They don’t really like us

Yom HaZikaron begins on Monday night, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut starts on Tuesday night. For Israelis — and for the rest of us, but with more distance and therefore less intensity — Tuesday is a day of mourning and gratitude. Wednesday, marking the birth of the modern state of Israel, is a day of celebration, again more immediate and therefore more joyful there than here.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. But it’s been hard for the last two years — the first was just months after October 7, and the second, last year, was after the world had started to change.

This year it might be very difficult.

It is painful to see how the public attitude toward Israel has changed, but there is no point pretending that it hasn’t. Looking the other way isn’t useful. We can debate the reasons, argue about whose fault it is — many if not most of us have strong feelings about it, I know I do, and that debate is necessary and should happen soon. But it won’t be right here, in this column, right now.

Now, I just want to say that no matter who or what you think is responsible for the shift, it’s happened.

I see it when I read opinion pieces, and even more in comments sections, which tend to be less well written and cruder. I hear it when I listen to podcasts.

Antisemitism has taken many forms over the millennia. The cliché is of course true — not all anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitic. Benjamin Netanyahu is a deeply skilled politician, remarkably gifted at being able to stay in power, but that does not make him beloved, particularly in the outside world. To be clear, many people — including many Israelis — detest and distrust him.

We could debate Gaza endlessly. I won’t. But I will say that whether or not Israel’s actions in Gaza were justified, much of the world hates Israel because of what they saw of them.

And now Israel is seen as being responsible for the war in Iran, which is deeply unpopular and wreaking havoc on the economy.

And then of course there is the antisemitism that courses below everything. As Abe Foxman often points out, and I often repeat because it’s true, antisemitism has always been in the sewers, even here in America, the goldene medina. But since the end of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, it had been kept out of sight, held back by sewer covers. But in the last decade those caps have been unscrewed — or maybe the pressure coming from the sewer exploded them open — and rank, putrid antisemitism is oozing out.

It seems to be true that those of us who were born in the second half of the twentieth century were incredibly lucky. It certainly wasn’t a perfect time, but back then, the long arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice.

It seems to have bent back now. It’s boomeranging in the other direction. We’d better watch out — it’s aimed straight at our heads.

But — and there always is a but, because there always is hope — we have weathered this and far worse before. That’s the amazing thing. We are a very, very old people. We always come back. We always recover. And we will this time too. But it would be a very good idea for us to pay attention, to acknowledge the obvious, and to figure out how to deal with it.

Meanwhile, let’s remember, with gratitude, the people who died in creating and maintaining the state of Israel, and celebrate its birth with joy on these ravishing spring days.

—JP

opinion