Jews are effectively being encouraged to re-ghettoize themselves for their own safety

For a number of months now, I’ve been troubled by the feeling that on one level, the savage attack on Israel planned by Yahya Sinwar has been a rousing success. Not militarily, of course. On every border, Israel is more secure today than it was on October 6, 2023, and the Iranian threat has been temporarily reduced, though far from removed entirely.

But on another level, the October 7 massacre has weakened Israel’s international standing dramatically and endangered Jews around the world. Sinwar knew that Israel would have no choice but to respond forcefully to October 7. Not to extract revenge, but because October 7 and the emptying out of a large swath of southern Israel of its civilian population in its aftermath left Israel with no choice but to topple Hamas rule in Gaza. Anything less would leave too many Israelis in Hamas’s crosshairs, and result in the de facto contraction of Israel’s borders.

And Sinwar also knew that because Hamas was deeply embedded among the civilian population, with tunnel shafts descending from virtually every multistory building in Gaza, including hospitals, schools, and mosques, any effort to remove it would result in many civilian casualties, despite Israel’s unprecedented efforts to remove civilians from the area in advance of attacks, and the low ratio of civilian to military casualties when compared to any other example of modern urban warfare.

Notably, not one critic of Israel has suggested how Israel could have removed Hamas from its southern border at a lower cost in civilian casualties, without incurring far higher rates of its own casualties than it has already suffered.

Hamas spokesmen repeatedly disavowed any responsibility for Gaza’s civilian population, as that population, sadly, is worth more dead than alive to Hamas, in terms of propaganda victories — victories aided and abetted by a lazy and ignorant media.

As a result of those propaganda victories, Israel finds itself more diplomatically isolated than ever before. Numerous Western nations, including Australia, have determined that now is the time to recognize a fictitious Palestinian state. Yet if October 7 made one thing crystal clear, it was the mortal danger to Israel of such a state on its borders, wherever they might be drawn. Gaza has been an entirely Palestinian self-governed state for twenty years, and the only things its government has done over that period has been to divert massive international aid to building the military infrastructure for war against Israel.

IN ADDITION to Israel’s diplomatic isolation, the repeated lies about a mythical Israeli “genocide” in Gaza have created permission structures for escalating anti-Semitic attacks on Jews around the globe, the results of which we witnessed last week on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where over a 1,000 Jews gathered to celebrate the lighting of the first Chanukah candle. Fifteen Jews were murdered and 40 more injured, many critically, by a father and son team of radicalized Muslims, marinated in the ISIS ideology of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. (The initial BBC headline reduced the terrorists to “gunmen,” managed to omit any mention of Jewish victims, and referred to the slaughter of 15 as an “incident.”)

The collective response of Australian Jewry to the slaughter was shock, but not surprise. Rapidly mounting anti-Semitism and the quiescence of the Labour government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese lent an air of inevitability to the murders. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, raised as a Muslim in Somalia, writes, “Every society that has failed its Jewish citizens has done so first by looking away, persuading itself that hatred was only speech, and that speech carried no consequences.

“Chants calling for violence were justified as protest. Language forged in violence was treated as politics. Direct threats were brushed aside. Each retreat gave hatred more room. When murder is given moral excuses, it no longer shocks. It simply spreads... When Jewish symbols are burned, and Jews singled out as symbols of evil, this is not dissent, and certainly not ‘resistance,’ but preparation.”

And no one did more “looking away” than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, as anti-Semitic incidents multiplied fivefold over the last two years to 1,858 annually, as compared to the previous ten years.

Claire Lehmann, the (non-Jewish) editor-in-chief of Quillette, chronicled the long list of warning signs that failed to elicit comments from Albanese. On October 9, 2023, a thousand gathered outside Sydney’s iconic Opera House to celebrate October 7, and to chant “Gas the Jews,” according to some reports, or the hardly more reassuring “Where’s the Jews?” according to others. Albanese was silent. As he was when a mob descended on a Chabad shul in Melbourne commemorating Kristallnacht. And again, when an anti-Israel convoy drove menacingly through a heavily Jewish Sydney suburb.

And when families of October 7 hostages were forced to flee before a mob chanting “baby killers.” And when an indigenous (i.e., aboriginal) woman, a former Olympian and today a MK, was surrounded at the Great Synagogue in Sydney. And when a university professor in Melbourne had his office windows smashed because of a research project in conjunction with an Israeli university. And when 90,000 chanting protestors marched over Sydney’s Harbour Bridge, bearing signs of the Ayatollah Khamenei and Hitler.

About none of these events did Albanese have anything to say.

Not that Albanese or his government never expresses an opinion about demonstrations or is composed of free-speech absolutists. The government did not hesitate to condemn a March for Australia, organized largely to protest government immigration policies, which have allowed tens of thousands of poorly vetted refugees from the Middle East into Australia, and its plans to repatriate so-called “ISIS brides.” It accused the organizers of being neo-Nazis.

When Douglas Murray, an eloquent defender of Israel, was granted a visa in 2024, he received a letter admonishing him that if he said anything, or was even reported as having said anything, that might “cause community tensions” — about as vague as formulation as can be imagined — he would be instantly removed from Australia.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of those murdered at Bondi Beach, wrote to Albanese weeks before his death, beseeching him not to abandon Israel or the Jewish People. He reminded the prime minister that Jews have been driven from land after land by leaders remembered today with contempt, and begged Albanese not to “betray the Jewish People or G-d Himself.” Unfortunately, his warning went unheeded.

NONE OF THIS is to say that anti-Semitism in Australia is unique. Just the opposite. Much of what has been said about Australia could be said about every Western European country with a large Muslim population. All the factors described by Jack Pinczewski, a former aide to a previous Australian prime minister, apply with nearly equal force to the United States or Western Europe: inflammatory (and, in the case of Australia, state-funded) media coverage of the Gaza War; pusillanimous university administrators who allow campus protest compounds that are both deeply anti-Semitic and exclusionary to stand for weeks or months; public school teachers indoctrinating students from elementary school on up with claims of Israeli genocide; and dismissals of alarms sounded by Jewish groups about anti-Semitism as either “hoaxes” or a form of “moral panic.”

Australia’s Jewish community of 120,000 has played a long and large role in the country’s development. Sir John Monash was generally reckoned the greatest general of World War I, and was the first battlefield commander knighted by a British monarch in nearly two centuries. The first native-born governor-general, Isaac Isaacs, was Jewish. If Jews cannot live safely in Australia, the question inevitably arises: Where can they live?

And that may be precisely the point. Deborah Lipstadt, President Biden’s Special Envoy for Combatting Anti-Semitism, and David Wolpe, a visiting professor at Harvard’s Divinity School, who resigned from the Harvard panel to investigate campus anti-Semitism, write that the most chilling chant heard during a recent protest outside a Manhattan synagogue was not “Globalize the intifada,” referring to a campaign of suicide bombings in Israel, or “From the river to the sea,” but rather “Make them scared!” For it heralds a purposive campaign to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on their doorposts, or even wearing a Jewish star.

“From the river to the sea,” refers to removing all Jews from present-day Israel. But Bondi Beach and other terror attacks on Jews in America, France, and Britain suggest another broader slogan — “Kill the Jews wherever we can find them,” notes feminist professor Phyllis Chesler. (Actually that goal is explicitly declared in the Hamas charter.)

Multiple governments have proven more afraid of being labeled Islamophobic than they are of the threat of lethal Islamist anti-Semitism. Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar charged that Israel had warned Australian authorities of an attack like that at Bondi Beach, yet there were only four police officers on the scene to protect over 1,000 Jews at Bondi Beach, and their first reaction was to run and cower behind their police cars rather than engage the shooters.

Jews are effectively being encouraged to re-ghettoize themselves for their own safety. In London, the Metropolitan Police have asked Jews to absent themselves from pro-Palestinian protests to avoid “provocation.” And on October 9, 2023, the police in Sydney encouraged Jews to vacate the central business district.

Growing up in Germany, political scientist and writer Yascha Mounk took it as a matter of course that every Jewish institution required ongoing police guard. But that was not the case when he moved to America. Today, however, the distinction between the Europe of his youth and America has disappeared.

Many decades ago, on a visit to Israel’s Diaspora Museum, I read through a large illuminated book, the Scroll of Fire, detailing the major European pogroms over the preceding millennium. The lesson I took away was that no Jew in Europe over that period could ever be confident that his children and grandchildren would live in safety in the same place that he did. And Jews around the world are now wondering if they have to leave the places where they grew up and raised their children. Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked, laments that “the unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people.”

THE SIMCHAS TORAH MASSACRE set off paroxysms of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred around the world, even prior to any Israeli military response. “It is signs of Jewish — meaning Israeli — weakness that initially triggered the recent anti-Semitism in the United States [and elsewhere],” writes historian Benny Morris.

Within days of the slaughter of 1,200, Greta Thunberg, formerly better known for her environmental activism, was photographed holding up a sign reading “Stand with Gaza.” By October 19, Artforum published a “open letter” signed by 8,000 artists, critics, and gallery owners, accusing Israel of genocide and calling for a full boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. Tellingly, the letter omitted any mention of October 7.

Paul Berman explains that, if anything, the viciousness of Hamas’s assault was taken by a wide swath of Western intelligentsia and their young acolytes in the universities as proof of Israel’s evil. Knowing nothing of the ideology of radical Islam, they deny the lethal quality of ideas, and assume that everything has a material cause. Thus, if Palestinians commit brutal atrocities, it can only be because they have been driven to it by Israel’s “theft” of their land.

Morris notes the curiously selective nature of the identification of Muslims in the West and their fellow travelers with Palestinians in Gaza. There are no demonstrations in Paris, or London, or Berlin, or at Berkeley or Harvard, as Sudanese Muslims are murdering tens of thousands of black Muslims in Darfur, in an explicit campaign to wipe them out, or when Bashar Al-Assad used poison gas against tens of thousands of Muslims in Syria. Only the alleged crimes of the Jews bring hundreds of thousands of demonstrators into the streets.

BUT WHAT STARTS with the Jews never ends with the Jews. The West makes a big mistake if it thinks that the goals of the large Muslim populations it has admitted, but not absorbed, begin and end with the Jews.

Paul Berman explored the ideology of radical Islam in the wake of 9/11 in Terror and Liberalism. The Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, had its beginnings in the 1930s, long before the existence of the State of Israel. Its ideology is an amalgam of traditional Islamic thought and European fascism, primarily Hitler.

Though Muhammad inveighed against the Jewish tribes around Medina for rejecting him, “the idea that the Jews are all-powerful and cosmically frightening is pretty much a European idea,” according to Berman. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, the former a product of the czarist secret service and the latter Hitler’s outline of all that he sought to do, have long been the best-selling works in the Muslim world.

Just as Mussolini wanted to “cleanse” society by resurrecting the rule of the Roman Empire over the entire world, so Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, sought to create a transnational movement to revive the Islamic Empire of Muhammad. Hamas’s charter explicitly extends “everywhere across the globe.” (Similarly, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is explicitly transnational in its ambitions.) For that reason, Berman concludes, “the establishment of a conventional Palestinian state would not satisfy the demands” of the radical Islamists.

And finally, radical Islam is a death cult, determined to kill or be killed. “Martyrdom on the path of Al-lah is our greatest hope,” was the slogan of Hassan al-Banna. And similarly, Hitler was determined to exterminate, not conquer, his greatest enemy, the Jews. And failing that, he and his top lieutenants would commit suicide.

The failure to comprehend the willingness, even eagerness, to die, says Berman, is what left the West so unprepared for a suicide terror mission like 9/11.

BERKELEY PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR Judith Butler declared long ago that Hamas and Hezbollah must be viewed as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of the global Left.” On its face, the statement that proudly misogynistic, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, theocratic movements are “progressive” is ludicrous.

But at a deeper level, neo-Marxists like Butler are right to see radical Islamists as their allies, for they share a common goal of destroying the West. The West must take note. Bondi Beach is only the most recent warning.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1092. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)