This Dangerous Jewish Moment

By Yossi Klein Halevi

This concise article provides clear definition of modern and historic ‘antisemitism’, and explains the insidious threat of ‘anti-Zionism’.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His 2018 book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, was a New York Times bestseller. His 2013 book, Like Dreamers, won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Book of the Year Award.

EXCERPTS BELOW:

Arguably, no other people or faith (and the Jews are both) has had to contend through most of its history with a spiritual assault of this magnitude on its right to its own story. In the modern era, that assault assumed a secular form. In much of the Muslim world, led by the Iranian regime, and for neo-Nazis in the West, “Holocaust denial” is an attempt to undermine the moral argument for Israel as a necessary refuge for the Jewish people.

…

In the era of anti-racism and human rights, the Jewish state is turned into the criminal of nations, a symbol of racism and colonialism, and now even genocide. Reaching this conclusion requires a heavy dose of denialism: the erasure of the Zionist narrative, from the millennial-old Jewish roots in the land of Israel to the relentless war against Israel’s existence, which has forced Israel to act in sometimes brutal ways.

…

The pretext offered for the widespread support among anti-Zionists for the Hamas massacre is based on two “denialist” arguments. The first is that the massacre was the inevitable result of the Israeli occupation. This argument ignores the fact that Hamas’ goal is not the end of the occupation of the territories Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War but the destruction of the Jewish state. And it ignores the complicated history of how we have come to this point, including Palestinian rejection of every offer Israel has made over the years to end the occupation.