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PART FOUR:
From Assimilated Jew to Resentment of the Religious
However, to fully understand the phenomena of contemporary Jew-hatred and Israel-bashing, we must examine who hates us most and whom precisely it is that they hate. The clamor about Israel at the UN obscures crucial dynamics: who are the architects of the most influential anti-Israel motions? They are Jews such as Richard Falk and Richard Goldstone. Who is behind the media’s demonization of Israel? New York Times columnists’ Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen; David Remnick, Gideon Levy, and their innumerable leftist Jewish journalist– and artist–wannabes. Who pressed Congress to authorize Obama’s self-destructive American pact with the Iranian mullahs, whose first victim would be Israel? Wendy Sherman; Bernie Sanders; non-Orthodox rabbis; and the denizens of J Street, New Israel Fund, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Jews bolster the BDS movement—Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and Peter Beinart—and are well represented among anti-Israel directors within Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Why have Antony Blinken and Senator Chuck Shumer choreographed America’s capitulation to Hamas, Qatar, and Iran on behalf of President Biden?
Liberal Western Jews—young and old—flood the many organizations pressuring Israel to surrender vital territory—biblical heartland—to a Palestinian entity sworn to destroy us, and some even demonstrate for Hamas. Why would they do that? Why are Jews who betray their own people and side with their enemies a staple of world history and politics?
The Talmud gives the reasons, but first I’ll explain it in the language of a more familiar Western figure, Sigmund Freud. There are both conscious and unconscious reasons why they behave as they do. First the conscious motive: inborn idealism predisposes Jews to validate the claim of all peoples to self-determination—to advance compromise for the sake of peace. Progressive Jews acknowledge this motive.
However, Palestinians have proven to be the most implacable of neighbors. In 2005, Israel made the latest of several territorial sacrifices for peace: we tore close to nine thousand peaceful, productive citizens from the land they purchased, cultivated, and loved in twenty-five Jewish communities across Gaza and the West Bank—razed their homes—and offered the Palestinians that land complete with valuable Israeli industry and resources as well as ceded the Palestinians political self-government.
How did the Palestinians respond? They hastily destroyed the industry and spent nine years amassing weapons before launching a war from that very territory in 2014. Our entire nation was traumatized for fifty-one days as the Palestinians fired 4,500 missiles at us, forcing many of us to live in bomb shelters without food or running water. Further, from the moment we surrendered that part of biblical Israel to the Palestinians, they began constructing a subterranean Hades—a vast terror tunnel network beneath Gaza. After starting multiple mini-wars, Hamas—the freely-elected leaders of Gaza Palestinians—launched a barbarous attack on southern Israel through land, sea, and air on October 7, 2023, in which thousands of Palestinian terrorists brutally butchered, raped, slaughtered, or took captive into those tunnels over 1600 Israeli Jews, most of whom were civilians and many of whom were babies and children.
The Palestinians have received more international funding than any refugee population in the history of the world. Yet they use the money to indoctrinate their people to hate the Jews, to tunnel a terror colony beneath the ground, and to import Iranian weaponry with which to threaten Israeli civilians. Between September 2015 and February 2023, 1,936 Israeli Jews were wounded and 151 were murdered in a wave of unrelenting Palestinian terror (stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks, and bombings). This violence goes under-reported in the Western press by leftist Jewish or antisemitic non-Jewish journalists, who close their eyes to Jewish Israeli suffering. Israel sustains the Palestinian Authority with valuable resources—electricity, water, and many dollars—yet the Palestinians have never expressed an interest in living at peace with the Jewish state, no matter what they are given or offered. Their evil reached its apex on October 7, 2023, when Israel experienced a grisly massacre at the hands of Hamas, eagerly championed by a wide majority of Palestinian civilians.
How can it be just to reward Palestinian savagery and rejectionism with vital land—only to be used to launch war from greater strategic depth—threatening Israel’s very survival? Would American Jews cede their homeland to those who seek their harm?
In left-wing American Jewish political activism, progressive Jews are projecting their idealism, kindness, and mercy onto those with feet of clay and hearts of stone. The Palestinians whom they romanticize as human beings simply seeking peace and freedom in their own state are inventions of their own wishful thinking.
The Palestinians have a set of values which liberal Jews refuse to admit: Islamic jihad; glorification of murder in the guise of religious martyrdom; and wholehearted devotion—in summer camps, schools, media, and mosques—to establishing a Middle East without Israel. Palestinians proudly offer their children as suicide terrorists, sacrificing sons and daughters to kill Jewish “infidels.” This is moral depravity, yet many secular Western Jews would have us reward it!
May I invite an examination of any map of Israel? Here’s one produced by the US government in the link below. Is it now clear what the vaunted “two-state solution” would mean—what writer Jack Engelhard shrewdly called the Final Solution? Israel would be narrow enough to spit across if it met Palestinian ambitions to put a Judenrein state in what modern politicians have dubbed the “West Bank.” Notwithstanding that God gave this entire parcel to the Jewish people in 1312 BCE, including this territory which the faithful call by the everlasting names Judea and Samaria, biblical Jewish land essential to our self-defense, today.
In this very proposal lies the evidence that a Jew whose godly soul is untempered by the self-discipline of Torah devolves into a dangerously naive secular messianist. Secular messianism is an attempt to bring about a manmade utopia according to human conceptions of justice, without appeal to God or His mandate. (This is what happens when Jews forsake their bread and butter. The Torah, with its divine word and sophisticated, complex laws, is specially calibrated to nourish a Jew’s exalted soul.)
However, I maintain that there is also a much darker unconscious motive at play within left-wing Jews. If God exists and the Torah is His word, then the relationship that a (wayward) chosen people has with that word exerts far greater influence on intra-Jewish politics than secular progressive Jews care to admit.
Jewish Guilt
The Torah tells us that every Jewish soul heard the commandments at Mount Sinai and pledged to keep them forever. The obligation to uphold the Torah lies deeply buried in the collective consciousness of the Jewish people—and it is the source of ubiquitous, inextinguishable Jewish guilt. The guilt arises because several generations of Jews have fallen away from their duties. While some Jewish Sages exempted from liability Jews who grew up ignorant of their responsibilities—holding they should not be held accountable for an education they never received—I maintain, nevertheless, that passionate, faithful Jews in Israel, eagerly serving God by fulfilling the biblical covenant, trigger a cognitive dissonance in assimilated Western Jews and arouse their discomfort. The willingness of secular leftist Jews to side with Israel’s enemies, against their own innocent co-religionists, reveals a pathological underbelly to their idealism: a vengeful resentment toward Jews who are fulfilling their covenantal responsibilities—because we pique their conscience.
The 2013 Pew Research Center survey of American Jews found that 94 percent feel proud to be Jewish. Yet the overwhelming majority of this cohort does not observe Jewish law and practices few Jewish traditions. Secular Jews cope with the cognitive dissonance generated by this inner spiritual contradiction by demonizing Torah-observant Jews as medieval, misogynist, and Machiavellian. If Jews who keep next to no rituals or commandments are good Jews in their own eyes, then those Jews who strive to keep all the mitzvot must be bad Jews. From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to agitating (indirectly, of course) for the demise of the Orthodox and the country that is home to the majority of us. If the obligations that come with being Jewish didn’t weigh on the secular conscience, nonobservant Jews would be indifferent rather than hostile to the Orthodox and Israel. They would feel no need to sabotage those who quietly live more consecrated Jewish lives in the Holy Land.
Observant Jews and Israel stir a subconscious scorn because we are the postmodern world’s evidence for God: our lives are testaments to the God Whom left-wing Jews (and many other Westerners) have forsaken. Could this be why Mark Zuckerberg and his executives allowed Facebook to become a platform for Muslim terrorist incitement—fulminating with Arabic video tutorials for how to bludgeon to death Israeli Jews, featured in their skullcaps, prayer shawls, and sidelocks? Only the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit by the families of Israeli terror victims, filed by attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, nudged Facebook executives to begin reform.
Freud’s contribution to the psychological lexicon—the concept of a defense mechanism, of which projection is key—appears much earlier in the Talmud: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are” it notes (Berachot 55b), and “We criticize others according to our own defects” (Kiddushin 70b). In other words, it is human nature to protect the ego by projecting onto others whatever we don’t like to admit—accusing them of the flaws we hide from ourselves…See Part Five, up next!
Amanda Chaitt invites readers to visit her website www.antisemitismanswers.com to receive the entire essay, "Cracking Open the Jewish Code, " amply documented with interesting references.
