Watching pro-Hamas campus demonstrations can be dangerous to one’s health. Such stupidity, mendacity, and gratuitous violence virtually guarantees high blood pressure or cardiac arrest. It’s not easy watching Ivy League presidents explain how calls for “Kill the Jews” is not exactly hateful since it is “a matter of context.”
Personally speaking, the most upsetting is watching frightened Jewish students recounting woeful tales of being intimidated from attending classes or visiting the library. This is classic Jewish passivity and reminiscent of how millions of Jews reacted when expelled from Spain, rounded up by the Gestapo, or forced to flee their neighborhoods due to crime. All predictable, of course, since Jews are easy targets who seldom fight back. Fleeing danger is the history of Jews for the last 2000 years.
Of course, campus functionaries promise “to take action.” All pointless. Does anyone believe that including “Jews” to the list of “protected” campus groups will deter radical Muslims from screaming anti-Semitic slogans? Good luck firing tenured professors who compulsively demonize “Zionist settlers.” “Doing something” is Kabuki theatre entirely directed at rich Jewish donors.
Can Jewish students and non-Jewish allies feel safe on campus? The only genuine solution is to abandon the meek, “flight, not fight” mentality and instead develop a backbone to terrify your enemies. This does not mean Jews attacking their enemies; rather, the aim is to reduce attacks on Jews.
Time to restore the Old Testament. Jews are the people of “the book,” and Old Testament is replete with tales of this God violently destroying enemies of His people. No more nice guy turning the other cheek. Richard Dawkins characterized this God of the Jews (p. 51) as “…a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Just what the doctor ordered for today’s campus anti-Semitism.
The Old Testament famously tells of how Joshua conquers the city of Jericho in which he kills every person (apart from Rahab’s family who had spied for Joshua) together with all the city donkeys and sheep. Joshua then moves on to the city of Ai, fails initially, but advised by God, succeeds on the second try, and sets the city on fire and kills all the inhabitants.
Biblical commentators have compiled these grim accounts. Here’s a sampling:
[He] helps Judah win in battle against the Canaanites and Perizzites (Judges 1:4), and they celebrate by cutting off Adoni-Bezek’s thumbs and big toes (Judges 1:6). He enables Judah to dispossess the inhabitants of the hill country (Judges 1:19). He is with Joseph when they put the entire town of Bethel to the sword (Judges 1:25).
Similarly,
[In] Deuteronomy 7:1–5, [He] tells Israel to ‘utterly destroy’ seven nations including the Canaanites and Perizzites. No treaties, no mercy, no intermarriage. Instead, they are to destroy their idols and altars. Nothing that breathes should remain alive (Deuteronomy 20:16–18).
This is Old Testament vengeance, not the terrified Shtetl Jews of Eastern Europe fleeing pogroms. It is also the vision that informs present-day Israel. Tsuccess of violent-appearing campus groups such as the Black Panthers, victory is guaranteed.
Start with intensive self-defense training as taught by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Women can enroll in the KMI school in the New York City area for a 12-month intensive program in Krav Maga, the judo-like approach for unarmed self-defense. This is one of many such Krav Maga schools taught by IDF veterans. Such training can be expanded given that over a 1000 IFD veterans are now studying on U.S. college campuses. There are also online video instructions.
Trained Krav Maga graduates might wear IDF-logo clothing — both in English and Hebrew — that can be ordered on the internet. Once fearful Jewish students will now stand tall thanks to hats and shirts with in-your-face IDF emblems. Recall when during the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC the Persian King Xerxes demanded that the Spartans surrender their swords. The Spartan king, Leonides, told him, “Molon Labe,” μολὼν λαβέ, or come and take them. Pro-Hamas professors will think twice before going off on their daily rants against “Zionist settlers.”
Next, learn to use guns, and this hardly requires being personally armed though open-carry laws would be helpful. This is the logic behind the Second Amendment — owning firearms, knowing how to shoot, and having quick access to them is the bulwark against tyranny. Imagine Harvard and Columbia filled with shooting clubs for Jews conducted by IDF veterans? This would entail intensive training and graduates would own firearms and regularly practice. Pro-Second Amendment groups would surely help and an explicitly Jewish pro-firearms group already exist.
This Old Testament-like response did surface in pre-Holocaust Europe, and one individual in particular, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, embodied this aggressive resistance. Jabotinsky (1880-1940) grew up in Russia during its deadly pogroms, became a Zionist, and concluded that only armed self-defense could protect Jews. He organized self-defense groups throughout Russia with such slogans as “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” and “Jewish youth, learn to shoot!” During WW I he helped create the Jewish Legion as part of the British Army in the liberation of Palestine from Ottoman rule. After leaving the British army, he trained Jews in warfare tactics and small arms.
During the interwar years Jabotinsky helped build a Jewish state in what is today Israel while, calling for millions of Jews to flee Europe. When the British severely curtailed Jewish emigration to Palestine, he planned for Jews to enter illegally, and then forcefully expel the British. Though this scheme failed to materialize, he continued to endorse armed action.
Today Jabotinsky is recognized as a founder of Israel who supported liberal democracy and the right of Arabs to remain in Israel as full citizens. For him, Zionism was a necessary radical departure from the passivity of European shtetl life. Israel now has 57 streets and public places named in his honor, a figure greater than any other person in Jewish history.
Tough, militant Jews need not provoke armed campus strife. This is a vision of peace that rests on the reality that if attacked, Jews will fight back, and forcefully if necessary. This replaces protection via promulgating glittering declarations of diversity and inclusion or adding Jews to the official list of protected species. Safety for Jews will arrive when a group of pro-Hamas demonstrators bedecked in their keffiyehs are walking down a dark street late, hear approaching footsteps behind them, turn around and tell each other, “Don’t worry it’s only a bunch of gangbangers, not Jews.”
Image: Micha Perry
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