To state the obvious, the anti-Semitic hatred that has exploded in the face of the diaspora has ended the roughly seventy-five year ‘Golden Age’ of Western Jewry. This has sent a lot of diaspora Jews, me included, looking for a historical parallel to bring clarity and tell us exactly what ‘Age’ we are in now.
Many of us understandably reference ’never again’ and the Holocaust. Yet, the likelihood of the current situation rising in the West to mimic the Holocaust is, in my opinion, quite slim. There are simply too many checks and balances for that to happen. Not impossible, but it’s the next closest thing.
However, as Bondi Beach and many other atrocities have proven, conditions need not rise anywhere close to Holocaust levels for Jewish lives to be lost, for Jewish places to suffer assaults, and for Jewish life to become a fear-filled, joyless, drudgery thanks to the ‘Hound-o-caust’ -- a climate where our enemies run amok with lies and agitprop to create a state of constant Jewish harassment. The result is omnipresent security focus, financial burden, political ostracization, lawfare, and outrageous comments at the water cooler. The New Jewish Ghetto we are being forced into is degrading our souls just as much as Warsaw and Lodz did our bodies.
With all this in mind, the better parallel to our current torment is found in the British Mandate period of 1919 to 1948. Then we had the same "three-ring circus" we have today in the diaspora - the Jews on one side, the often-conflicted and often-clueless non-Jewish power charged with protecting us in the middle, and the wily and violent enemy on the other side.
The structure of the nightmare is the same, but there are important differences in detail, as I’ll point out. But first, let us wind the clock back, and turn our eyes toward Zion.
The almost thirty years of the British Mandate for Palestine saw, after every outburst of Arab terror (whether in Hebron, or Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, or elsewhere) a predictable response from the ruling authority of maddening vacillations, empty proclamations, and outright moral confusion. The British didn’t react by using today’s cringey bromides of ‘this is not who we are’ or nauseating fealty to ‘Islamophobia’, but otherwise they were just as compromised as most of the diaspora ruling class are today.
Despite the philo-semitic professions in the Balfour Declaration, the promises to fulfill them voiced at San Remo, and the genuine assistance offered the Jews from some in His Majesty’s service, to say our British ‘protectors’ overall did not do a good job saving us from Arab bloodlust would be a huge understatement. London not only didn’t protect us from Arab pogroms, they also frustrated our efforts to settle the Land, to create Balfour and Lloyd George’s promised ‘national home’ and, in some cases, to just stay alive.
They thwarted our boats, and thus our escape from the inferno of Europe. They limited where we could settle and in what numbers. They often took our guns.
Through all this, their decisions were clouded by a craven desire not to upset the local Arabs, lest they riot. This supplication also extended to the non-local Arabs, lest they pinch the flow of oil. Worse, the actual anti-Semites in the British ranks, while never close to a majority, were rarely expunged. Does any of this ring a bell?
Countering all those stumbling blocks placed before us, we had in our favour a supremely motivated Jewish people, living in their Land, and determined to make a go of it. Determined also to take up arms and defend themselves.
Most important of all, we had the certainty that the Tommies would eventually go home to their own country, and we (ahem) strongly ‘encouraged’ them to come to this conclusion.
We don’t have any of that now.
The ‘protector power’ of our governments, police, and institutions, is never going home…they ARE home already.
The question is whether we are.
Today, it’s not oil that clouds the minds of the timid diaspora politicians charged with protecting us, it’s Muslims votes. It’s toxic wokeness and lies on both left and right. It’s ignorance of the justness of our claim to our country. It’s also, for some, simple anti-Semitism.
Today’s Jews are different too. We don’t have the gritty pioneer spirit and two-fisted chutzpah of our Yishuv ancestors. Our material comfort and deep integration into our host countries, ostensibly a good thing, have limited the nature of our response to the growing danger. We are loathe to expose ourselves to the fight in a way that might endanger our jobs, our friendships, our prospects. Our reflexively orderly counteractions, nearly always led by our ‘approved’ community organizations, are ill-matched to the street-brawler attention-sucking tactics of our foes.
Unwilling to really raise Cain ourselves, we instead ask today’s ‘British’ to protect us with more police. We ask them for more security dollars. We ask them to pass more laws. More declarations. More High Commissioners. But what happens when today’s ‘British' deem us too expensive or too difficult to protect anymore? While today’s protectors won’t go home, their dollars might, and we’ll be increasingly on our own against the wolves.
Whether the latest news cycle drives us to panic, or we are lulled back to sleep in a moment of relative calm, diaspora trends are troubling. Trends in birthrates, trends in intermarriage, trends in immigration, trends in attachment to Israel…none of them look good.
The only question is only how far down things will go, and how fast.
Keep your passports up to date, and a bag by the door.
Steve Mitchell writes from Toronto, Canada where he is active in the Jewish community, a party to current litigation in its defence, and a writer on a variety of matters affecting our people.