Originally published in Israel National News

It is a question for the ages. The most superficial and disingenuous of our detractors claim that today it is because of the war in Gaza, the (outrageously false) allegations of genocide, starvation, and torture, all of which blithely and maliciously ignores that Hamas attacked us on October 7, 2023, raped, murdered and ravaged our people and homes, holds and tortures the hostages, and still clings to its fantasy of destroying Israel and murdering every Jew in the world.

A good question to ask these detractors – including those nations like France, Britain, Spain, Canada, and others now jumping on the derailed train of Palestinian Arab statehood – is: when Hamas avows to destroy Israel, what part of that do you not understand?

This recognition of something non-existent – should we condemn Britain for shielding the Loch Ness monster? – is both farcical and cynical. It recalls Arafat’s vacuous declaration of statehood in 1988. There was a Palestinian Arab state in Gaza, run by Hamas. They did not use the instruments of statehood to better the lives of their voters but used the billions of dollars provided them by Qatar, Turkey, and Western countries to construct a complex terror infrastructure that can murder Jews and advance Hamas’ desire to obliterate the Jewish state.

For all their sophistication, these nations today reflect the modern face of Jew hatred. They do not hold Israel to a double standard but to impossible standards, standards fabricated only for us. These standards include:

-the unprecedented obligation to feed your enemy during wartime,

-the directive to conduct a war without killing enemy civilians,

-the utter disregard of Hamas’ use of civilians as shields including embedding their terror infrastructure within the civilian population,

-the rejection of the use of what they term “disproportionate” force (the typical way wars are won is by the application of disproportionate force by the eventual victor),

-the refusal to evacuate Gazan refugees to safer habitats (as is their right under international law),

-the distinction made between a government and the people who elected it, and

-the lack of any demand that Hamas surrender, which is often the way a defeated party concedes a lost cause.

Instead, these countries, which deem themselves cultured, refined, and in the vanguard of Western civilization, create impossible standards that no sane country would follow, and then seek to reward our enemy with statehood. And if a Palestinian Arab state would then use its newfound independence to attack Israel, I can hear the world faintly (and cynically) saying “oops.” And if G-d forbid Israel is overrun, they will say “double oops,” and veer to a one-state delusion in which Jews live under Arab rule.

That is genuine, unvarnished hatred of Jews and Israel, regardless of their empty protestations of good will and love of peace. Every time the world cries “starvation” and “genocide,” our leaders would do well not negotiating, explaining, or conceding, but just keep reiterating “free our hostages,” “let Hamas surrender,” and “Europe, admit Gazan refugees.”

We should be saying that over and over, rather than weakening our war effort and strengthening our enemies and their supporters. And if we won the war, and Hamas was utterly defeated in Gaza, the entire dialogue with these countries would change.

Still, what is the source of this relentless hatred? It is not the existence of Israel, because as the Holocaust reminds us, they also hated us when there was no Israel. They hated us when they called us “rootless cosmopolitans,” a danger to civilization, and hate us now that there is a Jewish state, and still call us a danger to civilization. What gives?

A number of reasons present.

First, the Muslim takeover of Europe. Europe as a civilization is dying, besieged by Muslim immigrants with a culture and value system that is unassimilable, condescends to Europe’s self-image as enlightened, and perceives Europe as ripe for Islamizing. Every country now supporting the creation of a Palestinian Arab state has been victimized by mass Islamic terrorist attacks. Their leaders are scurrying to save their societies, but time and numbers are against them. A Britain where for years the most popular boy’s name is Mohammad will not for long be a supporter of Israel or benevolent to its own Jewish population. France, Germany, Spain, and other countries are not far behind.

Second, all these countries that are suddenly advocating for a Palestinian Arab state are governed by leftist parties. France, Spain, Britain, Canada (even Germany, which has a right-leaning government but whose leftist party gives it a majority in the Bundestag) are all ruled by leftist, secular, progressives. Several of those countries had right-wing, pro-Israel governments until recently. Who is not jumping on this tendentious bandwagon? Poland and Hungary (also, neither admit Muslim immigrants), Greece, Italy, and other countries that are ruled by right-wing governments. Canada’s last right-wing government supported Israel, Italy’s last left-wing government was antagonistic. It is as simple as politics.

And make no mistake about it: if Kamala Harris had defeated Donald Trump, the United States would be standing alongside Europe in its effort to carve up and dismantle the Jewish state. Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, opined recently that the United States committed itself to a Palestinian Arab state in 1947 (!), and has failed to deliver on its promise, obviously oblivious to the Arabs’ rejection of that Partition Plan including the war launched against Israel in 1948 and several times thereafter.

What is it about left-wing, secular, progressive governments that they find such fault with Israel?

The answer is that Israel stands for everything they reject. They reject nationalism and they repudiate religion, and Israel is a Jewish state, indeed the Jewish nation-state. Double whammy. They reject the Bible as a source of anything, they reject truth as a fixed concept, they reject morality as an objective entity. Everything about Israel will bother them. Then, throw in their embrace of the fallacy that Israel is a white, colonialist state – Israel is actually majority non-white as these racial bean counters would see it and anyway, one cannot possibly colonize one’s own land – and this endless, unsatiable enmity persists and grows stronger.

If you ask, what about the dozens of Muslim countries in the world that are founded on their version of religion and nationalism, why doesn’t that bother these progressives? The answer is, see reason one.

This secular progressive ideology afflicts many leftist Israelis as well and they struggle to articulate what right we have to this land. And many of these are the same Jews who – for the first time in Jewish history – have joined the blood libel against their own people and parrot the accusations of genocide and starvation.

Third, Europe is in the last stages of purging itself of any residue of Holocaust guilt. Germany may have been the prime mover of the Holocaust but there is no European country that is not stained with the blood of six million Jews, either through acts of commission or omission. That is why Holocaust imagery is so rampant in discussing the war in Gaza:

Israel is committing “genocide,” the word coined to describe the murder of Jews during the Holocaust; Israel has turned Gaza into a “concentration camp; Israel is intentionally “starving” innocent Gazans, you know, like the Nazis did to the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps; and any attempt to relocate Gazans out of the war zone in which they live – out of the territory which has now been mostly reduced to rubble – is termed “ethnic cleansing,” you know, like the Nazis did to the Jews.

The Holocaust weighed heavily on European consciences. That burden started to lighten after the Six Day War, and when the Palestinian Arab statehood movement was created shortly thereafter – a way of destroying Israel not through war but through “human rights, self-determination, freedom” and other fine-sounding nostrums – Holocaust guilt swiftly receded. Of course, combining those worthy values with terror and violence, they assumed, would make an unstoppable winning combination.

That is where we are today – we are expected to provide every possible human right to our enemies in order to facilitate their murdering us.

Holocaust guilt is gone, and it is aided by Europe’s unquenchable thirst to see Israelis as Nazis, which not only assuages their guilt but leads many to conclude that we had it coming to us. Thus, they want to believe that Jews would wantonly starve and murder innocent people, which is why Hamas’ blood libel has gained enormous currency across the world, and so rapidly.

Fourth, and probably most importantly, we are living the biblical notion of “a people that dwells alone and is not reckoned among the nations” (Bamidbar 23:9). We are different, a nation apart. As a nation, we too are unassimilable, but we do not spread mayhem and violence across the globe. This hatred of us is irrational because it is self-destructive to the haters, but it is also ultimately inexplicable. It wells up from some unknown source in order to remind us that while we are set apart in order to better mankind, to bring G-d’s truth and morality to all, we nevertheless have our own destiny. Our history has a purpose.

What bothers them most – and they can not articulate it – is that we are experiencing the realization of all the biblical prophecies. The prophets warned frequently about our impending exile and destruction because of our sins but then assured us repeatedly of our eventual return to the land of Israel and Jewish sovereignty thereon.

That is what we are living through today with all the vicissitudes, the wars, the terror, the hatred, the miracles, and the rebirth. This must confound them and give them no rest because it undermines every progressive idea and shatters every secular shibboleth. It should not be surprising that Operation Rising Lion – the swift and miraculous reversal to Iran’s nuclear program designed to destroy us – was quickly followed by accusations against us of genocide and starvation and the desperate need for a Palestinian Arab state. It does not matter which terrorist thugs lead it or what they want to do with it. Its most important feature is that it can function as a brake on the fulfillment of Jewish destiny.

We have so much to offer the world, which in fact is starving. As Amos the prophet intoned (8:11) several millennia ago, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord G-d, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of G-d.” Western culture is decadent and Western societies are collapsing, disinclined to reproduce, unwilling to fight for its survival. And so, they hate us and attack us, and find therein some purpose, a cause, however corrupt and venal.

That will be to their everlasting shame. As for us, proud of our heritage and confident in our destiny and the divine promises to us, we should not falter or fumble, hesitate or stumble, but march enthusiastically to our destiny, reclaiming and rebuilding every part of our land, from the river to the sea, imbuing it with holiness and Torah, and awaiting the final redemptive act from Above.

Photo credit: Sticker Opposing Antisemitism in Ealing by Doyle of London, with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license on Wikimedia Commons