The average reader will be shocked by the news coming out of US universities. More than half a hundred higher education institutions have been the scene of radical riots by pro-Palestinian university youths, with some of the protests still ongoing. Campuses are being occupied, with property being vandalized, windows smashed in, Jewish or possibly Jewish students being intimated and sometimes attacked, with protesters calling for the abuse and extermination of Israelis and Zionists (that is, Jews). Their chief slogan is ‘globalize the intifada!’
But what is ‘intifada’? The term roughly translates from Arabic as ‘shaking off’, and refers to the waves of terror of 1987–1993 and 2000–2005, when Palestinian extremists killed some 1,210 Israeli civilians over 11 years, and Israeli forces eliminated 4,300 Palestinian attackers. These were the times of such ‘heroic’ acts as the targeted shooting to death of Israeli ten-month-old baby Shalhevet Pas by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron.
The protesters are now calling for the ‘globalization’ of this wave of terror. They are threatening Jews in the diaspora, whether American, British, or whatever citizens, who have nothing to do with Israel or the war in Gaza. The progressive press is quick to report: this is not a call for genocide, at least according to the left-wing academics and professors who are being interviewed, as there is a fine line between the two; so, once again the right-wing media is the distorting things.
‘Globalize the intifada’ is the new ‘Je suis Paris’.
You may laugh at the white female student demanding food and drink from the administration of an Ivy League university, after barricading herself along with her peers, while doing a PhD in radical feminist literature and making statements to the media, but the story goes deeper than that. On 30 October 2018, I wrote an article for the Hungarian weekly Mandiner titled ‘Will the US remain a safe haven for Jewry?’. The article was about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that took place that day. ‘The Pittsburgh attack is a sign that something has changed forever,’ I wrote at the time. I could neither add to nor take away from the article today. Until now, America has been seen by Jews as a kind of refuge, as an example of irrefutable eternal liberalism. Europe has fallen in the twentieth century, but America, like Israel, will always be waiting with open arms, the conviction has been. There was no ‘Jewish question’ there.
But the progressive side has just created such a ‘Jewish question’. The left has discovered the concept of race, merged it with other dimensions of oppression (class, gender), and now they have made the Jews into a new oppressive caste alongside Christian Protestants. After 1967 they focused only on ‘Zionists’ and ‘Israelis’; now the Jews of the diaspora are the opponents. They don’t even hide their intentions, attacking synagogues, looking for ‘enemies’ who ‘look Jewish’ in the classrooms and in the corridors.
The attacks have nothing to do with Israel: they are intended to intimidate the Jewish American community.
All this is coupled with the fact that after October 7, more and more Jews are thinking that maybe Israel can’t protect them either. It seems that the gates are closing fast for Western Jews.
Long ago, the radical black Muslim preacher Macolm X spoke about how black Americans have never experienced the American dream, only the ‘American nightmare‘. (True enough, Malcolm X was a racist and an antisemite in his early period, but later on his views started to change; I don’t think it is a sacrilige to quote him in a conservative paper). Now, to paraphrase Malcolm X, it looks like American Jewry, which has lived in safety until now, is experiencing one such nightmare. Its source are not (only) the rural skinheads as seen in American History X. It looks like the attack is coming from the left as well: the woke youth has joined the Arab and Muslim students.
American Jewry is technically under attack by three forces. The radical left is attacking them for being Zionists and pro-Israel. The radical right is attacking them because they believe that Jews are undermining the United States. Radical Muslims and Arabs are attacking them because they are Jewish. At the same time, assimilation is reducing the numbers of halachically Jewish Americans even further. Those who, under the stress of antisemitism, choose dissimilation, or leave the country.
But it doesn’t matter where these physical atrocities are coming from. Whatever the current slogan, the result is the same: Jewish people attacked and intimidated in the homeland of Western liberty. In light of these developments, it is a legitimate question whether there will be any significant Jewry in the United States in the next century.
