By Phyllis Chesler
This is the article that I did not want to write. This is what I did not want to say. But here it is anyway.
The world will not stop braying for Jewish blood until it has, once again, fed on their chosen sacrificial scapegoat, until it has drunk its full and can drink no more, until the bloody beast is fully sated or at least exhausted. We have only been promised that a remnant of living souls will forever survive this bloodbath, as will our treasury of learning.
The world will forget what it has done. Over time, when faced with the facts, some may grow even more ballistic, enraged for being reminded, exposed, called to account. They will sue. They will smirk. As ever, a minority will try to repent what they allowed to happen on their watch. The vampires themselves will never admit to anything–and they will never repent. Most people will go about the business of their lives untroubled, free of all and any historical memory.
The Jews and our allies must understand this. Denial is no longer an option. Heroism is our only option.
Please allow me to remind us that I (and others) sounded the alarm long ago but were barely heeded. Most of us were seen as paranoid or hysterical or still overly traumatized by the past.
Most recently, in my 2003 book, The New Antisemitism, I explained that the cognitive or propaganda war would be bigger and more important than ever before; that ancient Blood Libels would be massively circulated around the clock in all the languages on earth, on every continent, in every country; that the internet and social media would be carefully and diabolically seeded with disinformation about the single Jewish state; that anti-Zionism was part of the new antisemitism; and that Western intellectuals would join forces with the Islamic world, and with Islamists, Marxists, and right-wingers in the West. Generations of university professors would teach these lies again and again over seven decades. College-educated journalists and international organizations would internalize them.
Or as Caroline Glick said at the JNS (Jewish News/Jerusalem News Service) conference in Jerusalem: The cognitive war now constitutes the 8th front that Israel must fight.
Once again, the handwriting is both on the wall and on the very skies.
Not only are Jew-haters/anti-Zionists being elected to public office, but they are also political consultants, university professors, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and “influencers” and “content creators” of all kinds. And many are ignorant morons, proud of hating Jews and Jewish Israel, as well as hating Western civilization.
Last night, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s choices for public office all won. Like Mamdani, each of them is brazenly, staunchly, proudly anti-Zionist. What has happened all over Europe is now clearly happening in the United States, and it has been happening here for quite a while. For a long time now, Jewish and pro-Israel academics have been harassed out of their jobs and turned down both by their long-time academic journals and by commercial media; publishers also shy away from suspected or known Zionist thinkers–even on entirely different subjects. Known Israeli cafe owners have been defaced with graffiti and known pro-Israel customers have been publicly harassed and turned away.
Ordinary citizens, both paid by Arab and left-wing money, as well as those who are just unpaid but passionate True Believers are, without shame, physically and verbally attacking individual Jews in the streets of America and Europe; shooting and bombing Jewish Centers and synagogues; marching, marching in Jihad-like swarms calling for “Death to Israel, Death to America”; staging campus encampments with Shari’a-compliant female students; Hollywood and Broadway celebrities are virtue-signaling their support for “Palestine” (a country that does not exist) and especially for “Gaza” (an area that has been taken over and taken down by Hamas terrorists, not by Israel).
No one who has been indoctrinated believes that what I’ve just written is true. Facts will not change their minds.
The Blood Lies are precisely what gives these actors permission–actually incites them–to call for Jewish blood. Hard as it is for most people to believe, these Jew-haters are not simply responding to something that a particular Jew has done–or to a particular Israeli policy. Everyone insists on imagining that this is a war for land–when, in reality, it is an Islamic religious war.
But dear Readers: I must remind us that Jews and Israel are now in a radically different place than we once were in Europe or in Muslim lands over the millennia–or in the 1930s in those same places.
We now have a sovereign Jewish state, which is precisely why so many forces are attacking that very Promised Land. It is the only safe haven for Jews in trouble, Jews in flight. True, Israel is also under constant bombardment but unlike American and European cities, it has bomb shelters, air raid sirens, an Iron Dome, and the blessed, heroic IDF.
Like our Israeli brethren, Jews and our allies in the Diaspora had better be ready for very hard times ahead. We cannot hide from what is to come. We cannot spend time blaming ourselves or, more likely, blaming other Jews for the difficulties we now face. We must Do Everything and Anything that we can. We must fight back in every way. Anticipate and pre-empt the psychological, verbal, physical, religious, economic, legal, and murderous attacks.
Some say that Jews in the Diaspora must hire security guards for all our sites but also learn how to shoot and learn how to fight, physically. Others say that it is time to pick up our “bundles” and move to Israel or to some safer place on planet Earth. (I am having a hard time finding such places.) Spain? Ireland? Australia? The UK? Holland? I think not, not at all. Maybe India? Maybe Japan? Many say that now is the best time to strengthen the coming generations with Jewish knowledge, to teach it to them and help them to gather in communities of solidarity.
At moments, I think that merely documenting and analyzing the atrocities is useless, but then I hear from readers who tell me that doing so makes all the difference. That even my voice has mattered to them.
Thus, although I would have liked to have risen in the ranks of the IDF, that romantic notion is not to be. I am about to turn 86 years old and need a cane and a walker. Even if I applied there–or to the New York Knicks (another hopeless dream)–I fear that I’d be rejected. And so, I will do all that I alone can do. And so must we all.
Perhaps each one of us must become more like Winston Churchill. which reminds me: I highly recommend a new book by Ibn Warraq titled Churchill’s Secular Creed: Empire, Zionism, and Islam’s Complicity in the Holocaust. And each one of us must become more like every resistance movement of yore, more concerned with the fate of civilization than with our own dear but smaller lives. Not smaller but connected. What happens to the Jews and to Israel, especially as we face Iran, will have the most profound and momentous effect on every living being.
First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter
