The Democratic Convention’s most tear-stained moment reconfirmed that most Americans, Left and Right, remain pro-Israel – despite the media, anti-Zionist Jews, and the academic Intifada. Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin demanded freedom for their beloved 23-year-old son Hersh, one of eight Americans and “109 treasured human beings” Hamas cruelly holds hostage in Gaza – aided by supposedly “innocent” Gazans. Like their Republican rivals in Milwaukee, Democrats chanted: “Bring them home!”
Jon explained that freeing the hostages “is not a political issue. It’s a humanitarian issue.” Most Americans recognize that. They don’t rip down hostage posters. Imagining these holy souls’ ongoing suffering rips them apart.
The challenge remains mobilizing Americans to do something about it. It’s easy to get emotional when the cameras zero in on Rachel’s tortured eyes, when you admire how both parents miraculously keep finding strength after 327 nightmarish days to save their beloved Hersh.
Alas, although the Democrats’ empathy reinforced the American-Israel bond, this issue won’t affect most Americans’ votes. Nor will they go to the streets, or inconvenience themselves, to put the necessary pressure on the Biden administration, the Qataris, and the world, to free the hostages yesterday.
Watching that heart-wrenching scene, mourning the 700th soldier killed, and starting to attend memorial services marking the end of the post-October 7 mourning period for some, raises profound questions about Jewish history – and Jewish suffering. An ongoing historical debate wonders: Why do they hate us, why is Jew-hatred so prevalent, so easily unleashed?
OCTOBER 7’S gleeful sadism, the endless hostage suffering imposed by Palestinian doctors, journalists, housewives, and others, compounded by the long-distance but vehement hatred of Iranians, Houthis, Hezbollah jihadists, as well as supposed “progressives,” raises another question: What makes our enemies so vicious, why do they take such delight in Jew-hunting and hurting Jews?
It doesn’t help that we’ve “picked” some of the world’s bloodthirstiest, sickest, enemies. Jihadists have killed and kidnapped, hacked and maimed, raped and sexually enslaved, Yazidis, Europeans, Americans, Turks, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and even Balinese, along with Israelis and Jews.
And while American sympathy for the hostages is widespread but pallid, today’s anti-Zionist Jew-hatred is red-hot. Like Hitler’s Nazism, it stems from fearing that “the Jew” will be “victorious over the other peoples,” making “his crown… the funeral wreath of humanity.” These haters see the Jews as threatening their lives and the world because, again as Hitler frothed in Mein Kampf, the Jew “personifies the devil, symbolizes all evil.”
Similarly, this April, a Hamas official, Hamad Al-Regeb, prayed for the Jews’ “annihilation,” explaining: Allah “transformed them into filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs, because of the injustice and evil they had brought about.” Defying so many lovely Americans’ assumption that there would be peace if Israel only ceded enough territory so, as Vice President Kamala Harris said, “The Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination,” Hamas’s Ghazi Hamad admits: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land”; it’s a “security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation.”
As the ever-reliable MEMRI website explains, these haters view the fight against Israel as “a religious war… No Israelis are civilians. All Jews in Palestine, including children, are combatants and may be killed by every means: stabbed, beheaded, or bombed, including in suicide operations.” That’s how you fight “microbes” threatening Islam and humanity.
Hezbollah’s ranter-in-chief, Hassan Nasrallah, agrees. Jews have “throughout history” been “Allah’s most cowardly and avaricious creatures” – and Israel is supposed to negotiate with him?
Ali Khameini, Iran’s supremely disturbed leader, keeps fusing traditional antisemitism with anti-Zionism, claiming that “Westerners and Jewish corporation owners’ main goal, by fabricating the Zionist regime and this cancerous tumor, was to build a stronghold to influence and dominate West Asia.”
The Jew
Now Israel, the Jewish state – is the gift that keeps giving for dictators, theocrats, and terrorists. Jews are the never-ending nemesis. Tyrants need enemies to justify the misery they impose on their own people while rallying them around some cause. Rather than inventing some villain, targeting the Jews gets you the world’s longest hatred, a bigotry with a pedigree.
You get the “most plastic hatred,” malleable, artificial, and often toxic – easily customized for autocrats from Right to Left, as performatively pious as Khameini or as godless as Hitler. You get the “most totalizing hatred” too, a globalized, full-service, 24/7, hostility, with ever-renewable negative energy, reinforced by centuries of conspiracy theories and vicious lies.
Demonized as the great threat, Jews thus deserve every anguish you inflict on toddlers and golden-agers, concert-goers and pensioners, men and women. And you get the “gateway hatred,” a hatred that starts with the Jews and Israel but like an unchecked fire keeps growing, ultimately consuming all the oxygen, anything good in its path – often threatening the haters’ too as the flames intensify and the winds change.
Thinking of the hostages today, languishing in the hands of these haters honed to hate by millennia of hatred, is terrifying. That’s why Israel must defend itself aggressively, effectively, everywhere, as it’s been doing.
That’s why Israeli-accented shouts of “Bring Them Home” fall short. Rather than campaigning in Israel – which raises the price Hamas demands and divides the country – hostage champions should deploy abroad, appealing to other democrats’ consciences, as Jon and Rachel did, to free these hostages from 23 countries, representing so many world religions.
Ultimately, we don’t need Americans crying for us – but fighting side-by-side with us.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His next book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, will be published this fall.