Israel, an Indispensable Haven

The ugly beast of anti-Semitism racing across the Jewish graveyard known as Europe has at least one saving grace.

It reminds us--now that Israel’s legitimacy is again being attacked--of the core reason for the Jewish state’s existence.

That Israel has the right to exist where it is--the simple, fundamental, historical right--is as certain and as evident as it’s always been. The Jewish people came alive there.

They grew up and matured there. They developed their civilization there. They created a faith there that became the source of the other Western faiths.

Despite defeats by larger powers, that land was their home--physical and spiritual--through more than a millennium of life and creativity. And in the two millenniums after their massive dispersion by the Romans, many Jews remained there, many more struggled to return there and the rest prayed for a national return to Zion in their daily rituals in every place of exile.

But it’s what happened to the Jews in their archipelago of exile--throughout those two millenniums but especially during the last century--that gives the inhabitants of the modern state of Israel, in addition to the right to live there, the urgency and necessity to do so.

Very simply, they were murdered again and yet again. True, usually they were only hounded. Often they were tolerated. In some places, at least for a while, they were welcomed. And in a few precious places they were allowed to truly flourish.

The most precious and anomalous such place--the one that has itself flourished because it is learning, after much grief and suffering, to allow all of its people to flourish--is America.

But, in the 1930s and 1940s, when Europe’s Jews needed a haven from the ferocious rampage of that continent’s anti-Semitic beast, even America didn’t open its arms. And the ashes and bodies of Europe’s murdered Jews filled that continent’s ravines, ditches, lakes, rivers and streams.

It didn’t have to be that way. Had the Jewish state that was created in 1948, after the Holocaust, been created only a decade earlier, those ashes and bodies would have remained living people, and they would have had a place to go. And the anti-Semitic beast, which at that time spoke German, would have been delighted to let them go.

Now the beast--reawakened from a sullen silence induced by half a century of Holocaust shame, and invoking justifications based on the struggle of the Jewish state to respond to massacres aimed at destroying it--speaks in other tongues as well and lives in a variety of European places.

Sometimes that beast still speaks German. But now it has greater fluency in French, both in France and in Belgium, and increasingly it’s growling across the channel in English and occasionally barks in Italian.

Its utterances have been heard in Russian too, as well as in Ukrainian. And for the first time in modern Europe it’s expressing itself, sometimes very forcefully and evermore viciously, in Arabic.

Fortunately, no country has yet countenanced that beast, and none is anywhere near mobilizing its vast powers in the service of the beast’s murderous ends.

One prays--indeed, one has the hopeful confidence--that none ever will.

But given the bitter lessons of recent history, against the background of two millenniums of bitter lessons, one would be foolish to be absolutely sure.

And one is reminded of that foolishness by the stirrings of the beast that currently prowls Europe, making noises in the form of street attacks on Jews in Paris, London, Berlin and Brussels, multiple synagogue bombings and torchings across the Continent, grave desecrations in Greece and France and malicious slurs in the politely powerful salons of elite society. In France alone, the beast’s current favorite lair, Jews experienced 360 attacks in the first two weeks of April.

Given the mortal stakes, it’s clear that Jews will never have secure homes anywhere unless they also have a national home in Israel--a haven to which they can escape from wherever they are if the beast of anti-Semitism is ever again given the power to put its passions in murderous gear.