At the same time, the birth of the Jewish state also opened a new chapter in persecutions in the diaspora.
Jews were driven from the Arab countries. Ancient communities, descendants of those who fled the Romans two thousand years ago and of those who were expelled from Spain in 1492, together numbering nearly a million individuals, were reduced by 99 percent. Remaining Jewish pockets in other Muslim countries have largely collapsed since then. After the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini is reported to have told Jewish leaders there: “We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless, bloodsucking Zionists.” If these words were intended to reassure despite intensifying persecutions, they seem not to have done the trick, for that community has since shrunk from around 100,000 to at most one-quarter, and by some counts less than one-tenth, that number. The rise of Turkey’s Islamist movement over the past decade, on top of mass murders at synagogues in 1986 and 2003, have prompted a flight of Jews from that country, accelerating the last few years in the face of open Jew baiting in the media and boycotts of Jewish businesses.
Non-Muslim countries whose governments are allied with anti-Israel forces—for example, Venezuela, whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, embraced Iran, or South Africa, where the dominant African National Congress has long maintained close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization—have also witnessed waves of abusive words and violent deeds aimed at indigenous Jews and thus a radical reduction of their Jewish populations. In short, the number of places on Earth where Jews can reside in peace and security has been shrinking, and the question of the day is whether the countries of Europe will continue to be among them.
The events of the summer of 2014 convinced some serious observers that the answer is no. “We are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe,” said Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency. In his widely noted article in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reviewed these Gaza War–related events as well as murderous attacks on Jews in Toulouse in 2012, in Belgium in May 2014, and in Paris in January 2015 and posed the question: Is it time for the Jews of Europe to leave? Goldberg’s own answer was saved for the final sentence, after noting that his forebears had once lived in Romania in a town where no Jews remain. He, himself, is alive, he said, “because [my] ancestors made a run for it when they could.”11
In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled from one European country after another at a time when antipathy must have been near unanimous, although there were no public opinion polls then. It would be bitter irony if Jews were again today in effect driven from the continent at a time when the Christian populations are more accepting of Jews than ever before. Yet, this may happen unless officials in those countries are prepared to act with unwonted rigor to suppress the predations of radical Islamists.
The situation may be symbolized by Malmö, Sweden. In a survey by the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Jewish attitudes was lowest in Sweden of all European countries—a mere 4 percent.12 But Malmö is today heavily Muslim, and its tiny Jewish population, comprising a single congregation maintained by an American rabbi from the global Chabad movement, has suffered harassment and abuse. Its members confessed to Goldberg that they live in fear. “Teenagers . . . told me that wearing a Star of David necklace can incite a beating,” he reported. Yet Goldberg saw nary a policeman when he attended Sabbath services together with eighteen other worshippers and accompanied them as they rushed through the streets anxiously afterward. In a similar spirit of indifference, municipal officials of The Hague rejected appeals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to block a rally in support of ISIS at which participants, some with faces masked ominously, chanted “death to the Jews.”13
If a mixture of Israel hatred and anti-Semitism is most widespread among Muslims, it is not uniquely their own. Alas, far from it, although among Westerners who want to remain respectable, such sentiments are invariably accompanied by insistence that the speaker is no anti-Semite. Perhaps the first in recent decades to execute this rhetorical maneuver was Patrick J. Buchanan, who ignited a controversy following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 by declaring that, “there are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” This drew sharp rebukes to which Buchanan in turn replied that anti-Semitism is “a grave sin . . . a variant of racism,” of which he was completely innocent. But he then he went on to sprinkle his columns with barbs against Jews and to defend Nazi war criminals, including some who professed innocence and others who confessed guilt. Bizarrely, he went so far as to embrace the claim of Holocaust-deniers that the exhaust from diesel fuel (used by the Nazis in some gas chambers) is in fact nonlethal (a theory he conspicuously made no attempt to vindicate by testing it on himself).
It is hard to say whether Buchanan’s initial sallies against Israel were motivated by an underlying antipathy to Jews that he had kept under wraps or whether his dislike of Israel was the starting point from which he developed a broader hostility. It is a question that applies equally to others—for example, John Mearsheimer. He and Stephen Walt declared in their initial paper on “the Lobby” (that grew into their famous book) that far from being anti-Semitic they were “philo-Semites.” But a couple of years later, Mearsheimer proposed the thesis that Jews fall into two categories: “righteous Jews,” meaning those who hate Israel or at least blame it for the conflict with the Arabs, and all the rest, whom he labeled “Afrikaners.” This shed little light on Jews but a lot on how Mearsheimer felt toward them. Then he provided a cover blurb for The Wondering Who by the Israeli-born anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon, who argues that “Jewishness is an ethno-centric ideology driven by exclusiveness, exceptionalism, [and] racial supremacy.” Atzmon topped this off by writing “65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask. . . . Why were the Jews hated?”14—suggesting they got what they deserved in the Holocaust. Mearsheimer glossed all this with the encomium: “a fascinating and provocative book [that] should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.”15
Atzmon boldly proclaims himself a “self-hating Jew,” but Mearsheimer and Buchanan insist they are not anti-Semites. Buchanan complains that “anti-Semitism” is “a word . . . used to frighten, intimidate, censor, and silence; to cut off debate; to . . . smear men’s reputations.” And Mearsheimer writes that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite.”16 Others have said much the same. Given that virtually every editorial of the New York Times and every column by its foreign affairs commentator Thomas Friedman that deals with the Middle East criticizes Israel, at least in part, and that this is also true for most of the major print and electronic media, except the Wall Street Journal and Fox TV; given that much the same can be said for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and most of the other intellectual and foreign policy magazines and that the New Republic, the Atlantic, and such Jewish outlets as Tablet and the Forward routinely include sharp critical asides even in articles that defend Israel; and given, too, that the Middle East Studies Association, the dominant professional organization of academics who teach in this field is fiercely critical of Israel, to put it mildly, and one might cite much more in this vein—given all that, Mearsheimer’s claim is preposterous. It would be more accurate to turn his charge around and say that anyone who claims that “anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite” is probably an anti-Semite seeking to preempt criticism.
A similar example is the blogger Andrew Sullivan who has spent half a decade or more pouring vitriol on Israel and its supporters, all the while complaining that “criticizing AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is something forbidden for non-Jews—for fear of being labeled an anti-Semite.” How forbidden is it? I counted forty-five blog posts on Sullivan’s site with “AIPAC” in the title, all in attack mode and without scruple for accuracy. (This was in addition to two hundred–plus titles about Israel—all in a similar spirit.) AIPAC and seemingly all other supporters of Israel are routinely referred to by Sullivan as “the Greater Israel
