How the West was won: Radical Islamism and surging antisemitism

Antisemitic rhetoric and violence in western countries has increased dramatically in recent years, playing out in the universities, the social media, and the streets. It has become common in cities and towns throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and beyond to see protesters chanting pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas slogans, along with anti-Israel and antisemitic invective, occupying universities and public spaces, and confronting those who dare oppose them, sometimes violently. With faces often hidden behind checkered keffiyehs it is difficult or impossible to distinguish who among them are liberals rallying to the defensible cause of saving the lives of innocents, who are hardcore right wing antisemites, and who are fanatical Islamists dedicated to dismantling Israel and intimidating its supporters into silence.

The strange alliance between progressive leftists and radical Islamist, who have incongruously opposed aspirations and world-views, has been supercharged by the war in Gaza, enabling these strange bedfellows to join in common cause. Progressives can justify their protest by expressing it as principled support for a stateless, humiliated people who are suffering and dying under the oppressive thumb of an occupying colonialist interloper. To the Islamists the war in Gaza is a divinely-inspired battle to exterminate the infidel political entity contaminating the heart of the Muslim world; it is the necessary first step in their mission of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East and ultimately beyond.

In targeting Diaspora Jews with antisemitic invective and physical intimidation, both groups implicitly acknowledge the fundamental importance of the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and their historical, religious, and emotional connection to it. In doing so they inadvertently expose the bankruptcy of their core rhetorical arguments, which are based on denying the indigeneity of Jews to the historical land of Israel, asserting that only (Muslim) Palestinians have the right to self-determination in the ancestral homeland they share with the Jews. Together they chant slogans, march in protest, and (ironically) stage their own occupations, with visions of an ideal future strengthening their resolve. To the western progressives that vision is of an Edenic secular state of Palestine – liberal, tolerant, multicultural, modern. The vision of the Hamas supporters and their Islamist fellow travellers is of a Palestine that is theocratic, repressive, misogynistic, and homophobic. The only points of commonality in their visions are that Palestine will be Jew-free and that it will stretch “from the river to the sea”.

In the past, progressives were more likely to identify with nominally secular Palestinian factions such as Fatah. But radical Islamists have largely displaced these ineffectual secularists in upholding the cause of Palestinian nationalism, since the latter failed to deliver the goods over nearly a century, attributing their dismal failure to the duplicitous Zionists. There are two things wrong with this picture. To the Islamist fundamentalists, Palestinian nationalism is a false flag held up to rally the masses. Their goal is not the creation of yet another Arab nation-state, but rather the establishment of a Middle Eastern caliphate uncontaminated by an alien autonomous Jewish entity. Secondly, the failure of successive generations of Palestinian leadership to achieve self-determination is not attributable to Zionist aggression, but to their own consistent rejection of any compromise, of their refusal to acknowledge that the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination in their shared ancestral homeland. A path to a free Palestine alongside a free Jewish state was proposed to them in 1937 (the Peel Commission), 1947 (UN Resolution 181), 2000 (Camp David), 2005 (the Gaza withdrawal), 2008 (the Olmert proposal); furthermore, they declined to follow that path and between 1948 and 1967 when the territory they claim as rightfully theirs was occupied not by the Jews but by their Arab brethren. Every opportunity was contemptuously rejected by Palestinian leaders who have clung to their maximalist demands, and who unleashed the murderous Intifadas to vent their rage.

The Islamists in the west are perceptive enough to recognize that their aspiration to refashion western societies as illiberal theocracies would make little headway in winning progressives to their cause. They therefore developed a strategy to recruit the progressive left into the diaspora front of their global campaign against the Jews. To do so they have characterized the war in Gaza as one in which Israel, the expansionist, genocidal Zionist entity, is violently suppressing the virtuous struggle of the dispossessed Palestinian people for dignity and self-determination in their homeland. This characterization is catnip to the progressive left, so much so that anti-Zionism has become emblematic of the larger struggle against what they view as white capitalist settler colonialism. The twin slogans “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” and “Death to Zionism” are morally corrupt and historically illegitimate, explicitly denying to Jews the rights that they demand for Palestinians. Naive liberals are blind to the fact that this denial is the latest iteration of the endlessly mutable virus of antisemitism.

They are also oblivious to the fact, or else consider it irrelevant, that the Islamists with whom they have made common cause have no interest in Palestinian lives or Palestinian nationalism, that the Hamas “freedom fighters” who they vigorously support are terrorists whose goal is not a secular Palestine but a repressive theocracy, that Israel has no territorial ambitions in Gaza, that the war was started when Hamas invaded Israel, or that the war would have been instantly over at any moment since its onset if Hamas agreed to lay down arms and allow an alternate government to rule Gaza.

Thankfully, the Middle Eastern front in the war against the Jews has not gone as well as the western one. As public intellectuals such as Micah Goodman and Einat Wilf have pointed out, this was not inevitable. Hamas’ barbaric invasion of October 7, 2023 was not conceived as a desperate, doomed suicidal operation. The late Sinwar brothers and their followers indeed foresaw a path to victory, with the Israeli house of cards toppling in disarray. Their triumph would be accomplished, they believed, as part of a collaborative regional operation, bolstered by a simultaneous overwhelming invasion by the potent Hezbollah forces in the north, spontaneous uprisings by Arabs in the West Bank and in Israel proper, sniping by Yemeni Houthis from the south, and as the tide of battle turned, perhaps joined by their Islamist brethren from Syria and Iraq. With continued material and financial support from Iran and Qatar, and of course with God’s help, victory was assured against an enemy that had become flabby and complacent due to western materialism and demoralized by irreconcilable internal factional divisions.

Israel has prevailed since the atrocities of October 7 because Hamas overestimated the solidarity of its allies and underestimated the solidarity of Israelis. Its supporters and apologists in the global West have been considerably more astute in reading the public mood and strategizing how to take advantage of it, by leveraging pro-Palestinian sentiment and “anti-Zionism” to normalize antisemitism. It remains uncertain whether our societies will clear the scales from our eyes and see this threat for what it is, as Israelis were forced to do before it was too late.