A few weeks back, a friend, who’s European and non-Jewish, asked me – a Zionist American Jew – why the world hates Israel so much. Sunday’s preemptive IDF mission against thousands of Hezbollah missiles and drones in Lebanon has never made that answer clearer.
Make no mistake – an attack on Jews anywhere is an attack in Jews everywhere. What the IDF demonstrated early Sunday morning is that Israel exists to prevent attacks on Jews anywhere. That anywhere begins with Israel itself – and this is why the world is so against our Jewish nation. To live as a Jew in a Jewish nation defended by Jewish soldiers willing to die to protect Jewish life is a truly revolutionary act.
Throughout our millennia of existence, Jews have lived at the fringes of societies that have at once welcomed and slaughtered us. We have existed as semi-citizens, afforded half-rights and privileges with all the costs of assimilation – taxes, conscription, legal obligations – but little of the accompanying safety and security.
For centuries, Jews have lived among the perennial “everyone else,” often looking and behaving and even thriving like them. But as pogroms and the Holocaust have inevitably revealed, we’ve forever lacked the basic rights of everyone else: The right to exist without the threat of extermination within our own homes, with our own people – and today on our own land.
Israel exists to ensure these rights – and extend them to every Jew in every nation even if they fail to realize it. This is why “they hate Israel so much.” They, Iran and its Islamist proxies; they, the swarms of Jihadi protesters who chant for Jewish blood on college campuses and in town squares across the globe; they, who try to silence Jewish artists and students and parents, claiming we are “Zionists” – as if there is something wrong with Jews living safe and protected like any other nation throughout the world today.
They “hate” Jews because we are no longer existentially imperiled. We no longer exist nationless and defenseless in the face of the seemingly unending threats – Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah – who’ve made their intent to exterminate us clear. They want to kill us – they want us dead. They have done it before and they say they will do it again. There is no mystery to their intentions, only how and when. That “when” would have been 5 a.m. this past Sunday morning had the IDF not attacked Hezbollah – with just 15 minutes to spare.
The IDF's strike on Sunday angered many
They hate us because we can attack, we can defend ourselves – and we will attack and we will defend ourselves. Israel will protect Jewish life by whatever it takes and by any means necessary, because no one else will. And no one else ever has. So we defend ourselves – astounded at times by our own ability to finally, mercifully, be the Jewish architects of our own Jewish futures.I AM NOT Israeli, but Israel is as much a part of me as my California childhood and subsequent adulthood in New York. Except for having my children, anything truly good that has ever happened to me happened here in Israel. I am also not only Jewish, but the son of an African-American father. Because of this I know hate when I see it: I know what virulent, viral, blood-thirsty loathing looks like. And the hate the world now feels toward Israel and Jews rivals the bigotry America has for centuries meted out to African-Americans.
Indeed, in some ways, it is even worse. Despite the hundreds lynched under Jim Crow, even during the height of segregationist evil, few whites truly wanted to see Blacks dead. Beat them, deny them the vote and education and economic equality: absolutely. But mass extermination: not so much.
This is the reality faced by Jews today, here in Israel where Hamas and Hezbollah have already made their murderous intent real. And in the Diaspora, too, where those chants of “from the river to the sea” would easily mean from the Hudson to the Atlantic if only the NYPD would allow it.
As American college kids return to campus and the Gaza war remains a flashpoint within the current presidential campaign, the threat of further escalation will leave Jews even more vulnerable. Here in Israel, however, life quickly got back to normal after an admittedly tense and eerily silent Sunday morning. Parents have made it to work, kids are playing at summer camps, and the rest of us are sorting out dates and dinner plans – even as we worry what the nighttime will bring.
Nearly a year into the war with Hamas, Israel is embarking on multi-year, multi-billion dollar arms production schemes as its reliance on American weaponry has repeatedly been compromised in the face of political expediency. The weapons will take years to develop and won’t arrive in time to contend with the current threat of Hezbollah and Hamas. But they demonstrate Israel’s unwillingness to place the safety of Jewish lives in anyone’s hands – even those of our closest ally.
Like in 1981, when it preemptively destroyed Iraq’s Tamuz nuclear reactor, Israel will go it alone if needed — well-aware that Jews have always been alone in our 5,000 years of survival. But survive we have and survive we will continue to do – and this, ultimately, is why they hate us so much.
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.