If any of you imagined that the cold-blooded murder of four Jews in the Hypemarche Cacher would at least give some pause to those who reflexively insist that everything wicked in the world must be Israel's fault, Tim Willcox's fatuous harassment of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor during the Sunday rally would have put such delusions to rest.
Willcox's insistence that somehow Palestinian sufferings "at Jewish hands" provided "perspective" for the killings; was more hapless in its moral confusion and tin-eared in its tone than truly poisonous. But it was precisely its banality; the parroting of unexamined follies which have have become truisms in the media, that was so deeply depressing. How could the selection of a kosher supermarket (and it is now thought that the gunman's preferred target was a Jewish school at Montrouge save for intervention of the policewoman who paid for it with her life) be anything except the fault of the Jews themselves? Ultimately, it is the lame-brained notion that Israel is the cause of antisemitism, rather than caused by antisemitism, which is at the root of such obtuseness. Even as we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the word "genocide" (as I can attest from the more moronic of the trolls pursuing me) is more likely to be applied to Israel's war in Gaza than the industrially planned extermination of six million Jews.
fvPrepare yourselves for eye-rolling, for Shoah-exhaustion, for the "yes but" gang who will routinely call Netanyahu a "Nazi" and insist that Israel is as bad as, no worse than, the Third Reich. The ignorance which assumes somehow that antisemitism began with the creation of Israel is no excuse for these atrocities of logic and perversions of history but it is, alas the explanation. Such people know nothing of medieval history, of the blood libel for the most part a peculiarly English invention; of London's streets sewn with gallows and the swinging bodies of Jews in 1278, of the annihilation of Granada's Jews in 1066. To them the Inquisition is a Monty Python routine; and the pogroms a minor incident in an otherwise uninterrupted performance of Fiddler on the Roof.
What is to be done with such stopped ears and idle minds? What can be done except that which Jews are good at: educate, educate educate. Tell our story until some of it sinks in and changes minds. Explain the moral necessity of the saving homeland; open minds which assume somehow that there was no connexion between Jews and Eretz Yisrael until Herzl dreamed the whole thing up, that we never stopped being there, with our hearts and minds as well as our bodies. Take our history with its hard-earned achievements, its tragic disappointments; its glories as well as its ghettos out into the non-Jewish world.
Write a haggadah for the rest of our history, write it for non-Jews and invite them to Seder. Just this year omit Dayenu. For believe me our history as understood by the rest of the world is not enough.
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