The New Face of an Old Hatred

Kenin M Spivak
Kenin M Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank.

To an expanding chorus of intensely antisemitic zealots, just 16 to 20 million Jews – roughly 0.2 per cent of the world’s population – are behind almost all of the world’s evils. Jews have uniquely been the targets of this irrational invective for centuries. The hatred is raw and ignorant. It needs no logic or evidence. It just hates.

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of the US city with the largest Jewish population, revoked orders that barred city agencies from boycotting Israel or engaging in antisemitic acts, terminated the respected head of his antisemitism office, and appointed no Jews to his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. He has repeatedly called Israel’s response to Hamas’ horrific attack on Oct 7, 2023, a “genocide,” and says Israel has no right to exist as a homeland for Jews.

World leaders, human rights groups, the EU’s second-ranking official, the House’s second-ranking Democrat, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, more than a dozen members of Congress, groypers, progressive influencers, entertainers, and countless others dutifully accuse Israel of genocide, shun American Jews and others who support Israel, reject Israel’s right to exist, and increasingly support the Intifada, which seeks the worldwide eradication of Jews.

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism have merged to a point where there is only a theoretical distinction.

In the first 16 days after Hamas invaded Israel, harassment of Jews in the United States spiked by 400 per cent. Last year, Jews, who are two per cent of the US population, were victims in 69 per cent of religious hate crimes. Two Israeli staffers were killed outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC; a walk supporting Israeli hostages in Colorado was firebombed, killing an 82-year-old Jewish woman; and Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro’s residence was firebombed during Passover.

The United Nations, which has battered Israel for years, rigged numbers and changed its methodologies so it could accuse the world’s only Jewish state of causing a famine and genocide. Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 resolutions condemning Israel, compared to 90 resolutions against all other countries combined. The UN Human Rights Council has never criticized China. It has condemned Iran 18 times, Russia 14 times, and Israel 116 times.

The tide of baseless attacks on Israel is so overwhelming that from 25 per cent to 40 per cent of American Jews erroneously believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Their Stockholm Syndrome fatuity evokes Max Naumann, who founded the Association of German National Jews to support Nazis, the Jews who supported Marx, who was abjectly antisemitic, or Stalin, as he purged and killed Jewish writers, poets, and doctors.

Israel’s birth and journey are a repudiation of these complacent and naïve quislings, and others who expect Jews to capitulate. It is a celebration of Western values, courage, and strength.

A war is fought against the enemy. It does not become genocide because the enemy is largely one race or ethnicity. The elite who accuse Israel know that. Their goal is to delegitimize the country and its people, deprive them of their right of defense, strip Jews of their legacy as survivors of the world’s greatest genocide, and present the victims as the oppressors so that they may be destroyed. Perpetrators of genocide, oppressors, rootless cosmopolitans, manipulative, greedy, fake Jews, Christ killers – the tropes are many.

Against these blood libels, the facts are simple – not that they matter to those whose hatred is visceral.

Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s charters mandate that Israel be ‘obliterated,’ and Hamas quotes Mohammed’s hadith demanding that Muslims fight and kill all Jews. For nearly 50 years, Iran has called for Israel’s destruction, and in 2024, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei called that a mandate from God.

After many tens of thousands of indiscriminate rocket attacks and suicide bombings by Iran and its proxies, Hamas launched a brutal assault. As 5,000 rockets slammed into civilian targets, its fighters massacred at least 1,200 Israelis, injured 3,500, and took 251 hostages. They raped, eviscerated, mutilated, beheaded, tortured, and incinerated their victims, and then, under fire from the IDF, retreated into Gaza where a network of tunnels, rocket launchers, weapons caches, logistic centers, and combatants were embedded in and under hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential areas.

That is the tactical situation Israel faced as it sought to rescue the hostages, stop the rocket attacks, neutralize an enemy intent on its destruction, and defend against the risk that Hezbollah would join the fight.

The legal context is the UN charter, which guarantees the “inherent” right of defense, and the UN Genocide Convention, which defines “genocide” as killing “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah proclaim that goal.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the population in each of the West Bank and Gaza grew every year since 2022. Taking Hamas’ estimate of 74,000 killed, inclusive of combat deaths, and Palestinians executed by Hamas, that’s about 1.2 per cent of Palestine’s population. If Israel was attempting genocide, it failed.

Here is what real genocide looks like:

• Holocaust (Nazi Germany, 1941–1945): Approximately six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of European Jewry.
• Armenia (Ottoman Empire, 1915–1923): 1.3 million to 1.5 million Armenians, about two-thirds of Turkish Armenians.
• Rwanda (1994): 500,000 to 800,000, 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the Rwandan Tutsi population.
• Holodomor (1932–1933): 2.5 million to 7.5 million Ukrainians.
• Circassian (Russian Empire, mid-1800s): 800,000 to more than 1.5 million, about 90 per cent of the Circassian population, most of whom were Muslim.
• Pontic (Ottoman Empire, 1914–1922): 300,000 to 900,000, nearly 100 per cent killed or exiled.
• Assyrian (Ottoman Empire, World War I): 150,000 to 300,000, nearly 100 per cent killed or exiled.

According to West Point professor John Spencer, the leading expert on urban warfare, no military has done more than Israel to avoid civilian casualties. It dropped more than seven million leaflets, made over 70,000 phone calls, sent more than 13 million texts and 15 million pre-recorded voicemails urging civilians to evacuate before IDF attacks, suspended operations so they could do so, and used precision munitions. Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields and prevented them from leaving.

Allegations that Israel tried to starve Palestinians are propaganda, backed by pictures of children with genetic diseases. Those lies fell apart when press photos showed the truth, and UN analyses inadvertently backed Israel. Hamas stole 89 per cent of aid shipments to make more than half a billion dollars on the black market. The UN vastly overstated malnutrition. Gazans are, on average, better fed than neighboring Arabs.

The Gazan health authority’s estimate that more than 20,000 children died is decontextualized. “Children” includes all Gazans under 18, about half of Gaza’s population, including 15- to 17-year-olds who comprise the vast majority of Hamas militants. Israel is thus falsely portrayed as a baby killer. These deaths are on Hamas, which started the war and then forced Palestinian children into harm’s way as fighters and human shields.

Those who accuse Israel of genocide stay silent in the face of Islamist proclamations and actions, or support them. Double standards and irrational condemnation of Jews is hardly new. From antiquity, Jews have been tortured, killed in mass pogroms, and expelled.

Starting in the 12^th century AD, blood libels accused Jews of murdering Christian children to take their blood, sparking massacres. In 1290, England expelled its Jews. In 1394, France did the same, followed by Spain, Portugal, and Germany.

In The Merchant of Venice, written in 1598, Shakespeare’s Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, embodies greed, vengeance, and alien menace. In his 1844 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” despite having two Jewish grandfathers, Karl Marx expanded on Shakespeare’s theme, opining that society had to be emancipated from Jews whose bourgeois egoism was central to their identity.

During the 1880s, pogroms in Russia killed and wounded thousands of Jews, as millions were expelled or escaped. Forty years later, over a thousand pogroms in Ukraine claimed tens of thousands of Jewish lives.

In 1886, Edouard Drumont’s widely-read 1,200 page Jewish France described Jews as racially impure, money-hungry, Christ killers, leading to 20 years of riots and prosecutions targeting Jews.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fabricated by a Czarist nationalist and circulated by Russian secret police around 1903, claimed to expose a Jewish plot for world domination. It spread across Europe and America. Henry Ford printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. The libel required no proof.

Starting in the 1920s, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other elite universities imposed quotas to reduce Jewish enrollment. Some of the restrictions lasted into the 1960s.

Then came the Holocaust.

There are lulls, and then blind, hate-filled assaults resume. For Islamists and those on the radical left, singling out Jews as the source of evil is a central tenet of intersectionality. The Palestinians are oppressed and the Jews and Netanyahu are their oppressors. The newest vituperation is a proxy for a broader onslaught against Western values and American exceptionalism.

This is not reasoned debate. It is the raw, ignorant hatred that expelled Jews from medieval kingdoms, burned them in pogroms, restricted them from universities, and fed them into gas chambers. It requires no reason. It will simply endure unless, finally, good people stop it.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.