Jews may have a lion’s share of the Nobel Prizes, but I’m beginning to think that the smartest people on Earth are Palestinians. Make that Gazan Palestinians. No, Gazan Palestinian terrorists. Only geniuses could make a proud, strong country like Israel a universal pariah in six short months; Israel, a country full of freedoms and democratic ideals, much admired, armed, educated, and moneyed, courted by even its most powerful Arab neighbors. What subterranean think tank created the plan to force it to stand alone against the world after brutalizing it in a manner unthinkable to the civilized mind?
And how did that brain trust prepare the ground for such a coup? Perhaps long before October 7, these meddling geniuses took note of growing worldwide antisemitism, sowed seeds of the same in American and European universities and streets, while magnifying Israel’s fractured politics. Presto! An army of activists were nestled in their palm ready, eager for deployment.
Most American students, like those who mounted an antisemitic protest at Columbia University in April, will tell you that Israel is guilty of genocide, which trumps all other guilts. It would help if these instruments of social justice knew what the word meant, especially to Israelis and Jews.
How Hamas terrorists turned Israel into a pariah
It would also help if they did some due diligence and read Hamas’s genocidal charter, calling for the elimination of the Jewish people “from the river to the sea,” a fundamental phrase conveniently obscured or falsely denied by its authors. Meanwhile, attacks from the South, attacks from the North, and death by urban terrorism plague Israel daily, and none of these cap-and-gown warriors raise a fuss.
Do they listen when respected, worldwide experts report that the Israelis employ more methods to prevent civilian injury than any other army in all of military history? According to the UN, a normal war statistic would reflect nine times as many civilian as combatant deaths, while Israel statistically reflects 1.5 civilian to each combatant death.
But the young adults-made-children incapable of hard analysis by authoritarian, proselytizing professors do not believe it. Their minds are closed, their reading perversely curated. Across the US, cowards cancel the Jewish concert, book talk, speech, fundraiser. By their mealy-mouthed protestations about the safety of the public and their employees, they endorse the shutting down of museums, the defacement of paintings, the blocking of highways because it is easier to cancel Jews than it is stand up to the intimidation of bullies, even intellectually juvenile ones.
How did this happen, this sea change in American consciousness? We are less religious than ever before, that’s part of it. We are barely connected to community, apart from the ephemeral, endlessly seductive type online. We marry less, have fewer children, are not especially tied to our jobs. Having in our slumberous excess discarded a heritage of ideals and law, we are rootless, empty, prey to whoever wants to fill our heads with their self-serving ideas. Even those clinging to the old ways will not be saved by them. The propagandists are legion, and we are all lost. In a world where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity” (thank you, W.B. Yeats), there is no path out of darkness.
The God of the Jews instructed His people to be “a light unto the nations.” But it seems a multitude of American Jews cower before the escalating antisemitism of our time. They remain silent in the shadows but whisper their despair only to each other. They grieve the taking of hostages but fail to defend Israel’s prosecution of a just war. This must end. Voices must be raised and shouted from the rooftops.
If they do not, some day a new, braver generation may rise up, one fierce in rebellion against its elders, quick to spot hypocrisy and corruption and act against them. If the beatniks and the hippies could rise up against the gray flannel that smothered and cowed young people in the 1950s and ‘60s and transform the world, this new generation in a reborn age might breathe back reason into us.
But where will they get this wisdom? Imagine all the books that might teach them are suppressed, canceled, while the entire world suffers the same disease of willful ignorance. The heel of intolerance will be on their necks. How will their souls come to understand that they have been muted, restrained, and that if they rebel, they will blossom? Who will guide them there?
Damn sure they’re going to need some Jews. May enough of us survive!■
Mary Glickman is author of six historical novels focused on antisemitism and racism in the Deep South. Her latest book, Ain’t No Grave, is scheduled for publication in July 2024.