RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/antizionism-became-western-rite

It’s official: Jew hatred is trending among millennials and older Gen Z. On June 28, the rapper Bobby Vylan’s chants of “Death, death to the IDF” were broadcast by the BBC and enthusiastically echoed by tens of thousands of people in the live audience of 200,000 at the Glastonbury Festival, many of whom were waving Palestinian flags. “Hell yeah, from the river to the sea,” intoned the aptly named Vylan, “Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, it will be free!” Vylan’s performance was a coda to Zohran Mamdani’s June 24 victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a city with the largest population of Jews (1.3 million) outside of Tel Aviv. Mamdani—who supports the boycott, divest, sanctions movement, has expressed his “love” for convicted funders of Hamas, and has defended calls to “globalize the intifada”—got 52 percent of the under-45 vote among primary voters.

Many of Vylan’s fans and Mamdani’s base of young, white, college-educated, and affluent voters would doubtless agree that “there is only one solution, intifada, revolution!” But what problem is this globalized intifada intended to solve? Evidently, it’s not just Israel, but also the West, whose foundational values and successes the Jewish state epitomizes. The “solution,” therefore, is not simply to cleanse the land of Jews “from the river to the sea” but also to eradicate Western civilization.

Open hatred of Jews flourishes in periods of societal instability and license, when the decency and decorum that protects them from assault by their fellow citizens is suspended. The claim that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in the preparation of Passover matzoh offered an excuse to torture and murder whole communities from the 12th century until at least 1946, when 42 Jews were slaughtered for it in Kielce, Poland. Today, the “blood libel” is back in a new form: the allegation that Israel is targeting Gazans, particularly children, for genocide. Propagated by people who inwardly despise Christianity’s moral and spiritual teachings, including far-right antisemites, this malicious falsehood has fueled widespread indignation and outrage in the West. Some have taken matters into their own hands, targeting Jews for violence wherever they may be found.

Recent events show an accelerating pattern of accusation and attack. On May 20, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations issued an urgent warning during an interview with the BBC: “There are 14,000 babies [in Gaza] that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them” with humanitarian aid. Although this absurd claim was swiftly debunked, it immediately went viral and was spread far and wide by mainstream media in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. High-profile figures, like the journalist Katie Couric, who has 1.6 million followers on X, reposted it. The next day, a couple that worked at the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were executed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by a man who told police, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” A few days later, on June 1, an Egyptian man shouting “They are killers! How many children you killed?” firebombed marchers in Boulder, Colorado, who were advocating for the release of Israeli hostages. He injured 15 people, including a Holocaust survivor. One of the victims, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, has died from her injuries.

The blood libel expresses ugly emotions of envy and hatred buried in the deep recesses of the psyche. How could a people slated for extermination since the time of Moses still walk the earth? The Book of Exodus answers that the people of Israel are favored by the divine might of a loving God. In his letter to the Romans, Paul, too, affirms God’s love for the Jews. Jew haters, however, invert this relationship, comparing Jews to blood-sucking insects or vampires—subhuman and inhuman parasites, so far from divine favor as to be utterly demonic.

Moreover, the blood libel perverts a foundational religious practice of Judaism and Christianity that commemorates God’s loving sustenance. Passover matzoh recalls the “bread of affliction” that was the hurried fare of the fleeing Israelite slaves, the unleavened bread God instructed them to prepare in their flight to freedom. It is what Jesus held in his hand at the Passover seder that was the Last Supper, thereby birthing the ritual that binds Christians with one another and with a God who saves and redeems. In celebrating the spilled blood and broken bodies of Jews, the motley assembly of antisemites has replaced God’s bond with a modern-day pagan cult.

The scapegoating of Jews in the West is part and parcel of a rebarbarized culture, one that endorses political violence. A recent Rutgers University poll found that “55 percent of all self-identifying ‘liberals’ believe killing is a justifiable means of pursuing their political goals”—and endows it with theological significance. If George Floyd’s death and subsequent canonization as a secular martyr justified the urban riots during which 2,000 police officers were injured, thousands of businesses and properties were looted and vandalized, and 17 people were killed, the sanctification of cold-blooded murder soon followed. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, images appeared of Mangione with a halo, in a green mantle with a red sacred heart, under the title “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All.”

These developments underscore the global convergence of militant political and religious movements. Islamists have learned to speak the language of social justice activists, while far-left radicals have learned to frame ideological struggle as a holy war. Human life holds little value for either of them. The journey from self-immolation for Palestine to so-called self-martyrdom bombings is a short stop or two on a train that long ago left the station of peaceful politics.

The ultimate aim of those who have married Islamism and Marxism, as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a group of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations) admitted, is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” That would mean a world without political and economic liberty, freedom of speech and opinion, equal rights for women and minorities, technological advancement, philosophy, science, art, literature, music, and the blessings of the Jewish and Christian traditions.

The hatred of Israel and the Jews is at bottom a nihilistic loathing of the free and flourishing life that the West has secured for billions of people. Israel epitomizes not only the abundant fruits of Western civilization but also the conditions for their existence: strong borders, national pride, and free markets; thick social bonds and vigorous common purpose. These conditions are much maligned (particularly in the case of the Jewish state) because they impede any sort of political or religious globalization, be it of socialism, Islamism, or elite technocratic rule. While there’s no changing the minds of hard-core antisemites, Westerners who subject Israel and its people to withering criticism because they are inclined to support one or more of these causes would do well to ponder this biblical instruction: “Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life so that you may live, you and your seed” (Deuteronomy 30:19).