The Battle of the Israelites and Amelekites, Nicolas Poussin, 1624-25 A lively debate is underway in the Jewish world about whether Jews are wise to present themselves as victims.
In the Jewish Journal, Rabbi Amitai Fraiman has written that Jewish victimisation is now an outdated paradigm. Jews are no longer seen as vulnerable and marginal, but ever since Israel’s iconic victory in the 1967 Six-Day War they’ve been associated with force, power and agency.
The Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023, may have slaughtered innocent people, says Fraiman, but this was met by a “ferocious response from a Jewish army”. Portraying it as a story of pure victimhood is therefore “a conceptual failure”.
At the beginning of this month, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens argued in an address at New York’s 92nd Street Y that antisemitism isn’t just a prejudice but a neurosis that can never be eradicated.
So rather than engaging with it, he suggested, Jews should ignore it. The millions of dollars that community leaders had devoted to fighting it had been mostly wasted and would be better spent on reinforcing Jewish education, culture and identification.
Both Fraiman and Stephens said that Jews shouldn’t expect people to feel compassion for them. It was wrong to assume that if the world was reminded of Jewish suffering, moral clarity would follow. Nor would Jewish virtues or successes move hearts; constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy to win the world’s love was a fool’s errand.
Victimhood has certainly figured hugely in the way diaspora Jews have viewed themselves. In America, where Jews are less focused on synagogue life and religious observance than they are in the United Kingdom, the Shoah has become a central pivot of Jewish identity with an explosion of Holocaust memorials, museums and educational tools.
Jews reflexively depict Israel as having been the permanent target and victim of the Arab and Muslim world ever since the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948. They also point to the antisemitism that mars the West itself, and which has been around for as long as there have been Jews in the world.
Clearly, none of these indisputable facts has prevented the current tsunami of hatred and bigotry from inundating the West. Diaspora Jews are being abused, harassed, vilified, intimidated and attacked — targeted over their identity, whether this is couched in the exterminatory language of anti-Zionism or in the paranoid tropes of Jew-hatred.
Jews in Britain, Australia and Canada are being accused of “killing babies” in the Gaza Strip. Groups of “anti-racists” are going from house to house in British cities, writing down the names of anyone who refuses to support a boycott of Israeli goods to create “Zionist-free” zones.
People shrug aside chants for the death of Jews on Western streets. After brief periods of performative shock when Jews were gunned down on Sydney’s Bondi Beach or at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, nothing serious was done by the Australian or British governments to address the anti-Jewish incitement now rampant in their societies.
This onslaught has been fuelled by the demonisation of Israel through wall-to-wall lies and vicious distortions. These have been widely believed to be true, and because of that have cast Israel and its supporters as the worst people in the world.
The driving force behind all this is the Islamists, who have mounted a globally organised and funded campaign of propaganda and psychological warfare.
The acceptance of this malicious and false narrative, however, rests upon far deeper Western cultural pathologies about the Jews and Jewish suffering.
This was obvious in the reaction to the October 7 attacks, with a widespread refusal to acknowledge the depraved, sadistic and psychopathic way in which the Israelis were slaughtered, raped, tortured, kidnapped and otherwise abused.
The obvious reason for that is that any evidence of Jewish victimisation by Palestinian Arabs gets in the way of the default narrative of Western liberals that the State of Israel is the colonialist oppressor and the Palestinian Arabs are its victims.
But there’s a still deeper reason — the widespread resentment that the Jews are considered victims at all.
In the world of “intersectional” victim culture that has created overlapping categories of “the oppressed,” Jews are viewed as oppressors because they are seen as capitalists in key positions in finance, the media, the law and other professions.
Ludicrously, as a result of the special status afforded by Western society to the Holocaust, the Jews have also been accused, in this writer’s hearing, of “sucking up all the victimhood in the world, leaving none for us”.
This is closely allied to resentment at the very idea of antisemitism. People believe the Jews use the claim of Jew-hatred not only to sanitise the “crimes” of Israel. They believe Jews also use it to sanitise themselves by making it impermissible to express “legitimate” dislike of Jews as hateful, devious, grasping and the embodiment of other classic antisemitic canards.
They are baffled by, as well as jealous of, the Jews’ conspicuous and disproportionate success. Since they can’t understand the source of this unsurpassed record of achievement, they assume the Jews must have hidden powers. Israel’s very real military power confirms them in the paranoid view that the Jews embody some kind of demonic cosmic force.
In other words, the Jews make them feel frightened. And people who frighten them, they think, can’t themselves be victims of anyone.
This is all obviously a form of cultural derangement. So how should Jews deal with it?
It’s certainly beyond foolish to believe that the world will ever feel sorry for the Jews because of their victimisation. But that’s not a reason for remaining silent about the abuses they are facing.
Jews have a duty to stand up for truth over lies and for justice over injustice. It would also be insane for them not to protest against the systemic incitement and indifference that is turning them into sitting ducks for genocidal fanatics roaming the streets of Western cities.
And it’s essential for the safety and security of everyone to call out the moral bankruptcy of inverting victim and oppressor — the mind-twisting obscenity at the core of the demonisation of Israel.
Plenty of people in the West aren’t anti-Jew, but they might tumble down this rabbit-hole unless they’re hauled back from it by Jews sounding the alarm.
Similarly, Jews themselves must be prevented from believing such lies, which is causing increasing cultural demoralisation as well as turning so many young Jews against both Israel and Judaism.
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism need to be fought, but harder and better. Diaspora Jews have never combated them properly. They’ve assumed the default position of exile — the nervous belief that they exist at the pleasure of their host community, which must therefore be appeased and never challenged.
As a result, their stand has always been defensive. Sucked into arguing on the ground designated by their tormentors, Jews have found themselves struggling to answer accusations that are so preposterous they are innately unanswerable — and then they wonder why they always lose.
As I explain in my new book Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, to be published next month by Wicked Son, Jews must go on the offensive and take the fight to the enemy.
Jewish history teaches that the ancient Israelites did precisely this—fighting and defeating their enemies with a clear-sighted understanding that anything short of doing so decisively would lead to the extinction of their people.
Israel today similarly fights its enemies on the battlefield of kinetic war. Diaspora Jews must fight their own enemies with equivalent tenacity and courage on the battlefield of the mind.
Jewish News Syndicate
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SIR – Amid the deeply troubling reports regarding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, let’s not forget two aspects of this affair in which we can take great pride.
The first is that, in this country, no one – however senior or well-connected – is above the law.
The second is the standard of selfless service, set by the King and Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal and Vice-Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, which remains the envy of the world.
Christopher Jary
Frampton, Dorset. DT.