One year on from the end of illusions

The Jewish people are no stranger to illusions; to false hopes and false prophets. The Jews of western Europe believed that the Enlightenment, which had opened up so many doors once firmly shut, would spell the end of persecution and discrimination. Instead, the most enlightened population in Europe elected to power the greatest mass-murderer of the Jewish people in our history.

In eastern Europe, many Jews embraced communism as a liberating force. Instead, it destroyed freedom of religion – even freedom of thought for many. And the Soviet Union would go on to manufacture and promote anti-Zionism as a new form of antisemitism, not only enduring, but positively thriving today.

In the Israel of the 1990s, many believed in the illusion that peace with the Palestinians was imminently achievable, only to be suicide-bombed back into reality during the Second Intifada.

October 7, 2023 shattered multiple illusions. First and foremost was the 75-year illusion that having our own state would mean we could never be subject to mass murder again; that we would never see entire communities of Jews slaughtered, raped and tortured. Not now we had our own army; our own government that we, a majority Jewish population, elected. October 7 taught us that our certainty on this score was tragically foolish. Our army and our government are comprised of all-too-fallible human beings. And it turns out that military leaders can suffer from hubris and complacency. Political leaders can be corrupt, and drunk with power or mad ideologies; obsessively pursuing ruinous policies designed to prolong their rule. We paid the highest price possible for these human failings.

Another illusion destroyed one year ago today was the idea that we could live with genocidal enemies on our borders. In retrospect, what on earth were we thinking? We convinced ourselves that Hamas could be mollified by Qatari cash, and that the threat from Hezbollah was a can to be indefinitely kicked down the road. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the emergence in the Middle East of a regime committed to Israel’s destruction as a religious imperative, the clock has been ticking. In Iran and its Palestinian and Lebanese (not-to-mention Yemenite and Iraqi) proxies, Israel faces a quite different enemy than the secular Arab and Palestinian nationalists of the past. This is Nazi-level implacable hatred; and – as we were shocked to the core to discover a year ago – Nazi-level genocidal barbarism. For all the calls for a ceasefire (including from many of our friends) you’ll find very few Israelis willing to end this war unless and until Hamas and Hezbollah are removed from Gaza and Southern Lebanon. Or at least until their capacity to harm us is removed.

Finally, October 7 – or more accurately, every day since then – has removed any doubts any of us had that antisemitism remained a potent force in Western societies. As wake-up calls go, there is nothing quite like hearing tens of thousands of people chanting “Intifada Now” and “From the River to the Sea”, in the wake of October 7. In that context, it seems to me, there is no way to hear these slogans other than as endorsements of the savagery and sadism visited on those Gaza-border Kibbutzim and the Nova music festival.

The anti-Zionism of my student days has been upgraded several notches. Not just “apartheid Israel” anymore, but “genocidal Israel”. Not just the occasional demonstration or student protest or, but regular mass rallies and campus encampments. And most unnervingly of all, not just euphemistic talk of “Zionists”, but explicit calls for “death to the Jews”. At universities in North America, Jews are made to feel unwelcome not just by fellow students but by faculty. At Ivy League institutions where free speech is routinely curtailed to avoid “offending” any number of minority groups, calling for the mass murder of Jews is an inalienable right. In the literary world, “Zionist” (that is to say, “Jewish”) authors are being blacklisted.

October 7 asked the world a question: What is your response today, 80 years after the Holocaust, to the gleeful slaughter, rape and torture of hundreds of Jewish men, women and children? The answer from an inexplicably large number of ordinary people, was to identify unequivocally with the perpetrators.

And yet, there is a hopeful illusion-shattering too. The notion that we, the Jewish people, are a nation that dwells alone was also revealed to be an illusion on October 7. There have been many eloquent non-Jewish writers, thinkers, politicians, activists, who have spoken out on our behalf in the media; facing hostile interviews and even more hostile members of the public. Not just long-time friends like Douglas Murray or Richard Kemp, but people with no record of Israel advocacy or involvement with Jewish affairs. People like John Spencer, the Urban Warfare expert at West Point; or Andrew Fox, the former British paratrooper and lecture at Sandhurst; or John Fetterman, the United States Senator for Pennsylvania.

These friends of Israel, and many more like them, possess the most valuable trait that any observer or analyst of a war can have: moral clarity. It is obvious to them, in a way that it should be to everyone but somehow isn’t, that Israel is fighting against irredeemable evil; against an ideology that celebrates the death of innocent men, women and children – including those on its own side!

We didn’t know this war would still be going on 12 months later, that we would still have hostages in Gaza. It is an ongoing trauma for the Jewish state and the Jewish people. But though we have not yet ended the trauma, let us learn from these shattered illusions, and act and plan accordingly.