At Home In The World

What need might there be for an ethnic, social, traditional-cultural, religious group, so long dispersed from their historic geography as a vast diaspora, to return to their geographic heritage, if their safety and security and respect for the integrity of their values were assured wherever they lived throughout the world?

None, ostensibly. Unfortunately, however, reality has proven otherwise, since wherever Jews have lived throughout the several millennia since their violent uprooting from the Middle East, they have been set aside, hounded and persecuted as inferior, undesirables, representing as a social blight on the societies they have joined.

Through pogroms and ghetto-imposed social restrictions, denied the right to equality and citizenship, to land-ownership and access to higher education and security, they have managed to survive the impossible odds arrayed against them. During their travails they recalled their historical time of nationhood, of autonomy, of security within their indigenous communities in the Middle East.

During the times of their deepest, darkest persecution, the community endured, dreaming of a return to Zion. "Next year in Jerusalem" went the refrain. That was the hope of the pious, the religiously devout, the rabbis and the learned religious-academic community of Jewry, flung across the Globe.

And then there were all the others, the vast majority that put down roots in countries far and wide, who finally experienced some modern degree of comfort in a sense of belonging, of acceptance and citizenship, despite the incendiary phoenix of anti-Semitism. In Germany, for example, Jews became more German than the Germans. Identifying first and foremost as German, incidentally as Jews.

They absorbed the prevailing culture, took pride in their genteel regard for the arts and sciences; excelled at both, and considered themselves to be faithful to the country in which they resided. Volunteering to serve in the German military. Gaining influence as bankers, lawyers, in the news media, as practising musicians of outstanding performance calibre and acclaim.

Nothing saved them from the vicious predations of Nazi anti-Semitism. Those Jews whose heritage had been so dissolved into their nationality that they were hardly distinguishable as ethnic Jews, those whose grandparents only were Jewish, those who were secular, those who were highly-placed as members of the social or financial elite, all were captured and gathered into the net of fascist-determined destruction.

Yet it is within the present-day milieu in the diaspora of young Jewish men and women, content and comfortable with their positions as academics, intellectuals and political advisers that criticism of Israel resounds most critically. Young Jewish writers, representing progressive think-tanks, who know no life but that of privilege and accomplishment, who cannot visualize a history that has been so deadly for Jews.

They cannot conceive of a spreading evil so ineffable that the mind has difficulty constructing a replica of the extent to which Jew haters would plan to execute a mass murder of such mastery in the intricate execution of the master plan that they would succeed in obliterating six million men, women and children from the face of the earth. What they did not experience cannot possibly impact upon their consciousness.

They thrive in the blessed obliviousness of youth for whom all is possible. And for whom disaster is not an option in their lives. Lives that have been uninterrupted in their steady progress toward success. Lives that could not conceivably become complicated by an ill-conceived strategy of genocide. A political-social strategy that would absorb the thought and work of countless people dedicated to that singular cause.

People just like anyone else; ordinary citizens whose humanitarian impulses, concern for others, kindness and generosity, compassion for neighbours would all be suborned by a relentless campaign of hateful propaganda painting Jews as disgusting sub-humans with soul-destroying traits of greed and subversion, better disposed of than permitted to ruin society. The banality of evil was permitted to prevail.

So it is that within North America and Europe, young Jewish men and women, caught up in the general expression of outrage against the decision of the State of Israel to finally take up the cudgel of self-defence against a committed Islamist army of hate-mongers and Jew-killers see fit to denounce and decry the government of Israel and its military as offensively immoral in their response to bloodily violent existential attacks.

The very armies of jihadist terror that threaten unceasingly, incessantly, to destroy the State of Israel - and with it the millions of Jews who have found haven there; roughly equivalent in numbers to those who perished in the Holocaust - to effect their own modern version of a genocide, receive validation in their commitment by the children of the children of Holocaust-surviving Jewish populations.

From the righteously-moderate young Jewish women who invaded the Israeli consulate in Toronto, to the Jews who march in solidarity with Muslims in decrying the 'disproportionality' of Israeli military response against jihadist bombing goads, to the young Jewish progressives who disown the Jewish state's resolve to defend itself, we see ignorant disdain for the experience of history and the history of experience.

Those threatened with imminent genocide being accused of practising genocide. By the children of those who managed to escape genocide. How strangely pernicious.