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Anyone who can now march with the neo-Nazi slogans “From the river to the sea,” who can draw the drawing of Jewish stars on the houses of Jews or identify with it, is an anti-Semite. Because with all this, on the one hand, the positions of aggressor and victim are confused, and on the other hand, it shows that Israel has no right to defend itself, while this right to defend itself means only one thing – to destroy the Hamas movement so quickly and to combat as efficiently as possible those that the State of Israel wants to wipe out from the face of the earth.
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Hamas conflict is long and complex. Israel’s governments have done a lot of evil during the state’s existence, and if it were not in the Middle East but on the European continent, it would probably end up court-martialed. Things probably would have been different in 1948. The expulsion of the Palestinians, the repeated attempts by neighboring states to destroy Israel – from which Israel emerged victorious – are not ideal for the basis of good relations. After the failed efforts at the turn of the millennium and the second Intifada, the conflict has understandably frozen and neither side is behaving “fairly”. At the same time, the failure of Israel’s left-wing government to reach an agreement with the Palestinians and the ensuing intifada sparked an era of right-wing cabinets that lasted until the far-right era, into which Netanyahu drew his coalition. And now it seems to be ending according to the same laws of politics as the left ended at the turn of the millennium. Because it did not ensure security and its concept of security policy failed.
To understand what is a protest against the policies of the state or a particular government and what is anti-Semitism, the events in Israel from the last elections to the Hamas attack are a vivid example. Huge and relentless millions of protests against Netanyahu’s government with the Israeli ultra-right. Practically every week. Against his efforts to destroy Israeli democracy and rewrite its laws and rules so that it is no longer a democracy. One could see that Israel’s democratic core is healthy, strong and determined and Netanyahu has not yet imposed and destroyed democracy. We can see such a desire for democracy in Poland, for example, where the PiS took over the public media and destroyed the judiciary, but society still did not allow this. Or on the contrary in Hungary, where Orbán was successful. Unlike him, Netanyahu doesn’t do that.
These protests are not anti-Semitic. Not because they were made by the Jews themselves, or rather by citizens and residents of the State of Israel. But because it is directed against a specific and abhorrent policy that, through its focus on supporting militant Jewish settlers who are murdering Palestinians, has overlooked the situation in Gaza and is therefore at odds with the events of October 7th.
And it was precisely from October 7th that a turning point came when Israel united in its self-defense, which is the need to destroy Hamas. At the same time, it is not the case that the public blindly follows Netanyahu. There are still extremists in the government and not all parties in the Knesset have joined the War Cabinet. What is now happening “under cover of darkness” in the West Bank is causing great resentment. Confidence in Netanyahu is at freezing point. Nevertheless, Israel is clear that it is now fighting for its existence, for the survival of its people. Because Hamas and everything behind it wants to wipe them out.
And at this moment there are hundreds of thousands of demonstrations in the West calling for the liquidation of Israel. Because Israel is the mastermind of all evil. Occupier. Apartheid etc. Classic secondary victimization. Vinna is the victim. She shouldn’t have provoked. It’s somehow understandable that Muslims take part in these demonstrations. Their shared history is full of blood and anti-Semitism – wiping Israel out of the world is a long-term, officially recognized statement of many radical Muslim countries. Within Islam and martyrdom, every Muslim killed is a brother etc. Can be understood, not excused. But it is impossible to understand those who walk with them without having something in common with Islam and the Arab and Muslim countries.
The history of Europe is a parade of thousands of years of hatred against the Jews. The Jews have long been responsible for everything. Pogroms under Charles IV. Jewish ghetto outside the cities. Much can be understood through the lens of the “Middle Ages,” as well as through the similarly “medieval” thinking of today’s totalitarian Muslim states in the Middle East. As we transition into a new era of unlimited resources and opportunities, it became a holocaust for us. The Jews were still to blame for everything. Until the 1930s, anti-Semitism was part of good etiquette even in a better society. The anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism of the elite was taken for granted – even among our Catholic poets. And from this the Shoah was born.
What is currently happening in certain European and American elite circles is no different. It’s just another variation on the Brauer theme that “a gypsy is guilty from birth.” Because they’re about hating better people, they don’t sound like those down-to-earth racist explicit views – the ones we heard from Islamophobes on a treadmill in 2015-16. The laughter and joy of dead Muslim children fleeing across the Mediterranean is the same laughter and joy with which part of the Muslim world reacted to the images of Hamas’s cruel attack.
Since this is racism for decent people, the wording is more demanding. Jews are not scapegoats, Jews are simply to blame for everything. A nation of 15 to 18 million people is responsible for all the needs of the Muslim people, just as it is responsible for the needs of the European people. That makes sense. They are simply all-powerful and pull all the strings in the world. Since time immemorial. If there were no Israel and the Jews had finally disappeared somewhere around the world and especially in the Middle East, paradise would reign.
Western anti-Semitism did not disappear with the end of World War II. It led to a constant denial of the Jews’ right to their own state, which means protecting their citizens (whether Jewish or not). It has morphed into a bizarre intersectional identity politics in which the rights of the “weaker” are protected, even though in this case it is a terrorist state entity against our civilization. It doesn’t matter what ideological basis today’s Western anti-Semitism is based on. For whatever is nearby. In Europe it is more about the eternal guilt of colonialism, in America it is about BLM. It’s irrelevant.
How Western governments respond to today’s Western anti-Semitism will be important. The steps taken by the Bavarian or Czech Ministry of the Interior to penalize the carrying of signs with the modern “Arbeit macht frei”, i.e. “From the River to the Sea”, are great. Great is the reaction of Germany, which, aware of what began 90 years ago, says clearly that it is impossible to let it begin again and that the current upsurge in anti-Semitism must be stopped immediately.
It is very likely that immigration policy will need to be reassessed. Not because there is logically a capacity limit somewhere, which was clear from the start. But at least the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees who came here and whom we welcomed well now show a natural hatred of anything Jewish. But we cannot tolerate that on the European continent. Only those who respect the State of Israel’s right to its own existence – that is, to defend and destroy Hamas – can be at home here.
#COMMENT #AntiSemitism #racism #people #Matěj #Hollan