Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is a rabbi and attorney who lives in Israel, serves as the Senior Research Associate at the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), Israel Region Vice President at the Coalition for Jewish Values, and is the author of six books, including “The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility" (Gefen Publishing).
The explosive rise of Jew hatred across the world and even in the United States should not obscure one curious fact, drawn from the lives of three of the most prominent Jew haters in America. Granted, there is a healthy competition for that designation, but for our purposes we can focus on Abdul El Sayed the Senate candidate, Zohran Mamdani the Mayor of New York City, and Hassan Piker the streamer and media gadfly.
What do all three have in common, aside from their pathological obsession with Israel and hatred of Jews? The roots of all three are not from countries that were enemies of Israel but, ostensibly, countries with which Israel has friendly or at least civil diplomatic relations.
Abdul El Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984 to parents who left Egypt in the 1970’s, around the time or perhaps shortly before Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. It would seem obvious that his parents opposed the peace treaty, especially considering that - as widely reported - his mother was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood while in college in Egypt. That would be the same Muslim Brotherhood that opposed Anwar Sadat’s diplomatic initiative, the same Muslim Brotherhood whose members were largely incarcerated by Sadat, and the same Muslim Brotherhood that was responsible for Sadat’s assassination. The fact that El Sayed was born into Egyptian citizenship at a time when Egypt was at “peace" with Israel, recognized Israel’s existence, and had no territorial claims against Israel did not make a whit of difference to the El Sayed clan.
Zohran Mamdani was born in 1991 in Uganda to Muslim parents who hailed from India. While he was a child in Uganda, that country established diplomatic relations with Israel. While India-Israel relations then were not as warm then as they have been during Prime Minister Modi’s tenure since 2014, those two countries even then had extensive diplomatic and commercial ties. None of his associative countries (Uganda and India) and then the USA, where he grew up in Manhattan from age seven, have any inherent reason to be anti-Israel or anti-Jewish. The first two have miniscule Jewish populations and the third - the USA - speaks for itself. There is no logical reason he would be raised to hate Jews and Israel. His environment alone should have nurtured him to be neutral or supportive.
Hassan Piker was born in New Jersey in 1991 to Turkish parents but was raised in Istanbul during the 1990’s, years before the rise of the Jew-hating Turkish prime minister and then president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Piker was raised in a Turkey that prided itself since 1948 on being the only Muslim country that had diplomatic relations with Israel, a Turkey that had a secular government and whose citizens were relatively sophisticated and modern. Was Piker radicalized by Erdoğan’s rise to power in 2003? Or did it emerge from another source - the same source that turned his uncle Cenk Uygur into another rabid Jew hater?
It emerges that none of the countries that produced these fanatical haters should have been fertile ground for their intense hatred. These were not countries that scorned Israel - like Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and others; these were countries that maintained extensive relations with Israel, one of which even entered into a peace treaty with Israel. What gives?
One obvious common denominator that in our haste to be politically correct we tend to overlook is that the three are all Muslims. There is a strain of virulent Jew hatred that runs through the Koran and has shaped the attitudes of many, though not all, Muslims. It is a hatred that has little to do with Israel as it long predates the existence of the State of Israel - a hatred that is only ameliorated when Jews are perceived as second class citizens in a Muslim society and a hatred that will never accept a sovereign Jewish state of Israel. Never.
For sure, there are Muslim nations that have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence, some friendlier than others. And it is true that a cold peace is better than a hot war. But we would be remiss not to note something that our leaders should internalize, especially leaders that situate themselves on the political left:
Israel has not signed peace treaties - with, say, Egypt and Jordan - as much as we have signed “absence of war" treaties. We may not fight on the battlefield (a good thing per se) but there is no reconciliation or even warmth from the Arab populations of those countries to us. Jews do not visit Jordan or Egypt in large numbers - and certainly Egyptians or Jordanians do not come here.
The United Arab Emirates were different - but even there, these days, Jewish identity has gone underground. In most Arab countries, even those with formal relations with Israel, those ties are governmental and commercial. Friendship towards Jews or Israel has not seeped into the population, something generally conceded by the leaders of those countries who fear a popular uprising if association with Israel becomes too open or amicable. Even if they wanted to - not at all a given - internal constraints would prevent them, what the West often calls the “Arab Street." It is not that the “Arab Street" has any real sway in the dictatorships where those “Streets" are paved; it is rather that the “Arab Street" is an accurate reflection of the societies and cultures that produce execrable Jew haters like El Sayed, Mamdani, and Piker.
Of course, one need not hail from one of these countries to hate Jews or even be a Muslim (take that, Tucker Carlson) and there are plenty of pseudo-Jews of the Bernie Sanders variety who fit the bill and provide (flimsy) cover for the Muslim Jew haters. But it should call into question the value of these “peace treaties" that do not at all make peace between nations. At least the desultory and sporadic efforts to create some diplomatic framework between Israel and Saudi Arabia has the good sense to refer to it as “normalization" rather than “peace." To concede anything substantive in order to sign an “absence of war" agreement with a country with whom we are not at war is foolhardy.
It makes no difference to the citizens of these countries whether they have treaties or relations with Israel or are openly hostile to Israel. Given the persistence of Jew hatred among the populations of our enemies, and of many countries with which we have diplomatic relations, and in European nations that are being overrun and transformed by their Muslim invaders, what lessons can be gleaned from this sorry state of affairs?
1. Nothing we do will change their minds. There is no constellation of governmental coalitions, no policies, and no concessions that will dilute their Jew hatred, short of our own dissolution. Their Jew hatred is inbred. Their opposition to Israel is not based on Netanyahu’s leadership or the conduct of the war in Gaza or Lebanon but simply a function of our existence. Yes, sadly, they have revived the argument that Israel, alone among the nations, has no right to exist or one that is debatable.
2. We must beware of their infiltration into Western society. These haters are already dominant in Britain, France, and Spain, and are increasingly influential in the US. It would have been inconceivable even a decade ago that unabashed Jew haters such as our three protagonists could have achieved such influence in American politics or culture. Part of their success comes from the pervasiveness of social media, part from the fecklessness of the traditional media, and part from the craven shamelessness of some Jewish politicians and celebrities in the US who run from their Jewish identity, think they will be spared when the day of reckoning comes, and provide them with political cover. The haters are skillfully leveraging the freedoms of democracy to make those countries less democratic and more antagonistic to Israel.
Our election results uncover the same stunt going on here, with open haters of the Jewish State of Israel serving in the Knesset, and potentially dominating, even if from the outside, our own government. Are there Israeli politicians willing to mortgage our future by empowering the Arabs all in order to gain for themselves positions of power? Yes, plenty, who will do it gladly.
It seems we are no more successful in combatting the enemy within than are Europe or the United States. When democracy works - i.e., when elections turn out results favorable to them - or when governments implement policies favorable to them, Muslims embrace it enthusiastically. And when it doesn’t, as they see it, they take to the streets and riot and plunder, as is happening in Western Europe.
Our three protagonists, and so many other Jew haters, grew up in democracies, and yet the values of democracy - of liberty, tolerance, equality - have never impacted their world view. We can meet this challenge by strengthening ourselves spiritually, fortifying ourselves politically, and inculcating in our society the Jewish ethos, our just rights to the land of Israel, and our unwillingness to eviscerate ourselves, our land, or our State to satisfy their insatiable demands.
The West is collapsing.
Democracy itself is under siege across the world from within.
Our enemies know how to exploit it in order to destroy it.
Appreciation of what Jews have brought to the world is waning. Our future lies in our reassertion of the Jewish idea, in pride in our heritage, in faith in our G-d, and in confidence in our destiny.