The unholy alliance of certain academics and Christian pseudo-moralists with Jew-haters over the Gaza war isn't going to make the Jews go away
If you're dubious, I refer you to something called "the Bible"
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Amid the escalating turmoil of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests across U.S. college campuses on Wednesday, I did something I doubt any of my academic peers could not have even imagined doing.
I went to hear a talk about what the Bible actually says about the “signs of the times” and the two-thousand-year anticipation of committed Christian believers that Jesus is going to visibly appear on earth once more – the so-called “Second Coming”.
Normally I don’t go to talks regarding these kinds of subjects. The vast majority of them consist simply in the eccentric theories of some self-styled “prophet” or risibly overconfident student of scripture offering the latest authoritative “insight” into how to interpret once and for all the immense tangle of Biblical passages concerning the “end times”.
I certainly don’t pay attention to most of the labyrinthine, tiresome, and witless arguments relating to this problem on the internet.
And of course there is also the vast historical legacy of hypercharged “millennialist” movements, documented for example in the scholar Norman Cohn’s famous study, which expect the imminent end of the world, which of course doesn’t materialize.
The talk turned out to be a quite engaging and well-scripted medley of scholarship and contemporary reflection without any all-too-familiar over-the-top haranguing about whether we should scramble and get ready for Apocalypse-Now, or on the flip side any smarmy monologue as to the futility and stupidity of eschatological vision-casting.
The speaker focused on three irrefutable bullet points: one, that Jesus himself (in Matthew 24) was absolutely serious about “coming back; two, that garden variety Christian, including the most enthusiastic, hyperevangelical variety, doesn’t really take eschatology seriously enough (even though the early church was obsessed with it); three, that both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament (think Paul in Romans) do not envision the destiny of Christianity as separable in any manner from the destiny of the nation of Israel.
The third point especially caught my attention The speaker made the point that “no matter what the Jewish people do, God is not going to break his promise to Abraham [in Genesis] that he would give them the land of Canaan as a permanent inheritance (Genesis 17, Romans 4).
Which of course is exactly what the Bible does say (implicitly in even many more passages than the two just cited).
If one pays any attention to what Paul, of course, argues in his long discussion in Romans concerning the fraught relationship between Judaism and the followers of Jesus then known as “The Way”, it is obvious that there are two unshakable anchor points of the Christian faith as a whole – belief in the resurrection and acceptance of the fact that Christianity itself stands or falls with the credibility of God’s promise to the Jews.
Antisemitism is not merely a character defect of historic Christianity. It is the very antithesis to what Christianity is all about in the first place.
Yes, my Protestant friends, Luther got it so very, very wrong on this score.
My aim here, however, is not to stumble into the weeds of Christian theological controversies and polemics, particularly when it comes to interpretations of specific Biblical passages along with the “true” import of end times prophecies.
What has struck me ever since the carnage of October 7, together with the burgeoning and well-nigh obsessive anti-Israel (and frequently antisemitic) politics of America’s progressive (neoliberal) left, including those who remain religiously minded, is that we have crossed over into extremely dark, uncharted, and perilous territory.
Why are such a significant and sizable proportion of American academics – faculty as much as students – mindlessly tumbling like lemmings into de facto assent to the clearly antisemitic and neo-Nazi, genocidal program of Hamas, which its charter describes not merely as a struggle against the political entity Israel per se but as “a battle against the Jews”?
The charter itself makes blatantly and brutally clear what “from the river to the sea” genuinely means once implemented.
The almost habitual denial that it signifies something else is about as convincing as the routine, but ridiculous, insistence of segregationists during the Civil Rights movement that African-Americans were quite happy with Jim Crow legislation.
Eliminating the state of Israel and expelling - in practice that would mean killing - Jews is egregiously disproportionate to even the most heinous alleged “crimes” of its government over the years.
Let’s consider the charge that Israel is an “apartheid” state, an attribution that completely falls apart when one analyzes what the term actually connotes historically.
Did the global anti-apartheid protesters demand that once the noxious system of racial segregation and discrimination was brought down that all white people be compelled to leave South Africa?
Of course not.
Or, as one Columbia professor quipped in an interview with the liberal British publication The Guardian:
Even if you are unhappy about the policies of Mexico, if somebody would be shouting ‘we don’t want Mexicans here’ the university would act very quickly.
The iron logic of “from the river to the sea” would undoubtedly be that every descendant of American immigrants over the last five hundred years be forcibly sent back to their country of origin.
And that ignores the fact even that at the time Jews began immigrating to Palestine in the late 19th century they were already a significant minority of the population whose ancestors had been present there since Roman times.
The scholastic mediocrity masquerading as intellectual sophistication as well as the cloying, monochrome politicized groupthink that has permeated the halls of ivy for the entire half century I myself have been in the business is now metastasizing into a noxious and de facto polemical pogrom of Jew defamation.
Some previously reasonable and fair-minded colleagues in my own field now vent routinely on Twitter, casually referring to Jews in general as “Zionists” - and not at all with neutral connotations – while callously and increasingly referring to them as perpetrators of “genocide” as if the accusation were settled historical fact rather than an overdetermined and prima facie libelous canard.
Even from faculty at my own institution, which so far for the most part has resisted the tide of political madness, I hear the repeated drum roll of praise for those “courageous” student protesters who continually spout the mantras of Hamas, even while two Jewish students recently complained to a local television station:
I never thought that I would have to live through what my great-grandparents had to live through…It feels like I am being persecuted against my religion, once again. I shouldn’t have to be afraid to wear my star. I should feel proud to be a Jew. I should not have to walk on campus and have people say, ‘Go back to Nazi Germany.’ That’s not okay.
Anti-war protest is a time-honored, worthy, and Constitutionally guaranteed right in both American jurisprudence and lived history, but raw antisemitism such as the kind recounted above has no excuse on any college campus, especially my own. The dogged see-no-evil attitude of so many faculty is not only hypocritical, it is morally bankrupt.
But let us return for a moment to the bigger picture of what is happening on the international stage these days. In spite of the repugnant radical chicness of Hamas these days, numerous historians have traced the unmistakable and intimate link between Nazism and anti-Israeli ideology, in particular that of Hamas.
The linkage can be found not only among Islamist terrorist groups, but as University of Texas historian David Patterson observes in his book A Genealogy of Evil,
The Jew hatred the characterizes Islamic jihadism is not about Zionism or the Jewish presence in the Middle East; it is about the Jewish presence in the world.
But that global “Jewish presence” is not going away any time soon and, if we take the Bible seriously, never!.
And also, ironically, if we take the whole progressive notion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, regardless of its documented “worst practices”, seriously also.
As a famous rabbi has said, “antisemitism is never ultimately about Jews. It is about a profound human failure to accept the fact that we are diverse and must create space for diversity if we are to preserve our humanity.
Both legend (think the Book of Esther) and lived history (think Hapsburg Spain, notwithstanding Nazi Germany) have demonstrated time and time again that monomaniacal projects to eliminate the Jews may cause misery among “God’s chosen” for a season, but ultimately results in the collective ruin of the persecutor.
And I’m sure the lesson applies to the American university community as well.
The incensed, yet totally ignorant student minions chanting “from the river to the sea” and “f—k the Jews”, egged on by their not-so-innocent and depraved faculty mentors, are obviously and ruefully unaware of the fact that the displacement and desperation of the Palestinians is not due, so far as self-evident and documented history is concerned, to Israel’s “colonial” rapacity on “indigenous” land – a patent, but inconvenient untruth that sustains a popular and hideously false narrative concocted by ideologically disingenuous poseurs with PhDs who harbor homicide in their little black hearts.
The situation is the direct outcome of two failed wars initiated by the Palestinians themselves and their Arab allies in 1948 and 1967 with the stated aim of making the region “from the river to the sea”, as the Nazis would have put it, Judenrein (“cleansed of Jews”).
Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser launched the Six Day War in 1967 by mobilizing his Palestinian and Arab allies, encircling the then much smaller Israeli state, and with bluster and bravado announced he was bent on “driving the Jews into the sea.”
For several tense weeks all indicators were that he would invariably succeed.
That was, of course, before Israel launched a surprise attack on the encircling armies early in the morning of June 5, destroyed their air force, and broke the encirclement, saving the “Jews” from a second Holocaust.
The miraculous military feat, which saved the Jews from extermination over a half century ago and which most everybody (including those alive at the time) have opportunely and almost completely forgotten, was clearly to many of the Israelis of that generation one more explicit confirmation that their God was truly em-manu-el, “God with us”.
The “occupation”, which current protesters continue to cite as the casus belli for trying to “drive the Jews into the sea” for one more time, was and remains the result of a demonstrable attempt at a “final solution” to the Jewish problem in the Middle East, if not the world.
Despite the attempts of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in the 1970s to make peace with Israel (he was thanked for his efforts by assassination on the part of radical jihadists) and the initial success of the Oslo Accords, which collapsed quickly because of a lukewarm attitude on the part of then Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chief Yasser Arafat and, ironically, its sabotage by a nascent Islamist movement in early 1996 known as Hamas, conditions on the ground have not changed in 76 years.
Generation after generation tries to engineer a political, diplomatic, or even military “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian fiasco while refusing to confront the basic historical facts that have made the situation intractable.
Every time they do the mess grows worse and the mire deeper.
Perhaps we need to pay more attention to Biblical eschatology and put less of our confidence to the monkeys in striped suits who are clueless about how vain and fruitless it is to continue trying to play God in God’s own back yard.