The Israeli political divide has had its low points over the years: Slander, condemnations, and attacks on opponents are common in the dispute. But it's doubtful we've ever hit a point as low as the one we encountered in the days that have passed since the terrible massacre perpetrated against the Jews of Pittsburgh on Saturday.
In the face of such a bloody, nauseating outbreak of anti-Semitism, Israelis and Jews from all affiliations should have stood united. Instead, even before the victims were laid to rest, jaded leftists unsheathed their political swords and rushed to place the horror on U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Both sides of the U.S. political map flirt with anti-Semitism. Still, it's absurd to blame either of them for the killings. Trump deserves a strong condemnation for his campaign propaganda's gestures to the racist Right and his stuttering response to the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the other hand, former President Barack Obama and the Clintons should be called out for their association with the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who recently called Jews "termites." The same goes for the Democratic Party and the many American Jews who stay silent about Farrakhan's student, Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Keith Ellison, and supporter of terrorism and hater of Jews Linda Sarsour.
None of this interests the Israeli Left, which takes care to hysterically warn about the darkness that has fallen upon the U.S. and conveniently ignores the simmering anti-Semitism in its own ranks.
Groups like Adalah and the Center for the Defence of the Individual represent anti-Semitic murderers who have the blood of Jews on their hands. Two years ago, the group Breaking the Silence helped spread an unproven anti-Semitic libel that Jews had poisoned wells in Arab villages. The human rights group B'Tselem calls IDF actions on the Gaza border "murder," while at the same time Hamas members are flying Nazi flags and sending swastika-adorned burning kites over the border to start fires in Israel.
Peace Now and other leftist organizations sent warm congratulations to Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi, who called for suicide bombings and whose family is responsible for distributing instructions on how to stab Jews to death, when she was released from prison after being convicted of attacking an IDF soldier.
Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz compares Israel to a Nazi regime while expressing its own loathing of Jews. Only last month, Yishai Friedman, writing in the Makor Rishon weekly, wrote about an exhibit in the illegal Bedouin village Khan al-Ahmar in which Israel is portrayed as an octopus whose evil tentacles cover the world. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken responded to the report with a tweet that read: "An octopus with a Star of David isn't a bad description of Israel, which has its hands all over the world."
This anti-Semitic remark comes on the heels of a piece that ran in Haaretz under the headline: "Five ways Israel will make you hate it." The article explained to readers that Israel is a country that "wants people to boycott and hate [it]." Another article states that the Jewish people are the "rudest" and should be attacked via its "infamous sensitivity to money." That's not too far off from the content in the newsletter the Ku Klux Klan puts out from time to time.
Anti-Semitism doesn't need encouragement. Anti-Semites don't distinguish between observant and secular Jews and they don't see any difference between a Jew from Jerusalem and his brothers in Paris or Pennsylvania. The only way we can defeat hatred of Jews is if we fight it together. The exploitative dance over the blood of the Pittsburgh murder victims is not helpful; it even nurtures anti-Semitism.
