POWERFUL JEWS

CENTURIES-OLD TROPES OF JEWISH POWER INFLUENCE OUR PERCEPTIONS OF CURRENT EVENTS. EVEN THE SEEMINGLY UNDENIABLE “TRUTH” AT THE HEART OF THE DAVID-VERSUS-GOLIATH MOTIF IS A LIE.

Take it from this guy: Jews are paranoid neurotics with nothing to worry about. (Oh, also: Globalize the intifada!)

In June 1967, at the height of the Six-Day War, Rashid Khalidi was walking to his father’s office at the United Nations building in New York City. Khalidi, who would become a leading historian of the Middle East, saw American Zionists collecting money for Israel’s war effort.

“They sincerely believed that the Jewish state was in danger of extinction, as did many Israelis, alarmed by the empty threats of certain Arab leaders,” he wrote decades later.

As it turns out, Israel won that war handily — that’s why it only lasted six days. But that was not a foregone conclusion. In preparation, Israel ordered soldiers to begin preparing public parks to become mass graves. Anyone who has travelled in the former Yugoslavia has seen these sorts of sites.

About the time Khalidi was lightheartedly sauntering the streets of Manhattan, Ahmed Shukairy, chairman of the PLO, was promising: “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors — if there are any — the boats are ready to deport them.”

President Abdel Rahman Aref of Iraq was saying: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” said Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt. “The Arab people want to fight.”

Cairo Radio cheerfully predicted: “This is our chance, Arabs, to deal Israel a mortal blow of annihilation, to blot out its entire presence in our holy land.”

The words may sound ominous but, as Khalidi understands, those Jews are so touchy.

One of the primary characteristics of the world seems to be a steadfast certainty that Israelis have nothing to worry about, no matter how spine-chilling the threats from the neighbors who outnumber them exponentially. Very legitimate security concerns are dismissed as invented or, more commonly, as products of a peculiarly Jewish congenital overreaction.

Trot out the myriad murderous proclamations and the history of repeated wars of attempted annihilation against Israel and the response you will hear are allegations of paranoia and a pathological victim mentality.

But the pathology is not on the part of Jews.

It is a core trope — perhaps the core trope — of antisemitism that Jews are “powerful.” At times in history, like the Middle Ages for example, when Jews had demonstrably little or no worldly power, they were imagined by their neighbors to be endowed with gnarly supernatural powers.

The scenario is clouded today by the fact that Jews — in the form of the Jewish state — actually are powerful. So how do we deal with the reality, on one hand, of a historical caricature of Jewish power while there is an undeniable example of actual Jewish power in the form of a militarily strong Jewish state?

Well, first of all, we need to discard the assumption of Jews as a monolith. “All members of group ABC are XYZ” is the very definition of prejudice. Israel is militarily strong. The Jewish couple shot dead on the streets of DC Wednesday were not strong when faced with a pistol-weilding murderer. OK?

But we also need to put in context even the assumption of Israeli power. I’ll get to that. But first, there are a few more tropes to confront.

The Palestinian narrative, as well as Western antisemitic stereotypes, presuppose that Jews, even in an ideal world of heavenly peace, will contend they are threatened by existential dangers. Of course, this is not a world of heavenly peace, it is a world of incessant, horrifying calls for the mass murder of Jews. Yet look how one typical leftist thinker responds.

“Perhaps inevitably since the Holocaust … in the name of vigilance, a kind of inverted ‘crying wolf’ has developed: each and every expression of murderous rage by an Arab or Muslim state toward the Jews is read as a telegram of intent, as a military plan bound to be activated. In fact, many Arab countries where antisemitism has been proclaimed loudly for more than 20 years, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have taken almost no action in that time in support of the Palestinians: their bellicose rhetoric remains, mostly, empty posturing.”

This is the case we are apparently making now: The Arab and Muslim world may be a cauldron of anti-Jewish genocidal frenzy, but that is absolutely nothing to concern ourselves with because, well, it’s probably just rhetoric.

The author’s mocking of those who take seriously “each and every expression of murderous rage by an Arab or Muslim state toward the Jews” is evidence of a recklessness that exposes in the starkest terms our society’s “Jewish problem”: After their experiences within living memory, most Jewish people will rightly be vigilant against what appear to be almost exact echoes of the past. But the response of humanitarian antiracist activists and commentators is to mock this entirely legitimate response.

Just as Mein Kampf was dismissed by our grandparents as the mad rantings of a lunatic, Western leftists today refuse to take seriously the murderous ravings of Palestinian, Arab and Iranian political leaders, clerics and others, even when they are expressed as clearly as they could possibly be.

The Israeli political pseudoscientist Ilan Pappé not only dismisses the danger of nuclear holocaust over Israel — “the invention of a phony threat of an Iranian nuclear war,” he calls it — he depicts the Iranian nuclear program not as a genocidal strategy by the ayatollahs, but as a deviously imagined deception by Israelis for some political gain.

Noam Chomsky splits hairs over the Iranian promise to wipe Israel off the map, choosing translations that are slightly less genocidal like Ahmadinejad saying that Israel “must vanish from the page of time” and noting that his words that the Zionist regime “will be wiped off the map” was prefaced with the phrase “under God’s grace” which, in Chomsky’s generous view, turns the threat of nuclear annihilation into nothing more than a bland prayer for mass extermination.

“No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and thereby face instant destruction,” writes Chomsky, one of the (choke) most admired figures in the Palestinian pantheon and a (dry heave) venerated scholar.

Mutually assured destruction is obviously the deterrent Jews should put all their eggs in.

After all, who do we think the ayatollahs are — some sort of crazy, nihilistic, end-times religious fanatics?

At the very moment Khalidi was poo-pooing Jewish fears of genocide in 1967, something tectonic was happening. The world’s perception of the Israeli-Arab conflict inverted almost overnight. Viewing Israel as a fledgling upstart courageously standing against the entire Arab world, which was the prevailing perception from 1948 on, was recast with the beginning of the occupation as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which flipped the dynamic. This new perception of Israeli power not only erased global sympathy for Israel (and to some extent Jews), but directly reassigned it to Palestinians. In the David and Goliath motif, the actors switched roles.

This change also helped neutralize the history of the Holocaust as a mitigating factor in the conflict: If the Jewish state was fully capable of protecting itself from elimination, we no longer had to contend with the fear of a second holocaust and, by extension, we could disregard the lessons of the actual Holocaust and its impacts on Jewish people. We could, as the writers above did, mock the very idea of Jewish unease.

The corollary of the David and Goliath theme is that Jews, who in 2,000 years of Western civilization’s narrative were weak and oppressed, left to the whims of the powerful among whom they lived, were instantly recast as powerful, self-determined people stable in their own homeland. Possibly more than anything Israelis might do to Palestinians, this image seems to stick in the craw of Europeans and North Americans. A people who have always known their place suddenly step out of line and become something they had never been, in a script we have not approved.

There is no doubt that Israel is a military powerhouse. If it wasn’t a military powerhouse, it wouldn’t exist and its citizens would be dead.

And yet it is a symptom of antisemitic prejudice that this fact is extrapolated to dismiss legitimate Jewish concerns. We recognize that Israel is powerful and we extrapolate from that fact that Jews have nothing to worry about and, further, that their pleas for tolerance are a political ploy.

The latter assumption — that Jewish pleas for tolerance are a political ploy — is a dismissal of a group’s concerns that progressive people would never dare take with any other group.

The second assumption — “Jews have nothing to worry about” — is a slap in Santayana’s face and, again, a letting down of our guard against the most sustained form of hatred the world has ever known.

But let’s focus in on the first assumption: Israel is powerful.

Everything in our world is relative. Compared with Palestinians, yes, Israel is powerful. But Palestinians, while the thin edge of the wedge seeking Israel’s destruction, are not the primary threat to Israel (although neither should their ability to inflict massive, grotesque and inhumane harm be discounted, as we saw on October 7 and at hundreds of other times in the past decades).

The actual picture is larger and quite the opposite. Israel faces a Muslim world of 1.6 billion that has identified a Jewish state of nine million people as the planet’s most reviled object and features the combined militaries of all surrounding countries sporadically seeking to exterminate it. This remains, ultimately, not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but an Arab-Israeli conflict with almost the entire Muslim world, including Iran, lined up with unconcealed genocidal intent.

Here, though, is the kicker.

The problem with the David and Goliath motif is, if we remember our Bible stories, David killed Goliath.

If we are going to use simplistic metaphors, let’s get the metaphors right.

The larger point is this: Old habits die hard. Our civilizational DNA has embedded in us the almost involuntary certainty that Jews are powerful — even when they are at their weakest. Israel, which has withstood successive attempts at annihilation, must by definition be powerful. Israel is, indeed, an example of Jews at their most powerful.

But even at their most powerful, Jews, in the form of Israel, are only holding on by the skin of their teeth.

Israelis may be armed to the teeth (to mix dental metaphors) but if they weren’t, they would have been annihilated 10 times over by a collective enemy that outnumbers them 100-to-one.

So, even when Jews are provably strong, and therefore our prejudiced trope of Jews as wielding some freakish power is not completely unjustified, we are still able to erase any contradictory ideas that Jews — in Israel or not — really have anything at all to worry their anxious little heads about.

This is simply not justified. Even “strong” does equal “invincible.” But it is, additionally, a symptom of antisemitic tropes overlaid atop anti-Zionist ideology that a tiny country outnumbered 1,000% by sworn enemies could be portrayed as the commanding aggressor. So even the nut at the heart of the argument is deeply flawed.

As I have noted before, the world’s response to threats against Jews — to incessant, shrill, blood-curdling cries for Jewish annihilation — is nonchalance.

To the targets of history’s longest hatred, to the children and grandchildren of the survivors of humankind’s most mechanized, industrialized process for eradicating Jews individually and collectively from the human family, we sigh impatiently, roll our eyes and declare, Relax. What’s the worst that could happen?