Everywhere I’ve gone around the world, people ask me, “Do you have hope? What do we do as a small people, 15.7 million of us around the world, in the face of not only the war that is raging in Israel but the tsunami of anti-Semitism in response to the war that is raging in Israel?” I do have hope.
The Danger of the Three Ds
The danger of those 3Ds – the demonization, the delegitimization, and the double standards – is that demonization means that Jews are not human. So when people in New York City are tearing down posters of Kfir Bibas, who was 8 months old when he was abducted into the hell, you understand that for them, Kfir is not a human baby. The delegitimization of not just an individual Jew but of the Jewish nation state’s very right to exist in any borders. And finally, the double standards. Double standards are dangerous for everybody because selective application of any rule or principle undermines or collapses the entire rule or principle. It can no longer protect anybody. The understanding that double standards was captured by Golda when she said the world hates a Jew that hits back, and after thousands of years, Israel is the Jew that can hit back, demanding only that it be treated equally and consistently like any other country in the family of nations.
The Modern Manifestation of Anti-Semitism
What has happened in our day is that very same mechanism that we know how to identify – the demonization, the delegitimization, and the double standards of the proverbial Jew among the Nations – that is the state of Israel, whether in international institutions, on university spaces, online, or on the streets. Those 3Ds are what have enabled the fueling and the mutation of this strain of anti-Semitism that challenges us together as a people. And it has challenged us before, but 2024 is not 1944. In 2024, we have a nation state to which we returned as an indigenous people after thousands of years of exile and persecution, of which the Holocaust was the modern manifestation. A country that is committed to equality, that is our Declaration of Independence, that is the vision, mission, values of our shared project, that is the 76-year young miracle of the state of Israel.
Unity and Responsibility
And we have about half of us here in that miracle state, and we have about half of us in the rest of the world, boots on the ground in the raging unconventional war, multifront attacking Israel right here in this existential moment, and the rest of us in the rest of the world with a tsunami of anti-Semitism. But we know what to do, and we know why we have hope. We have hope because we remember. The late Rabbi Sachs differentiated between history and memory, history being his story, memory being mine. So this existential moment, not only of 10/7 but the war raging since 10/7, has reminded us, and now that we remember, we have to reclaim. Reclaim our story. Reclaim our story as a prototypical indigenous people because the state of Israel does not exist because the Holocaust occurred. It’s precisely the opposite – a Holocaust could not have occurred had the state of Israel existed.
Reclaiming Our Identity
The state of Israel is the nation state of a prototypical indigenous people. Why prototypical? Because indigeneity means that we are a people that have spoken the same language, Hebrew, traversed the same land, Israel, practiced the same customs and rituals, and read the same book that was violated on Simchat Torah when that 10/7 massacre occurred. For thousands of years, we renew the covenant of our people, remembering who we are, reclaiming our identity, and speaking up and out against those that have actually imported other social constructs and imposed them on our story. And this is the moment in which we remember that 2024, not being 1944, enables us and, in fact, makes it a responsibility for each one of us to be empowered and make a difference wherever we are.