U.S. Marine, burst into a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, D.C., and yelled: 'America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!'"
As Jews increasingly are vilified and attacked around the world, it forces an analogy with similar events that occurred more than 80 years ago. Germany's persecution of Jews burst into overt mass violence the night of November 9, 1938 with Kristallnacht when Hitler's Nazis murdered nearly 100 Jews, destroyed thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, and sent 30,000 Jews to concentration camps.
The current situation is not that much different – only a question of degree – to the events that preceded the Shoah (Holocaust), during Germany's Third Reich. Countless examples exist, but consider just the atrocities committed on October 7, 2023 at Kibbutz Be'eri and also recent attacks such as the pogrom in Amsterdam and the jihadist murders in Sydney. Author Jonathan Tobin remarked that the Amsterdam pogrom was the "the inevitable consequence of a sinister red-green anti-Zionist alliance of leftists and Islamists in Europe."
Similarly, there seems little difference between the endemic propaganda of hatred against Jews and Israel spouting today from the microphones of the red-green alliance, with their multitudes of supporters, and the pernicious program created by Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who successfully cultivated Jew-hate in the Third Reich. Then and now, both cohorts have substantially succeeded in deploying the populace's anger against Jews.
In the instance of Goebbels, his venom eventually led not only to the mass slaughter of Jews but also to many of those regarded by the Nazis as "subhuman" (Untermensch). Insofar as the red-green alliance is concerned, the cancellation of Jewish academics, the boycott of Jewish artists, authors and businesses, and attacks on Jews, their schools and their places of worship, appear as renewed attempts to erase the Jewish presence and breathtaking accomplishments from Western society.
In 1942, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's future first prime minister, stated:
[I]f the world war ends... the Jews will have nowhere to return. Not a memory will remain of their homes, shops, and property."
Professor Paul Socken wrote last month:
"The philosopher Emil Fackenheim, survivor of the Holocaust, said that there are three stages of antisemitism: You cannot live among us as Jews; You cannot live among us; You cannot live. It's the gradual, insidious, filthy slime of hostility that slowly overtakes nations in their moral amnesia and blames 'those Jews.'"
In various forms and to various degrees, this process is now seen in the West, and increasingly in the US (such as here, here and here.)
Insofar as the Islamist agenda of killing Jews (and then Christians) is concerned, one recalls Amin al-Husseini, who served as the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. Husseini met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in November 1942, with the purpose of enlisting Germany's help in eliminating Jews from the Holy Land.
"The Führer confirmed [to Husseini] that the 'struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine' would be part of the struggle against the Jews. Hitler stated that: he would 'continue the struggle until the complete destruction of Jewish-Communist European empire'; and when the German army was in proximity to the Arab world, Germany would issue "an assurance to the Arab world' that 'the hour of liberation was at hand.' It would then be al-Husayni's 'responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared....' and that the only German 'goal at that time would be the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.'"
That era's alliance of Islamists and Germany's National Socialists evokes a comparison to today's red-green coalition of a leftist-elite lobby and their Islamist partners.
It is evident that the West's leaders, by and large, have forgotten, never knew, or choose to ignore the horrific events of the Nazi-era -- events which directly led to the shooting, gassing and starving to death of some six million Jews. The combination of mass propaganda, false or compliant reporting by journalists, and a gullible populace inclined -- as many still are -- to believe the worst of allegations against Jews led to widespread participation in, or complacency in the face of, strategically planned attacks on Jewish communities. The result was the Holocaust. There is invariably a grim consequence to constant vilification of minorities; the current slandering of Jews is no exception.
Despite Germany's shameful historic treatment of Jews, many people today seem indifferent to those historic atrocities. In mid-April 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had the callousness, audacity, and insensitivity to criticize Prime Minister Netanyahu for what Merz alleged to be Israel's "de facto annexation of the West Bank" – Israel's rightful heartland of Judea and Samaria. Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a resident of Samaria himself, replied:
"On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the German Chancellor should bow his head and apologize a thousand times on behalf of Germany, rather than daring to preach morality to us on how to conduct ourselves against the Nazis of our generation—who murdered, raped, slaughtered, and burned women, the elderly, and children in the most horrific massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the terrible Holocaust. We will not accept instructions from hypocritical leaders in Europe, a continent that is once again losing its conscience and its ability to distinguish between good and evil.
"Mr. Chancellor, The days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return. You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land."
"A People which no longer remembers," the Russian dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in 1976, "has lost its history and its soul." At Harvard, he remarked that the "striking feature of the modern West was a 'decline in courage;" and, on another occasion:
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. "
Clearly, the animus against Jews has never dissipated; once again the danger has become acute.
Hope is to be found in the extraordinary resilience of the Jewish people – a peaceful, vibrant, productive and creative people who base their core identity on the Torah, from which flow the principles of Judeo-Christian morality. The ethical underlay of Western civilization is founded upon such precepts.
Despite facing continual expulsions, persecution, and pogroms in foreign lands, the Jewish people endure somehow. Since the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, Jews have their own homeland back at last. Primarily aliens in other lands for centuries, they longed for return to Jerusalem, their capital. For two thousand years, their prayer every year at Passover has been "Next year in Jerusalem."
They never lost hope; that hope was rewarded in 1948. Although facing enemies who resent them and the return to their ancestral land, they have overcome all threats to their existence -- and thrived. "Jews," said David Ben-Gurion, "are not sheep to be slaughtered, but a people who can hit back—as Jews did in the War of Independence." Their enemies are by now fully aware of this ability. The Jews are no longer helpless, no longer to be abused.
Even before they were rooted back into their promised land, their sanctuary, the gifted Jewish people, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Jonas Salk, among many others, have shown the world what they can do with freedom and opportunity. They transformed, in Israel, a tiny land of sand dunes, deserts and malarial swamps, into a prosperous, exciting, enormously successful technologically-advanced nation, with a military among the world's most powerful. Hugely, if grudgingly, respected but also, in some quarters, deeply resented and envied for their success, Israel's citizens are major innovators in fields including medicine, science, technology, agriculture, water conservation and desalination. It is no accident that the small number of Jews -- just 0.2% of the world's population -- constitute 22% of Nobel Prize winners: they are a brilliant people, to whom the world is deeply indebted.
Israel may stand pretty much alone against the haters of this world. Depending on the political climate at the time, it can be expected that international leaders will remain absent, even silent, for the most part when Israel's enemies once again attack it – as they surely will. As historic events reveal, Israel and Jewry at large cannot fully rely for protection on the West.
"What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, you guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and of the brotherhood of man?" asked Ben-Gurion in 1944, against the West's apathy and silence during the Holocaust.
"What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenceless people while you stood aside and let it bleed to death, without offering help or succour, without calling on the fiends to stop, in the language of retribution which alone they would understand?"
"Many things will be forgiven," observed Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973. "but one thing will not—weakness. The moment we are marked as weak—it is over."
Did not the Hebrew prophet Isaiah predict such an outcome 2,700 years ago?
No weapon forged against you will prevail,
and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,
and this is their vindication from me,
declares the Lord.
Isaiah's prophecy has proven true and trustworthy for nearly three millennia. Israel and the Jewish people thrive – and will continue to thrive.
Dr. Nils A. Haug is an author and columnist. A Lawyer by profession, he is member of the International Bar Association, the National Association of Scholars, the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Among degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Law, Dr. Haug holds a M.A.in Jewish Studies (cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Apologetical Theology. He is author of 'Politics, Law, and Disorder in the Garden of Eden – the Quest for Identity'; and 'Enemies of the Innocent – Life, Truth, and Meaning in a Dark Age.' His work has been published by First Things Journal, The American Mind, Quadrant, Minding the Campus, Gatestone Institute, National Association of Scholars, Jewish Journal, James Wilson Institute (Anchoring Truths), Jewish News Syndicate, Tribune Juive, Document Danmark, Zwiedzaj Polske, Schlaglicht Israel, and others.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22467/europe-jew-hate
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