The Antisemitic Trope No One Talks About

In 1978, some Israelis moved into some buildings of a deserted a medical clinic in Hebron, Beit Hadassah. In 1980, the story hit the national news that Arab terrorists took up a position across the street from them and attacked them. As I discussed this with some coworkers over lunch, one person proclaimed,

“They shouldn’t have been there! That’s not their land!” I wasn’t anticipating this, but in one of the few times in my life a good response leapt to mind, I said,

“If it’s not their land, what was a Hadassah hospital doing there?” Silence descended on the table and I never got an answer to that question.

Today, as Palestinian supporters demonstrate around the world, the issue that I confronted more that 40 years ago is alive and well. Our right to live in Israel or in the West Bank is being questioned. I’ve come to think that Jews do have the right to live there, but not for the reasons most people think. The justifications we make—including the one I made at lunch—are largely irrelevant and are themselves based on an unspoken, ingrained, antisemitic belief. It is one that many Jews themselves endorse.

Justifying Where Jews Can Live

Typically, when we are challenged about the right to live in Israel, we fall back on justifications that involve archaeological evidence showing Jews lived there continuously since Biblical times. We argue that since we lived there previously, we should be able to live there now. But this standard has never been applied to anyone but Jews. For example, if being there first—or previously—matters, how do we justify the United States of America, which was built on land taken away from Native Americans?

Then there is the question of how long a group of people should live somewhere to establish their right to the land. History shows that, when it comes to Jews, no length of time is enough. Jews lived in Spain for about 1,000 years, ending with the expulsion in 1492. More recently, Jews lived in Yemen for about 2,000 years. That wasn’t long enough, because most of the Yemenite Jews were expelled in 1948. The Iranian Jewish community has roots in ancient Babylon. Apparently that wasn’t long enough either, because most of the Iranian community ran for it’s life when the Shah of Iran was deposed.

There is also a subtle trap in this thinking. If Jews have the right to live in Israel because our ancestors lived there, then Jews don’t have the right to live anywhere else in the world now. After all, there was a time when Jews didn’t live in the western hemisphere at all. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, there were between 1,000 and 2,500 Jews in the United States. Does that establish a right of Jews to live in the US? Probably not.

The second justification we rely on is that we are genetically related to Jews of ancient Israel. This argument is typically trotted out in response to the belief that Ashkenazic Jews are really descended from European Khazars and therefore don’t have any right to live in Israel or Palestine. In response, we argue about genetics and cite studies showing that Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have common genetics. But this evidence is pointless.

If genetics affect where one lives, then every country in the world would have to be racially pure. To get to racial purity in the modern world would take a lot of reshuffling of population. And where would people who are not “racially pure” live? All this argument about genetics simply echoes the beliefs of Nazis and white supremacists.

The Underlying Antisemitic Belief

When we talk about archaeology or genetics, there is an underlying belief that is clearly antisemitic, but never openly stated: that Jews can be prevented from living somewhere simply for being Jews. No other ethnic, racial, religious, or other minority has been justly held to that belief. If you don’t believe me, fill in the blank in the following sentence with any minority you want and see how it sounds:

“__________ can’t live there because it’s not their land.”

Or how about this sentence:

“__________ can’t live here because we don’t want them here.”

When applied to Jews, nobody even questions the validity of either of these sentences. Only Jews are required to justify our right to live somewhere, and in the end, it means that we can be expelled from literally anywhere.

After the War of Independence, about 17,000 Jews were expelled from there homes in the West Bank. The Palestinians have made conflicting statements, but Mahmoud Abbas openly declared that that they will not have Israelis living in Palestine. No one—except Israeli “settlers”—questions the Palestinian’s right to a country that is Judenrein. Instead, it is taken for granted that Jewish settlements are a “barrier to peace.” Nonsense. The real barrier to peace is the Palestinians’ antisemitism. If the Palestinians had been willing to live next door to Jews, a one-state solution would have been achieved in 1948, without bloodshed, and we wouldn’t be at this point today.

Where Jews Have the Right to Live.

Jews have the right to live somewhere simply because Jews want to live there. This may sound absolutely revolutionary (or “colonialist”) but in fact, it is undeniable. Think for a moment about a neighbor, doctor, or coworker you know who has a foreign accent. What gave them the right to live there? They wanted to. Yes, they had to go through the process of immigration and citizenship, but in most Western countries, there are laws in place that allow it. When there are laws or customs that actively deny that right to a minority, it is an injustice, pure and simple. Just listen to American liberals who want to enable more immigration to the US from South America and Central America to come to the US. Or, read Aljazeera on European immigration policy.

When European Jews were making Aliyah prior to World War I, the Ottoman Empire was willing to allow Jews to buy land and live there. So they did. When the British first acquired the Palestinian Mandate, they too allowed Jews to buy land and live there. Then, as clashes between Jews and Arabs increased, the British forbade Jews from entering. Back to “Jews don’t have the right to live there because they are Jews.”

More specifically, Jews have the right to live in Israel because, as Golda Meir told a much younger Joe Biden, we have no place else to go. For almost two thousand years, Jewish history went like this: Jews were “permitted” to live somewhere and it was OK or pretty good for a while. Then, things changed and Jews were expelled, losing most of their belongings and sometimes even their children in the process. Then Jews were “permitted” to live somewhere else, and the whole cycle repeated itself.

This cycle ended in 1939, when the world turned away from the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis. For the first time, Jews had no place to go, and six million Jews subsequently died. Even after the Shoah, when Jews were living in displaced persons camps, there was still no place to go. Jews sat in those camps while war criminals were being sent to the US to be resettled.

If Jews had lost the War of Independence, it is unlikely that the United Nations would have made any effort to establish a Jewish homeland. There would be no Jewish state to provide a haven for those fleeing antisemitism. And to borrow a line from the Haggadah, “We, our children, and our children’s children” would still be sitting in displaced persons camps in Europe.

Of all the minority groups in the world, Jews have the longest history of persecution. Our 2,000 year history in the Diaspora teaches that questioning our right to live somewhere is just another antisemitic trope. And, like many antisemitic tropes, its goal is to question our right to live as Jews and with the same rights as other people.