Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s mass murder of innocents in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, “inspired” by ISIS’ exhortations to wage war against “non-believers,” reminded Americans about the existence of evil. In our comfort, in our security, we don’t see evil up close all that frequently.
Unfortunately for Israelis, they see it every day. Evil in the form of Hamas on Israel’s southern border and of Hezbollah on its northern one. Israelis experience evil in the form of thousands of rockets fired at its civilians from both directions and from others, in the form of bombs blowing up cafes, in automatic gunfire coming out of nowhere, in stabbings and car-rammings.
Israelis experienced evil incarnate on Oct. 7, 2023, when some 6,000 Hamas gunmen, consumed with genocidal bloodthirst, invaded Israel for the avowed purpose of committing maximum slaughter.
That Hamas is bent on genocide should be old news even to the minimally informed. The reaction to the slaughter in circles that hold themselves out as “progressive,” however, should be a wake-up call; we have watched purported progressives defend the massacre as the work of “freedom fighters,” or announce that it requires “contextualization,” or proclaim that the mass murder of Israelis sleeping in their beds or dancing on a field was the fault of Israel.
While Israel is condemned for a war it didn’t want, didn’t seek and found unimaginable comes a timely memoir by David Harris, the former longtime head of the American Jewish Committee, entitled “On the Front Lines: A Lifetime of Global Jewish Advocacy.” Harris was famously described by Shimon Peres, Israel’s late president, as “the foreign minister of the Jewish people,” a nod to the gravitas and diplomatic skill displayed by Harris over 35 years on the international stage.
A less well-known but equally apt observation came from Sweden’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Per Ahlmark. “The genius of David Harris,” Ahlmark noted, “is that he can smell and analyze threats to western civilization before the rest of us can imagine them.” Harris has not merely smelled the threats. He has long warned about them, and not merely the abandonment of the Jews and the rise of ugly antisemitism among self-professed progressives. “We face two threats in the U.S. — from the radical right and the looney left,” Harris writes. “Both are real, both have traction. Both generate noise via media outlets and both pose challenges to liberal democracy, national unity and public policy sanity.”
There’s no corner of American society where inanity about Israel or a blind eye to obvious evil have reigned more notably than on elite campuses, where the children of privilege began aligning themselves with genocidal slaughterers by nightfall on Oct. 7 while convincing themselves that in so doing, they were standing up against … privilege. When it comes to Israel, waves not merely of inanity but of intimidation have swept through academia, with some faculty either sipping the Kool-Aid or distributing it, and where administrators are cowed. “Clearly,” Harris says in an email, “too many university administrators are fearful of radicalized students and, it should be stressed, faculty as well.
Jews don’t fare well in such a situation.”
Harris may be stately, but he’s blunt about the need for American Jews, from communal leadership on down, to ditch their complacency without further delay. “We need to stop mincing words when it comes to where the threats are,” he says. “We need to be much clearer in embracing our friends who have stood with us since October 7th and call out those institutions, individuals and groups who have abandoned us.” As for political action, “our votes, endorsements and support matter. They should be used wisely, ever cognizant of what we have witnessed, especially since October 7th.”
Harris’ message is stark. “Living with lingering illusions isn’t a strategy,” he says. “There have been hard lessons in the post-October 7th era. Clinging to those we thought were our friends and allies, but who went AWOL or much worse after the biggest one day calamity for us since the Holocaust, reveals a pathetic lack of self-respect.” Put simply, Harris says, it’s past time to let it be known that American Jews “won’t look the other way, remain quiet or easily forget.”
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