For more than a year, Jews inside and outside the State of Israel have been besieged by false claims of the “genocide” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The rhetoric of the pro-Hamas mob—“We don’t want no Zionists here,” “Go back to Poland” and so on—has been ugly enough to make Nazi Germany proud. The real-world impact—arson and gun attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions from Canada to Australia, a pogrom in Amsterdam, physical and sexual assaults on those wearing identifiably Jewish symbols, creeping discrimination against “Zionists” in the worlds of art and medicine and academia, and too many other such episodes to comprehensively list here—is all too reminiscent of Nazi thuggery.
There is no longer any doubt that Jewish communities are facing the worst upsurge of antisemitism since World War II. At the root of the current onslaught is what my JNS colleague Melanie Phillips calls “Palestinianism,” which, she argues, “seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history and the world.” That explains the fixation with affixing the label “genocide” to Israel’s military response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, which were themselves an act of genocide, intentionally targeting Jews because they are Jews living in their historic homeland. Yet in public relations terms, we have to concede that this has been a blood libel with legs, embraced not just by the keffiyeh-clad automatons but by governments from Ireland to South Africa, as well as by the United Nations, whose secretary-general, António Guterres, opined last September to
