The Explosion of Antisemitism Caught Israel Off Guard

In the seventy-five years of the Jewish state’s existence, Israelis have spent and continue to spend a great deal of time studying antisemitism. They believe that the establishment of the Jewish state is the ultimate defense of Israelis against antisemitism.

They characterize antisemitism as a distant past, as a solved problem. Perhaps that is why they were not prepared for the explosion of antisemitism, for the bloody pogrom on their territory on Oct. 7, 2023.

In 1967, the Israeli army’s preemptive strike against the Arab armies showed, that at that time, on the eve of the Six Day War, Israel’s leaders recognized the pogromic, anti-Jewish policies of their Arab enemies, murderous to the existence of the of the Jewish state and dangerous to Israeli life. Since then, many years have passed that have reassured the Israelis and instilled in them that their situation had improved to such an extent that preventive measures against antisemitic aggression are no longer necessary.

I don’t know at what point the Israelis decided that no anti-Jewish pogroms in Israel were impossible, but it seems to me that the October 7 massacre was not only a political and military failure, but also the result of an unsuccessful attempt to prove that the Jewish history of pogroms is over, that the Israeli refuge for the Jewish people precludes the massacre of Jews.

But it turned out that Jewish history is not a finished book that ends with the triumph of Zionism.

Israelis who proudly proclaimed their belonging to a new nation, free and devoid of Diaspora complexes, became convinced that they were still Jews and that antisemitism was still a relevant phenomenon for them.

On Oct. 7, 2023. Israelis have become convinced that they are Jews.

The attack on the state of the Jews began on all sides – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, pro-Palestinian and anti-Jewish demonstrations on every continent except Antarctica, economic aggression in the Red Sea, legal aggression with the help through the international court in The Hague, political aggression in various international organizations. The Oct. 7, 2023 massacre unexpectedly legitimized antisemitism in the outside world instead of condemning and eradicating it for the Jews of Israel and the Diaspora.

Israel was unprepared for the pogroms and massive international aggression. The unpreparedness was due to an underestimation of global antisemitism.

Moreover, while there are mutual attacks within Israeli society to find fault in others rather than in themselves, Israel continues to demonstrate its unwillingness to recognize the dangers of antisemitism, showing a lack of civic solidarity and national unity in an hour of terror. This dire situation continues, the war with Gaza and with Lebanon continues.

 Where did the illusion of a new Middle East come from, a place where economic gain, material expediency and a strong desire to live in peace triumph?

The Israelites, tormented by their thirst for peace, see a mirage of peace in a desert of hatred. Reality is distorted by the way light is refracted in the hot air of the Middle East. A weary traveler walking through the desert encounters the heat, sand, immense heat. He wants to see water, he wants to take refuge in an oasis. He dreams. He wants progress, and he sees it in regression. He mistakes East for West, war for peace, calm for silence, desert for oasis, peace treaties for true reconciliation. He lives in a world that mistakes wishful thinking for the real.

The value of human life in the East has always been low.

With the rise in oil prices, which became a way to massively supply lethal weapons, the price of life has fallen enormously – far below the medieval mark.

In the East, slow creation and rapid destruction became intertwined. Dreams of peace are pleasant hallucinations and clever word-formations of “moderate” and “balanced” thinkers who believe in reason where it evaporates after salon and cabinet conversations and after writing clever analytical articles. Life in the East crawls by snail, death flies by rocket. Mirages are born on political curves, on which diplomatic fiddling, which appears to be a peace process, operates. The Oslo Peace Declaration between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs in 1993, brokered by “progressive” American political dreamers, was a failed attempt to sell an air of imaginary change. It ended with the acquisition of an airless space in which only a quasi-world can exist, implemented by foreign dreamers gathered in the cold Norwegian capital.

The dream of Oslo, composed of fabulous ice cubes, melted into the desert like a mirage.

“Oslo Accords” looked good on documents signed by people dressed in elegant suits with nice ties. Warmed by the sun of the Levant, the “Oslo Accords” broke away from the beautiful papers and simply evaporated. Transported to the desert, they turned out to be mirages. Carefully prepared “road maps” for a peaceful settlement never found negotiating tables and got bogged down in the Middle East off-road. Every “peace initiative” turned out to be a mirage. Every peace myth melted in the Levantine heat. Every military operation turned out to be a reality. Dozens of clever foreign politicians and mediators kneaded the Middle Eastern sand in search of peace to no avail. The winds of “progressive” ideas of equality, fraternity and peace between Israelis and Arabs cruised senselessly in the hot desert air, creating mirages.

Israelis have divided the history of the Jewish people into two parts: before and after the Holocaust, after which even a Holocaust in miniature cannot happen.

This attitude of the Israelis towards their own history is reminiscent of the concept of Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History. In Fukuyama’s vision, the end of history is the end of a century of ideological confrontations, global revolutions and wars, and the complete victory of the ideology of liberal democracy over all other doctrines. By analogy with Fukuyama’s idea of the end of world history, the concept of the end of Jewish history arose in Israel, which successfully culminated in the complete victory of Zionism.

But the Israelis did not fully take into account the well-known warning of the history of the Jewish people, in each generation of which, as it is said in the story on Passover at the Exodus from Egypt, there is bound to appear a foreign nation that will seek to destroy the Jewish people. Such an attempt happened not on the holiday of Pesach, but on the holiday of the joy of Torah.

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