Defiance

We must be defiant in the face of today’s anti-Semitism. We must fight against the myth that we are destined to be unwelcome strangers in the lands in which we sojourn.

I recall reading the historian Graetz who maintained that when the Jews were expelled from Spain the population was approximately equally divided between Jews, Muslim, and Christians. Each community had about a quarter of a million people. I have been led to believe that modern scholars do not accept those numbers and there remains disputes about how many Jews actually were left in Spain after the persecutions, mass killings, and conversions that took place in 1390.

Regardless, my thought on reading Graetz (and then visiting Spain and seeing what a glorious country it is), was why did the Jews not resist the expulsion. Why didn’t they take up arms against the Spanish throne? Was it a practical decision – they were too weak – or was it buried deep in our consciousness as Jews that we did not belong in Spain and only had the right to live there because of the beneficence of the monarchy? I understand that Abarbanel tried to use his influence at the court, but that he failed. His effort was noteworthy but not up to the standard of what we can do today.

We the Jews of the Diaspora, especially those of us in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and France have to let go of the mentality in which we don’t show defiance in the face of attacks against us.  We belong in the countries of the Diaspora as much as any other people. We are citizen and have been for over a century in most countries. No one can take this away from us.

We must expunge the story of inevitable anti-Semitism, persecution, and expulsion from every Diaspora land in which we have lived.

There are legitimate ways to fight back. We have defense organizations. I need not name them all here. They can and should and, in many respects, are taking up the battle on our behalf. They must not relent and succumb to the idea that we all should make aliya, that that is the only path to safety, which is what many anti-Semites want, and sadly what some Jews are calling for as well.

Would we all be safer in Israel then in the Diaspora? Despite Zahal and the state, I think the evidence until now still points to greater safety in the Diaspora. Many more have died or been maimed in terrorist incidents in Israel then in the Diaspora.  Before Australia there were terrible incidents in France, Austria, and the US, but nothing as persistent and on the scale of the incidents in Israel. Perhaps in the future this will not be so. My hope is for zero incidents in Israel and the Diaspora, but that is not currently likely.

So, we must be defiant. Both communities — those in the Diaspora and Israel —  must act to defend us with all the power and might they can command.

And we must be aware that we are not powerless. We are not the Jews of Spain or the Jews of other Diaspora communities through the ages. The Diaspora today is not the same as the Catholic Europe of the Middle Ages. It is not Czarist or Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany. It is not inevitable that it will become like any of these communities.

We have resources at our command and if we mobilize them and use them wisely, we can manage this crisis. The crisiswill not go away quickly, and we are unlikely to be able to manage it perfectly, but we can manage it if we have the will to do so. We must be defiant in the face of our enemies and have the will to fight.

Despite the strength of the today’s anti-Semites on the left and on the right, they do not stand up to the power we still have in many of Diaspora communities, if we use that power well. Of course, we have to prepare for all contingencies and this may mean extraordinary efforts and innovative approaches, but they are not outside our reach. We can flood social media.  We can tell honest and positive stories about ourselves. We can criticize members of Diaspora and Israel communities if their actions are abhorretn.

We are free. We can “out” outrageous persons who, by intent or misunderstanding, express hatred toward us. We can and we will continue to make them apologize and if they don’t apologize make them pariahs.

We must fight back and we will. There is so much more to do. I am only touching the surface.

There always has been room in Zionist thinking for strong and viable Diaspora communities. We cannot give up on that idea. I don’t think the only solution is aliya. We have to keep fighting here in the Diaspora, and if we do (and Israel helps us), we may not be able to totally prevail – anti-Semitism is a sickness that will never go away —  but we will be far better off.

We have to have the dignity to fight . That is the lesson we should learn from our history, not to succumb to an old narrative that, however embedded in our psychic unconscious, is no longer needed.

We are a new Diaspora,  partially because there is a state of Israel.

We are not the Diaspora of of old. We must be defiant.