On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
Hatred of the Jew has come to be understood across the great wave of time as a function of how the world works and, therefore, of how the world is supposed to work. It has gradually come to acquire the character of a deeply harbored expectation, a necessary effect of an immutable cause. The colloquial mind thinks: It has gone on for so long, there must be something to it. This constitutes its justification — an irrational hatred masking as a rational presumption. It is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of the physical world, almost as if antisemitism had now become part of the natural order or part of our synaptic equipment, which is one reason it will persist until the last Jew.
And which is also why Israel is an absolute necessity. French philosopher René Girard explains the long prevalence of Jew hatred as an aspect of what he calls “mimetic desire” — we want what others want — and ultimately as an ethnic corollary of scapegoating — the selection of a target individual or group as a sacrificial victim to purge the assumed source of communal anxiety or national disarray and thus enforce group solidarity. As he writes in his influential book, "The Scapegoat," “By rejecting the right of the Jewish people to exist in political community—that is, the modern state of Israel—anti-Semitism implicitly rejects the humanity of Jews everywhere.”
The events of October 7 and all that has since ensued provide further confirmation of my argument. The lies that have been told about Israeli virulence and Gazan innocence, the towering ignorance of the historical ledger, and the deluge of Jew-hatred flooding Western democracies prove that antisemitism (and of course, anti-Zionism) will flourish in the face of every countervailing fact. It serves a salvific social and political function.
Indeed, is it not bizarre that people who have no skin in the game, as Girard muses, strongly identify with the Palestinian campaign to delegitimize Israel? Why are people everywhere who have no relation whatsoever to events in the Middle East, who have scarcely read the Bible and likely have never studied the Koran, the Hadith, or the Sunnah, who have never familiarized themselves with the pertinent millennial records from 622 A.D. to the present moment, and whose lives revolve around personal, domestic, and national issues completely sundered from the Fertile Crescent — why are such people suddenly attending hate-filled and violent demonstrations against Israel and Jews, chanting the Palestinian war cry “from the river to the sea” (though many do not appear to know what river and what sea), intimidating Jewish children leaving the Yeshiva or playing in the Mall, canceling musical performances by Jewish entertainers and plays treating of Israeli themes, and attacking Jewish shops with mongrel viciousness?
Related: The Tide Is Always Turning: The Parsifal Trap
Before the events of October 7, many of these people scarcely gave a thought to the conflict in the Middle East; now it is their prime concern, an opportunity to publicly hate Jews and virtue signal with impunity. The tendency to embrace sophistries is so commonplace and the ignorance so massive as to make one despair of humanity. The principle of “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) is at work: bad input produces bad output. Let us consider a few instances of good input, that is, of the indisputable facts of the historical case.
Gaza's dysfunction is wrought by Gazans
Gaza has been called an “open-air prison” and a “blockaded enclave,” and Israel has been accused of conducting a campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing against a people living under occupation. This is a load of codswallop. Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, evicting over 9,000 Israeli citizens living in 25 settlements. In June 2007, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority and began firing thousands of rockets and mortar shells at southern Israeli towns and villages, terrorizing and destabilizing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Israel had left behind its extensive greenhouses in the hope that a peaceful Gaza would profit from these enterprises. Instead, the Palestinians looted and then burned most of these structures to the ground.
As Victor Davis Hanson writes for The New Criterion, Israel misguidedly gave much support to the militant Gazan leadership which it felt it could manage and influence for mutual advantage. Kibbutzes along the Gaza border invited up to 20,000 day laborers at wages four times higher than in Gaza itself. “Many Israelis wrongly assumed prosperity and familiarity would lessen tensions…rather than provide Hamas with vital intelligence on the security, armament, and numbers of Israeli kibbutzes and towns facing the Gaza strip.” Israel is often the victim of its own misplaced hope and counterproductive idealism.
Gazan and leftist media feed Jew-hatred
We are constantly being pummeled in Gaza news outlets and the leftist parrot media with inflated estimates of Gazan mortality, derived from suspect U.N. sources like UNRWA, which is implicated in promoting Hamas terrorism. And we take them seriously, without a shred of saving skepticism! Whatever flatters our congenial fanaticism must be valid. After all, Hamas is the very fons et origo of truth, is it not? Not. We happily swallow Hamas’ exaggerated and unverified fatality figures coiled among its viper’s nest of lies that no sane person would ever dream of believing.
Indeed, why are Americans, asks Grayson Bakich at PJ Media, “minimizing and excusing the perpetrators of the single worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust? What drives them to downplay the utterly horrific reports of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on that terrible day?” The question is clearly rhetorical. The problem,” he continues, “is that the people of Gaza have supported Hamas to the point of voting them into power for over twenty years, and more than a few civilians gleefully partook in the atrocities of October 7.” What we see here is the Gazan version of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
Gaza diverts goodwill toward its military goals
Gaza was never under siege, except when the crossings were closed owing to Gazan shelling of Israeli villages. Israel supplied Gaza, its mortal enemy, via the Kerem Shalom, Kissufim, Nahal Oz, and Karni border crossings, with goods, medical supplies, comestibles, fuel, water, electricity, building materials, and construction cement. The latter, it turned out, was used not to improve the statelet’s infrastructure needs but to build a labyrinthine network of tunnels from which to attack its benefactor. Israeli intelligence, Hanson points out, did not appreciate “the vast three-hundred-mile subterranean Hamas city, the sheer size of its tunnels…under mosques, schools and hospital—a multibillion-dollar diversion of international aid.” The ADL justly points out that Israel (and, nota bene, Egypt) would at times be compelled to control the flow of imports into Gaza due to Hamas’ misuse and misappropriation of goods for military purposes.
Gazans are sworn to pursue Israel's destruction
One cannot expect peace and gratitude from an enemy sworn to one’s destruction and committed to the practice of deceit — taqiyyah, whose warrant is Koran 8:16 and 16:106. We see its persistence now in the verses of celebrated Gazan poet Refaat Alareer:
And another day in Gaza
Another day in Palestine
A day in prison
And we live on
Despite Israel’s death sentence
Alareer’s poems are standard Islamic boilerplate filled with sentimental effusions about the past symbolized by one’s suffering grandmothers (Alareer, Over the Wall) or grandfathers (Mourid Barghouti, My Grandfather’s Cloak). (Full disclosure: I met Barghouti at a literary conference at the University of East Anglia and attended his poetry reading, at which I got to know all about his long-suffering and stoic grandfather.)
Poets like Alareer and the more famous Barghouti are thoroughly consumed by an agenda and subject to their prejudices, writing propaganda rather than poetry. In a BBC interview, Alareer described the barbaric rampage of October 7 — in which over 1,200 Israelis including the elderly and infants were slaughtered, tortured, raped, and burnt alive, and over 250 hostages were taken — as “legitimate and moral.” In the circumstances, one is tempted to say his death under retaliatory Israeli bombardment was also “legitimate and moral.”
What is certainly not legitimate and moral is the venomous misprizing of Israel and the vascular hatred and scapegoating of the Jewish people. It is curious to note that the warrant for scapegoating both the Yishuv and the diaspora is found in Leviticus 16:10, which prescribes an act of atonement, the symbolic heaping of the community’s sins on a goat that is then “let go into the wilderness.” Ironically, “the atonement for the children of Israel” has been turned against them by those who know little or nothing of scripture or, if they do, are always prepared to violate its message of survival and increase for the progeny of the patriarchs and the prophets.
For should Israel cease to exist, there is only the wilderness for the remnant. That the tiny sliver of land called Israel continues to exist despite political perfidy, terrorist incursion, ubiquitous disinformation, outright lying, mycelial ignorance, vileness of character, and liturgies of invidious hatred is nothing short of a miracle.
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