How do you know a President Vance won’t make it illegal to move funds from your US bank account to an Israeli institution?
Diaspora Jews have lost their protection; they’re being summoned for an all-hands-on-deck meeting in Israel where there is much work to be done.
This New Year’s Eve was meant to feature piles of dead bodies at five targeted sites in Los Angeles and its suburbs. As those pro-Palestine Arab leftist terrorists are arraigned and brought to trial, we’ll learn more details of their plans, but given their explicitly pro-Hamas and anti-Zionist sentiments, it would not be surprising if one or more of their targets would have been L.A.’s Jewish community.
Were it not for the professionalism of Kash Patel’s FBI, America might shortly be contemplating its own Sydney moment. Such contemplation is already long overdue following the one-off murders of Paul Kessler in Westlake Village, CA, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, DC and Karen Diamond in Boulder, CO.
It might require more time before non-Jewish Americans recognize the threat to America’s institutions and way of life from America-hating terrorists, but Jewish Americans have no such luxury. They are being specifically targeted on a daily basis now and are adrift in a culture, especially among younger Americans, that reviles them and aspires to violence against them.
One of the small compensations of life in Israel (in addition to the huge ones like just being here) is the seemingly daily notices that such-and-such terrorist, who attacked so-and-so five, ten or twenty years ago, was eliminated. While it is of course unfortunate that they’re always trying (and sadly, sometimes succeeding) to kill us-that has never not been the case in Jewish history-what is new is that Israel is constantly settling accounts. Just last week, Mossad agents captured a Lebanese security operative whose family may have been responsible for holding Ron Arad, an Israeli pilot taken captive nearly 40 years ago. Arad has never been forgotten, and rescue efforts have been extensive, expensive and unceasing now for four decades.
Not so in the US. When they attack Jews, authorities announce stepped up protection around Muslim and Jewish places of worship and wring their hands about Islamophobia and antisemitism. “Globalize the Intifada”-types exercise their First Amendment rights barking at little kids in Jewish day schools. Jews have become punching bags on New York’s subway, are hounded in Pico-Robertson and are murdered with impunity while authorities puzzle over whether a hate crime might have been involved.
Having lived for over a decade now in Israel, it is hard, to put it bluntly, to see my co-religionists live in such abject powerlessness. I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I would surmise that Jews in the Diaspora have lost their protection and are now at risk of significantly increased loss to life and property. When a Candace Owens lectures her 5.5 million YouTube subscribers (that’s a lot of antisemites!) about Jews having been responsible for the slave trade, among other calumnies, she’s inviting violence and plunder, which are bound to increase.
A hardworking, law-abiding and daily-kindness-performing American Jew may not appreciate the extent to which some of their neighbors have become receptive to these antisemitic messages, and who even feel virtuous, entitled or obligated to prey on Jews. Indeed, the ringleader of the foiled L.A. attack, a Catholic social-justice activist who has described herself as a “Hamas fangirl,” has declared without irony “my generation’s zero-tolerance policy for hatred and injustice.” (Not her own). Do you get it yet? This is not about keeping Jews out of gentile country clubs; this is about achieving an ethical ideal of the kind Hitler wrote about in Mein Kampf. As another one of the other plotters put it, “I am here to destroy Zionism by any means necessary.”
Meanwhile, American Jews are long past the time where they can reasonably seek refuge on the right from the woke left. The conservative movement is coming apart in an ideological battle between those like Ben Shapiro who say movement representatives must not platform antisemitic and anti-American hatemongers and those who are willing to sanction hate as a conservative value if it is popular.
And popular it is. An acquaintance of mine, a young American Catholic who travels in both elite policy circles and in America’s heartland, has personally shared his alarm at the extent to which everyone he meets under 30 is obsessed with disdain for Jews and how the editorial line of Christian journals that Jews are unlikely to read are regularly pumping out anti-Israel screeds.
It is this groundswell that likely explains why the presumed frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2028, JD Vance, has already shown a predilection for playing footsies with Tucker Carlson and “takes insult” at Israel’s actions “and people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.”
The FBI deserves praise for obstructing this plot by leftist zombie terrorists on New Year’s eve, but young Americans of either political persuasion who get their education via TikTok or teachers’ unions too often live meaningless lives which only hatred of Jews infuses with purpose. What they fail to understand and implicitly reject are America’s founding principles, enshrined in its founding documents by Christian Zionists who derived their ideas of governance from the Hebrew Bible.
It is also ironic that these young people’s fevered imaginings of Israeli perfidy in drawing America into ruinous wars-which never was and never will be-substitute for a before-our-eyes reality of Qatari manipulation and bribery of American “influencers.” This Qatar lobby has already brought, and will increasingly bring real war-the jihad to which America now seems doomed. Note that the Muslim Brotherhood, financed by Qatar via the billions of dollars it pours into Hamas, Al Jazeera, and US higher education institutions, considers it a Muslim’s religious duty to abduct and kill Americans. But that comes at a later stage, after Tucker and Candace have already become wealthy.
An American Jew with eyes in his head should understand that the diaspora jig is up. And if a country is unable to protect its Jewish population, it will eventually be unable to protect the general population. When the jihad is called, Americans of all stripes will be caught in homegrown October 7 style attacks.
This means that American Jews should take action now to protect their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. The Constitution will not protect them if the country’s future “leaders” will not uphold it. The “demonstrations” on US college campuses demonstrated the disposability of civil rights for Jews. Now that conservatives are collecting Qatari bribes too, expect a further corruption of institutions meant to protect you, perhaps including the next administration’s FBI.
As a rule, when a diaspora golden age ends, you leave with the shirt on your back-if you’re lucky. Even if you’re very wealthy and you want to leave in four years, how do you know a President Vance won’t make it illegal to move funds from your US bank account to an Israeli institution? South Africans who want to leave cannot take their capital out of the country; such laws can be adopted in the US as well.
I know not everyone feels free to disentangle themselves from their diaspora lives immediately, but everyone must take at least some action now. If you own a home, sell it and rent for the duration of your stay. Apply for Israeli citizenship and open up an Israeli bank account. Buy a gun and get self-defense training.
Diaspora Jews have lost their protection; they’re being summoned for an all-hands-on-deck meeting in Israel where there is much work to be done. We need more soldiers and more participants in national service. We need you.
We also mustn’t forget our non-Jewish friends in the US who are being sold out by corrupt elites. In the same way that Israel has taken the initiative to back Somaliland, the first nation to do so, against terror-supporting and Minnesota-occupying Somalia, the day may not be long in coming when Israel extends its security expertise to Christian Zionist friends in Wisconsin or Arkansas against jihadist strongholds in Minneapolis or Dallas.
The world is rapidly changing; we cannot afford to sleepwalk in a minefield.
Gil Weinreich is the author of Who Killed Rav Adda bar Abba?: A Talmudic Murder Mystery, a work of historical fiction set in the Persian empire in the fourth century CE.