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Anti-Semitism in the sense of hatred for the Jewish people came into the world as part of our historical existence. The wonder about it – why they hate us – has been with us ever since. The hatred of us as a people and as a religion goes hand in hand with the Jew's endless pondering about his own identity. The thought that the State of Israel is to blame for growing anti-Semitism in the world is similar to the thought that if it weren't for Israel, the Arab world wouldn't be going crazy and Europe would still be on safe ground.
The Jews of Germany in the 19th century thought that if they took off the outward signs that revealed their different faith, they could integrate into their country as equal citizens. They were to find that that same integration increased the anti-Semitism. The more the process of assimilation gathered steam, the more those same Jews who saw themselves as progressive began to loathe the Jews of Eastern Europe (Ostjuden) who migrated to Germany and still wore the old signs of identification. They reminded the former of the identity they were hiding and embarrassed them in front of their German Christian neighbors. In the circumstances of historical Europe, the more Jews fled their identity, the more their neighbors would fling it in their faces. In Vienna in the 1880s, one Jewish intellectual, Sigmund Mayer Kaufman, admitted, "I forgot that I am a Jew; now anti-Semitism throws it in my face."
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Images have immense power, many times more than any verbal statement. The most common image of the past 2,000 years in Europe has been the crucifix. It included not only the well-known accusation that the Jews killed Jesus and should be punished for it but also the link between the crucifix and the people of the man on the cross, which deepened with time. Jesus was crucified once; the Jews have been crucified millions of times. The crucifixion is the deep trauma out of which Western civilization grew, including secular civilization. It appears as if religious anti-Semitism functioned as a sort of psychological revisitation of the trauma, a kind of psychological fixation that recreated the original act of crucifixion and repeated it through millions of hate crimes against Jews over the generations.
At the end of the 19th century, after more than 100 years of Jewish enlightenment, a large part of the Jewish elite despaired of the idea of assimilating in Europe. Many emigrated abroad to America. Some of the descendants of those same Jewish immigrants now scold Israel for its policies. Some of them are even ashamed of it, in the same way that the Jews of Germany were ashamed of the Ostjuden. Among the millions who emigrated, there were a few who changed history – no longer would the Jewish people continue to wander from one burning land to another where they might be able to rest for a generation or two. They would return home to the ancient homeland that had waited for them since they were exiled from it. These few took advantage of the secular revolution, the detachment from the umbilical cord of the Jewish religion, so they could reawaken our people's ancient national identity and bring it into being in the land of Israel.
Theodor Herzl put into words and led the Zionist movement in its political form but Zionism in its basic sense of Jews returning to Zion has always been present in the lives of the Jews, part of every ceremony at which they swore never to forget Jerusalem and in every prayer in which they asked to return to Zion. If the memory of Zion hadn't been preserved in our culture and religious traditions for thousands of years, the Zionist movement would never have been born. So the Jews returned to history. From an unclear situation of a people scattered across 70 nations – albeit with a shared religious faith but not a country – to a state of national rebirth, which resulted in our demanding once again our place as a nation among nations.
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But something was wrong. In psycho-historic terms, the Jews' return to history and to their ancient homeland took the air out of the most central tenet in Western culture: the crucified Jew. Zionism, and later on, the State of Israel, meant – among other things – a stubborn refusal by Jews to continue the role on the crucifix that had been assigned them for the past 2,000 years. Jesus stepped down off the cross, put on a prayer shawl and returned to his home in the Galilee. In the streets of Europe, a void remained, hollow testimony of the rich Jewish life that had inspired the old continent in science, philosophy and culture, but also of the regular violence, the hatred and the rejection of the Jews. Like the story of Jonah and the whale, Europe threw up the Jewish people. And like in the ancient biblical story, the Jews were born again on the shores of their own land in modern times, on their way to take up the burden of the ancient prophecy and share it with the world.
So the State of Israel comprises a major complication of the basic myth that fed Western culture. Legitimate criticism isn't the issue; it's the ongoing discussion, which is growing stronger among the intellectual and political elite in Europe and America, about the very existence of the Jewish state. There is no other country in the world whose very right to exist is doubted, as Israel's is. The old anti-Semitism is hiding its face out of shame – at least among the Western elite – and it has adopted a new mask: that of anti-Zionism and blaming Israel for nearly all the ills of the world. If in the past, the separate existence of the Jewish people, with their different faith and values, was presented as the root of the problem, today the very existence of their state is presented as the problem in the Western world. The war against Israel is a war against the return to Zion, or in other words, against the Jews returning to history. It is an expression of the West's deep-seated impulse to rebuild the myth of the crucifixion. But now, the Jews are armed again and are not willing to be crucified any more.
4
The Arab opposition to the return to Zion also has theological roots. If Muhammed is the last prophet and the Quran is the true book – in contrast to Judaism and Christianity, which are "mistaken," and the Bible, which is "fake" – the Jews returning to their land contradicts how Islam wanted to read history. The 1967 Six-Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem worsened the theological crack. That is why the Arab-Muslim conflict focuses on Jerusalem, especially on the Temple Mount. There is little room here for narrow politics. We aren't looking at a territorial dispute but rather a mythic struggle between civilizations and religions. The huge Arab migration to Europe brought the old religious anti-Semitism back to its streets, as well as adopting the new patterns that have developed in Western discourse, namely a fundamental opposition to the existence of the State of Israel.
It's hard not to think that a large part of anti-Semitic incidents worldwide is fed by the battle against Israel. The BDS organizations and other anti-Israel groups – including well-known speakers who compare Israel to the worst of the worst and spin lies and modern-day blood libels about it (poisoning wells, apartheid, genocide, fascism, Nazism) – all feed global anti-Semitism. We should all, Israelis and Diaspora Jews, keep criticism of Israel within appropriate bounds; Israel is the Jewish people's insurance policy.
Our brothers and sisters in the world have a simple choice, which for many of them is as hard as parting the Red Sea: to make aliyah. Why are Jews clinging to their patron states by their teeth and insisting on living a Jewish life there despite increased anti-Semitic incidents? What is the purpose of that counter-pioneerism? Israel is our people's national home. In any other country, even the friendliest, Jews will remain guests – sometimes for a generation, sometimes for 100 years or a millennium. Isn't it a shame to keep wandering? Come home and leave them to their anti-Semitism.
