The explosion of hatred toward Israel and Jews since October 7 is the best proof of Western suicide

J

eff Jacoby, a nationally syndicated columnist and an Orthodox Jew, wrote an excellent column before Tishah B’Av exploring the damage that anti-Semitism inflicts on a nation. As Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew baptized into the Anglican Church, once put it: “The L-rd deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Years later, Winston Churchill would affirm that observation: “Nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli’s confident assertion.”

The Biblical promise plays out in deformations of thinking, a collective irrationality that both reflects a society in decline and accelerates that decline. Historian Paul Johnson, author of The History of the Jews, distinguished anti-Semitism from racism, which he took to be an innate tendency in all human means. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, he argued, is “an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.

“Though a disease of the mind,” Johnson argued, “it is by no means confined to weak, feeble or commonplace intellects.... Its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts.” The fundamental characteristic of anti-Semitism worldwide over two thousand years, according to Johnson, is its irrationality: “In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat....”

That irrationality is one reason that anti-Semitism has such a negative impact on those societies in which it flourishes: Irrationality spreads, as holders of irrational beliefs try to square those beliefs with everything else they know, or think they know. That is why, for instance, conspiracy theories become ever more convoluted over time. Candace Owens, who once upon a time did a good imitation of an articulate, well-reasoned human being, provides as excellent example of the phenomenon. With each passing day, she appears more unhinged in her promotion of ever wilder conspiracy theories.

Anti-Semitism harms the host society by depriving it of one of its deepest sources of talent. Economists regularly explain that societies that deny education and opportunities to roughly half their populations — i.e., the female half — will inevitably fall behind. And so it is with societies that deny opportunities to their Jewish populations. Just consider the impact that Jewish immigrants from the FSU have had on the United States and Israel in a variety of areas, including Torah learning.

Jealousy of disproportionate Jewish success often leads to an anti-meritocratic bias. Thus, in recent years, the rise of DEI culture on campus has gone hand-in-hand with a shocking rise in overt campus anti-Semitism. The DEI ideal of equality of outcomes — at least for everything besides starting point guards in the NBA — gives rise to all manner of conspiracy theories, of which anti-Semitism is only one variant.

Those theories derive from the assumption that all differences in outcomes are the result of systemic racism, or even of some form of theft or unfair advantage. The success of Jews, who have historically been prime victims of discrimination and exclusion, undermines the claim that all differentials in outcomes are the result of historic racism or discrimination. And the failure of that theory also fosters anti-Semitism among those advancing that claim.

A PAIR OF BRITS — Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray — have become in recent years perhaps the prime proponents of the linkage between anti-Semitism and societal failure and national decline. Phillips, who is Jewish, now lives in Israel, while writing primarily for English-language outlets and serving as regular panelist on the BBC. Murray, who was raised in the Anglican Church, has spent more time than not in Israel since October 7, and has emerged as perhaps the most articulate and informed defender of Israel internationally, particularly in light of the abdication of that role in English by the Israeli government itself.

Both have been sounding the alarms for years, even decades, about the demoralization of the West and its inability or unwillingness to defend itself against those seeking to destroy Western civilization from within and without. The titles of their books provide a good sense of their despair. Murray is the author of The Strange Death of the West: Immigration, Identity, and Islam (2017); The War on the West (2022); and just recently On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025).

Phillips has been harping on the subject since her 1997 exposé of the attack on meritocracy, All Must Have Prizes. Her Londonistan (2006) describes how London became a center of radical Islam and for plotting terrorist plots against the UK. In The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over G-d, Truth, and Power, she argues that Western civilization has paved the way for its own descent into irrationalism by ridding itself of G-d, the Creator of an ordered, rational universe capable of scientific investigation. Her latest book is The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It.

Murray brings the statistics on Western demoralization. Only 55 percent of Americans say they would stay and fight if America were invaded; 52 percent of Democrats would flee. One-third of Britons would refuse to serve if their country were invaded.

In another recent poll, only one-third of Democrats expressed pride in being American. And those number are in a free fall. In 2013, 85 percent of Americans between the age of 18 to 29 were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans. Ten years later, that number was 18 percent. And more Americans in that age cohort had a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism.

In a lecture on the publication of her new book, Phillips explained that lack of will, verging on the suicidal. Western elites have foisted a narrative of guilt upon their host countries, which they describe as born in imperialism and oppression, and to whose culture they want to take an axe. The education system, the traditional family as a transmitter of cultural values, indeed the very idea of nation itself must all be destroyed and begun anew.

In many respects, Phillips’s critique parallels that of French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, who has argued that the popular phrase “Today’s Europe was born in the ashes of Auschwitz” is fraught with danger, for it treats Auschwitz as if it were the apogee of Western civilization, the end to which everything was always heading. By portraying European history as inexorably leading toward Auschwitz, centuries of civilizational achievement — the development of the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, respect for the value of every life, civic equality, individual conscience — are tossed into the trashcan.

The “theorists” of the new Europe described by Finkielkraut also have a special animus for the Jews. Since the Jews were the victims of Auschwitz, not the perpetrators, they alone have not learned the central lesson of Auschwitz — the danger of “othering” different groups. And as a consequence, Jews are uniquely suspect of being capable of genocide today. And with that neat theory, devoid of empirical support, is European guilt absolved and Jew hatred justified.

But if all cultures are assumed to be alike, or at least equally valuable, there is no basis for seeking to protect a unique national culture, nor any reason not to allow for unlimited immigration on the grounds that the newcomers are proving unassimilable. That is the fastest form of national suicide, as the populist masses across Europe have figured out.

FOR BOTH Phillips and Murray, the explosion of hatred toward Israel and Jews since October 7 is the best proof of Western suicide. Even as the beheadings, burnings of whole families bound together, and assaults on women were still being carried out with relish, demonstrators gathered in Times Square and on university campuses, not to sympathize with the victims but to celebrate the perpetrators. As one of the protest leaders at Columbia declared, “Zionists don’t deserve to live... I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”

Charles Cooke wrote of this phenomenon in National Review, “It is simply not within the normal bounds of human behavior to look at what has happened in Israel and to filter one’s instinctive moral reaction through whatever goofy, specious, ugly ideology one might have picked up in an overpriced seminar hall when aged nineteen.”

Maybe not. But there they were, in European capitals and on university campuses in the hundreds of thousands, before Israel had even launched a ground operation in Gaza. By exulting in the slaughter of Jews, those demonstrators represented “the total eclipse of moral conscience, justice, and reason, or the very idea of rationality itself,” according to Phillips.

Those who had been urging “Believe all women” for years suddenly found an exception for Israeli women. Those who hectored us that “words are violence” and demanded that their universities supply them with Play-Doh, bubbles, and videos of puppies frolicking whenever a speaker with whom they disagreed was invited to campus, suddenly found no problem pronouncing the actual murder of Jews “exhilarating.” Those, like literary theorist Judith Butler, who would have been thrown from the highest tower in Gaza for their lifestyles, insisted that Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive social movements and important partners on the global left. Islamists are progressives, she urged, because they too want to destroy America.

YET AMID the madness of crowds (the title of another book by Murray), both Murray and Phillips find hope for the future, and they find it specifically among Israel’s Jewish population in the wake of October 7. Israel, they argue, is one country whose population is determined to survive, and who believes that there is something worth fighting and dying for. Murray informs us that in the year after October 7, his friends noted that he had shed some of his usual pessimism. And the reason was the spirit of the people of Israel he encountered in his travels around Israel and while being embedded with the troops in Gaza and Lebanon.

After meeting 19-year-old IDF soldiers spending their time sifting through the ashes of those burned to death on October 7 for identifiable body parts, Murray reflects that those young people have already seen more of life than their Western contemporaries will by the time they die. Rather than hurling every repurposed blood libel at the Jews of Israel, he suggests, those encamped on campuses should look to their contemporaries in Israel as examples rather than scapegoats.

In her speech, Phillips explained of what that example consists. Though the Jewish People have suffered large-scale attrition over the millennia due to both pogroms and assimilation, there has nevertheless always remained a strong core committed to promoting their own continuity as a people, with a purpose. They know that prevailing in a difficult present requires connecting their past to the future. That connect to the past is maintained through communal rituals.

Jewish education has always emphasized the Torah’s unique values and imbued each new generation with a sense of our peoplehood. And we have shown the nuclear family to be the ideal means of transmitting those values to a new generation. Not by accident is the Israeli birthrate far and away the highest in the industrialized world.

In his final pages, Murray tells the story of Izzy, an IDF sharpshooter whose arm was blown off in Gaza in 2009. Everyone, except for Izzy, assumed his army career was over. But after leaving the hospital, Izzy pleaded with the head of the Southern Command, until the latter agreed to have a special gun fitted for the now one-armed sharpshooter. On October 7, the no-longer-young Izzy flew back to Israel from abroad. He was rejected for service. But for two weeks, he stood outside his base, until the IDF relented. Upon entering the base, he found his specially fitted rifle where he had left it.

In his penultimate paragraph, Murray attests, “Of all the soldiers I saw in war, none took delight in their task.” Though they might on occasion take satisfaction in the completion of a mission, “none take joy or pleasure in the task they have to do. They did it not because they loved death, but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people.”

And that is why the people of Israel will survive, while the death cults arrayed against them and all who wish to ally themselves with them will perish.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1075. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)