The Bookshelf: Children of Abraham
By Matthew J. Franck, Public Discourse.
The plight of the Palestinians is indeed a tragic one. Peace with their stronger neighbor will not come easily to them. Only a cessation of terrorism, of attacks on civilians, and of demonization of the Jewish people will enable them to make any substantial progress. Sad to say, the first steps may have to be taken by the Western elites who have learned to make anti-Semitism fashionable again, and have a great deal of unlearning to do.
On the terrible day of October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists crossed the border from Gaza into Israel, murdering and raping their way through a civilian population caught by surprise, with 1,200 dead and more than 200 hostages kidnapped back to Gaza. One would expect news of the worst indiscriminate slaughter of Jews since the end of the Holocaust to prompt horror and revulsion in any civilized person. Yet the immediate response in the most self-consciously “progressive” circles, particularly on university campuses, was to celebrate an attack of wanton savagery—and this before any military response by Israel could have provided even the fig leaf of an excuse for taking the side of Hamas. The rape of scores of women and the killing of Israelis of every age and condition was, the celebrants happily chanted, an act of justified “resistance” to “settler colonialism” by beleaguered Palestinians.
This moral inversion was shocking, but on reflection, could we say it was surprising? Was it anything new? Some commentators treated it as though it were, and perhaps the scale of the celebratory response was something new. But when I picked up a book published twenty years ago, Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Return of Anti-Semitism (2004), I found that it would need relatively little updating to describe the present moment. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, Schoenfeld opened by observing that “today, the most vicious ideas about Jews are primarily voiced not by downtrodden and disenfranchised fringe elements of society but by its most successful, educated and ‘progressive’ members.”
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
