Students returning to Ivy League colleges to train as the next generation of America ’s ruling class are again demanding genocide against the Jews and supporting terrorists eager to undertake that evil work.
At Cornell University, anonymous “activists” boasted to a local newspaper that it was they who sprayed graffiti on buildings accusing the “fascist, classist, imperial” administration of having “blood on its hands” because it won’t boycott the Jewish state or demand that Israel end its existential fight to eradicate Hamas from Gaza.
Marchers chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a ritual invocation among those who want all Jews gone — how would that happen, one wonders — from the traditional Israelite homeland so it can be taken exclusively by the descendants of Arab colonists who conquered it in the seventh century.
I’ve been contemplating the latest recrudescence of bigotry in the United States and the explosion of Jew-hatred since some 1,500 people from Israel were tortured, murdered, and kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023.
I have found it illuminated by Connor Cruise O’Brien’s splendid 1986 history of Zionism, The Siege, in which the author cites a 1974 poll of Israeli students who were asked “Do you think that a Holocaust is possible in the future?” One in five said, “No, in no country,” 58% said, “Yes, but just in some countries,” and 22% replied, “Yes, in all countries.”
The author asks, “Can anyone, in their sane senses, imagine a Holocaust of Jews in the United States.” But his question is not simply rhetorical. O’Brien notes that “Israeli students are exceptionally mature, serious, and well informed,” and he points out that few people thought, when Imperial Germany before World War I was one of the most enlightened nations on Earth, that it would be capable of the murderous horror it perpetrated only a generation later.
It was after defeat and humiliation in 1918 that Germany turned in on itself and Jews were singled out for blame and persecution. “Nobody can believe,” O’Brien wrote only 38 years ago, “that persecution of the Jews is possible in contemporary America, a strong, long-established pluralist democracy, where the rule of law is better defended and safeguarded than in any other polity.”
But what if, he posits, “at some future time, in some unknown and barely imaginable circumstances, the United States might experience national disaster comparable in scale and effects to that sustained by Imperial Germany. Under such conditions, might not similar reactions occur: the search for scapegoats, the finding of the Jews?”
It is chilling stuff, partly because the subject is so inherently ghastly but also because radical changes in the U.S. since the 1980s make it a country lamentably unrecognizable to many of its citizens.
God forbid that a Holocaust of Jews is likely in America either soon or ever. But the circumstances that made it virtually inconceivable in the 1980s are now maintained much more precariously. A Jewish friend, as level-headed an analyst as you could hope for, told me, “I never worried until this year, but now I can visualize it happening, the course of events. It’s part of my worry about America and the crazy Left. Jews are moving to the Right.”
Is it true today that the rule of law is better defended and safeguarded here than anywhere else? Is law and order impressive in America at all, not just in comparison to other places? All over the nation, crime, including violent crime, is a more menacing presence than it used to be, according to a Justice Department survey, even though it is masked by less and less reliable statistics from the FBI.
Radical prosecutors are subordinating law enforcement to leftist ideology and ignoring crimes committed by favored groups, such as illegal immigrants. One of them, Vice President Kamala Harris, is the Democratic nominee for president. When she was a prosecutor in San Francisco, she “shielded illegal aliens — including those with criminal records — from prosecution, deportation, and the death penalty,” as legal scholars John Yoo and John Shu recently explained .
At the same time that America’s commitment to the rule of law has weakened, it has also become harder to say with conviction that the nation is strong, or to disbelieve in the possibility of national disaster.
Public debt is spiraling out of control, and politicians are decreasingly inclined to do anything about it. This puts our economy, our wealth and savings, and our currency in medium-term, no longer just long-term, peril.
We have also lost authority and respect abroad, alarming our allies and emboldening our enemies. There are growing doubts about whether our military can deter wars or, if they come, win them. This is an especial concern as China grows in power and hardens its determination to displace the U.S. as the world’s most powerful nation.
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Diminishment, disengagement, and impotence abroad combined with division, disorder, and impoverishment at home might constitute national disaster on the scale contemplated by O’Brien.
If so, most attention would naturally and rightly be focused on the calamity for America itself. But history warns that a people embittered by their humiliation and reduced circumstances would be expected to look for scapegoats. No wonder, as my friend noted, that “of course, all Jews are worried about this.”
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