Antisemitism is a deep-seated hatred of Jews. Facts don’t stand a chance against this ancient, visceral emotion.
The attack against Jews in front of a synagogue in Los Angeles has been well-documented. I always stand in amazement how much Jew-haters need to justify their actions instead of just saying that they hate Jews and want to kill them. A few days after the melee, I heard the most disingenuous explanation as to why the pro-Hamas crowd attacked Jews in the City of Angels. There was a seminar at the Adas Torah synagogue on how to invest in real estate in Israel. Since Israel had “stolen” Palestinian land and gotten rid of its legitimate owners, it was now giving advice on how to make money on this pirated land. Did you get all of that? A simple real estate seminar trying to explain the ins and outs of trying to make money in Israel’s crazy real estate market was now transmogrified into a secret seminar on how to fence stolen property. Again, everyone needs to sleep, and these lovers of rapists and child decapitators had to come up with this contortion to justify their pummeling Jews in a very Jewish neighborhood of LA.
Jew hatred or in its more sterilized name, antisemitism, is a deep-seated revulsion of Jews. The reasons can be no reason at all to religious issues or feeling that the Jews are too rich or Israel is evil, etc. Our son just came back from Cyprus. Turkey a more than a third of Cyprus and has held it for 50 years. Have you heard anyone on campus screaming that Turkey must get out of northern Cyprus? Any recent UN resolutions that I missed? Of course not. Jew-hatred is the starting point and the next stop is to retroactively find supposed reasons—again, to allow for a clean conscience—for hating Israel and/or the Jews. But let’s look at Israel: what is the Jewish claim to the Jewish state?
One could certainly start with ancient times. A religious person would point to the holy texts that explicitly describe the sons and daughters of Abraham entering the Land of Israel and conquering it, holding it and eventually losing it. But let’s say that one does not buy into the religious texts. Well, there are historical documents such as the writings of Josephus on the destruction of the ancient kingdom of Israel, the sacking of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the taking of the Jews back to Rome. The images of the menorah and conquered Jews on the Titus Arch in Rome would sum it all up pretty well. So, the Jews have a very long relationship with the land where the state of Israel sits today. Additionally, a large number of archaeological finds of clear Jewish association (Hebrew stamps, menorahs on coins, religious documents) show Jewish presence in what today is modern Israel. Many such items have been found in and around the City of David in Jerusalem.
But let’s say that one does not buy into the old stuff at all. Since the 19th century, Jews have been coming, sometimes a few and at other times en masse, to the holy land. They purchased land for kibbutzim, moshavim, towns and cities. I had a cousin who came to Mandate Palestine from Germany in 1933. He said that Tel Aviv was one big sand dune; today, it is a beautiful, boisterous, busy metropolis. The house in which we live sits on land that my wife’s grandfather bought from a local Arab. Everything is recorded in the official registrar’s records. And just as he bought land sold willingly by an Arab seller, so too for over 150 years and up until today, Arabs have sold land to Jewish buyers. Something not well known is that in the Palestinian Authority (PA), it is illegal to sell land to a Jew. Some Palestinian Arabs have been killed for doing exactly the same.
Beyond purchase, Israel acquired its land through war—just as countries throughout history have done so. Much of the US sits on land that was taken through war with Indians or others. While the Louisiana Purchase was consummated with France, how did the French take control of the large tracts of lands sold to a very young United States? I had an outstanding young professor of history at Harvard. He showed how of the 720,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes during the 1948 War of Independence, half were encouraged by surrounding Arab armies to temporarily leave in order to allow the armies to fight the Jews, while the other half were driven out when the winning Jewish armies saw that victory was within their grasp. In all previous and later cases, refugees were only those who left their homes under duress. My parents were German refugees; my brother and I were not. But somehow there are millions of Palestinian “refugees” while the number of people who actually left their homes in Lod, Haifa, Tsfat, etc. in 1948 no doubt is in the few thousands.
So if you don’t buy into the historical connection of the Jews or their purchasing land, then one can go by warfare. Think of all of the countries that exist today either through violent revolution (the US, France, Russia, Iran, etc.) or warfare. Many countries in Europe were created by the break-up of the Austria-Hungarian empire. Nobody calls those nations illegal or demands that they be wiped off of the face of the Earth.
Jew hatred from time immemorial has been a deep-seated feeling against the Jewish people. Remember that Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 10/7 pogrom, had a brain tumor removed by a Jewish doctor. This act had no impact on his hatred of Jews, and I recently saw a headline that the nephew of said doctor was killed by Sinwar’s Hamas on 10/7. So let the Hamas-lovers of southern California come up with reasons to attack and beat Jews. The truth is that their hatred is built-in and needs no actual reason to bring it to the fore. They attempt to justify their violent actions, but even if the Jews did nothing but come to that same synagogue to pray, they would have been beaten up.
Israel is as legitimate a state as any other, including North and South Korea, invented out of agreements between Stalin and Truman. Vietnam is a single country due to the North’s victory over the South and its supporter, the US. Those who delegitimize Israel are frauds and simply wish to justify their white-hot hatred of Jews and all things Jewish.
Remember: your house probably sits on land that a long, long time ago belonged to some Indian tribe. If you don’t put the Hamas lovers in their place today, they’ll be knocking on your door sometime soon.