March 7^th

Today I’m going to speculate about the current rash of anti-Semitism. Of course anti-Semitism is not new but it is increasing. I’m going to hazard some guesses about why this is happening. First some givens: Israel is a small but powerful country; its army is quite capable of defending its territory from any attacker or combination of attackers. However, an enemy with atomic weapons is obviously an existential threat whether or not Israel also possesses these weapons.

In 2014 various attacks on Israel civilians by Hamas, a terrorist organization based in Palestinian territory, resulted in a reply by the Israeli military. The result was that 66 Israeli soldiers were killed and 2200 Palestinians were killed. (Palestinian deaths are variously estimated depending on the source.) Suffice it to say that the death toll was widely disproportionate between the two sides. This is typically the case when Israel decides on punitive efforts against attacks from the Palestinian territory.

In addition to the Palestinian deaths Israel usually demolishes homes which they believe have harbored terrorists or have been in any way involved in the attacks on Israel. These demolitions in 2014 left 60 thousand people homeless. At the same time Israel excludes many relief organizations from Palestine territory because they claim these organizations are pro-Palestinian. When various organizations attempt to censure Israel for this behavior the United States vetoes the censure. It seems clear that Israel believes that if they respond to Hamas with disproportionate force they can stop Hamas from attacking them. It isn’t working!

It is not working and it is producing some ill will partly because many people tend to favor the underdog in any contest and the disproportionate number of casualties in these affairs clearly show that the Palestinians are the underdogs. I believe that Hamas knows this and is quite deliberately provoking the Israeli attacks to gain world-wide sympathy for their cause. Putting their munitions and rocket launchers in residential areas is, I believe, an attempt to gain sympathy since they know that Israel will, quite predictably smash them and cause many civilian casualties.

As sympathy for Israel declines so does tolerance for Jews world-wide who have no connection whatever with Israel; this is not dissimilar to the attacks on Muslims and their mosques even if they have no connection with ISIS or other Muslim extremists. The process is called generalization, if you cannot attack the thing that irritates you then attack something similar.

Perhaps an additional comment about terrorists: Israel, as a state, owes a great deal to Irgun, a terrorist (Freedom Fighter?) group whose activities killing and bombing in British controlled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s helped to encourage the British to leave and produced the Jewish State. Their most notable attack was the bombing of the King David Hotel which killed 91 people. Israel now has plaques celebrating this event. Go figure!