Should Jews Go Back Where They Came From

There are many reasons for the dramatic rise in antisemitism today. But antisemitism is not a new phenomenon. Its ebb and flow have been with us for thousands of years—ever since, according to Jewish tradition, Abraham smashed his father’s idols and rejected the pagan world around him. The Jewish people have been paying a price for that distinctiveness ever since.

Here is how antisemitism works.

Antisemites—and people willing to repeat claims without bothering to establish whether they are true—manufacture vile and vicious libels about Israel. They distort facts, omit context, recycle ancient accusations in modern language, and portray the Jewish state as uniquely evil.

Impressionable people—and those already predisposed to antisemitism—then seize upon those accusations as justification for hostility toward Jews. Israel becomes the excuse; Jews become the target. The ancient prejudice is repackaged as political righteousness.

And then comes the ultimate contradiction.

The same people who insist that Jews are responsible for Israel’s alleged crimes often insist that Jews have no legitimate connection to Israel at all and should “go back where they came from.”

But where, exactly?

Jews came from many countries because generations of Jews were exiled, expelled, persecuted, massacred, and driven from their ancestral homeland. Jewish dispersion is not evidence that Jews have no homeland. It is the consequence of having repeatedly been forced from one.

The inconvenient historical truth is that Judaism is more than a thousand years older than Christianity and two and a half millennia older than Islam. The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is therefore not a recent political invention. It is rooted in the Bible, in Jewish history, in Jewish religious practice, in Hebrew literature, and in a continuous Jewish presence in the land stretching back thousands of years.

Jews did not suddenly appear in Israel in the twentieth century. They returned to a land from which successive generations had been dispersed.

We came home. And we are here to stay.

And while we are dispensing advice about “going back where you came from,”  we should apply the rule universally.

Apart from Native Americans, everyone in America whose ancestors arrived from elsewhere should pack up and return to England, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland—and wherever else their ancestors “came from.”

Of course, virtually no one seriously believes that should happen. America is a nation of immigrants, and generations of people have made this country their home.

Let’s retire the “go back where you came from” argument altogether.

Because when it is directed at Jews, it is not merely historically ignorant, it is one of the oldest and ugliest forms of antisemitic hypocrisy: denying Jews the right that every other people is permitted to claim.