It's time to accept as a fact of life: People love dead Jews.

Not for nothing did author Robert Wistrich call antisemitism the world’s oldest hatred.

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This is a guest essay written by Stephen Schecter of Stephen’s Substack.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/people-love-dead-jews

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The worldwide reaction regarding Israel’s response to the Gaza invasion of its territory and the carnage Hamas inflicted on its citizens is ample testimony to the persistence of Jew hatred far beyond the confines of the Western swath of humanity.

What is surprising is how Jews still wish to combat it; how they get caught up in the racism of their enemies, thinking there is some strategy they can come up with to fight and defeat it — and so proliferate across the Western world, which is where most of the Jews outside Israel reside, and organizations are designed to fight antisemitism and to protest against calumnies directed against Jews and the Jewish state.

As if up until now there have been no such successful strategies, but in the future there will be. All one needs is to research the question, figure out the appropriate response, and go to work.

Wrong again, unfortunately.

But then what, asks the reader?

And then this: Simply accept as a fact of life that people love dead Jews and, if you are Jewish or the Jewish state, go about your business doing what you have to do.

After all, people love dead Jews so much they have turned the Holocaust into an icon of memorializing and appropriating “Never Again” into a slogan they turn against the one embodiment of living Jews, namely the State of Israel, hypocritically asserting Israel’s right to defend itself while sabotaging Israel whenever it does so.

Look at the current situation as Israel fights to destroy Hamas in Gaza. After the world got over its initial shock at the savage and degrading attack on Israeli citizens on October 7th, 2023, it got back to business as usual, putting Israel’s military operation on the back burner of justice and politics in favor of the ongoing lament about civilian casualties in Gaza.

Innocent civilian casualties, as they are continuously described, even as the unearthed evidence mounts up showing that most Gazan residents fully and enthusiastically embraced Hamas.

Indeed, in the bizarre reckoning of diplomatic experts, TV anchors, and government leaders of the Western world, Israel’s declared war aim of defeating Hamas is excoriated because, it is claimed, even if Israel succeeds in doing so, it will be unable to defeat the ideology Hamas embodied embraced by the Palestinian people.

What is needed, on the other hand, is to win over the Palestinians by granting them a path to statehood once the war is over, that “wet dream” of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and all his counterparts in the intellectual morass of the Western world and beyond, regardless of the fact that every previous such path to statehood has led to disaster.

For those who still cling to the murderous fantasy of the two-state solution — and that includes far too many Jews inside and outside Israel — reality is no teacher. Antisemitism and its appeasers are not so easily uprooted. Living Jews are always expendable. That the notorious UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been shown to be knowingly complicit in Hamas’ activities is not sufficient proof to dislodge such thinking.

Internet servers under hospitals, weaponry hidden in children’s bedrooms, armaments smuggled in from Egypt through hundreds of miles of tunnels are not enough evidence to show how complicit the entire Palestinian population of Gaza was and is in the Hamas agenda to wipe out the State of Israel.

Nor is the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) approve of the October 7th invasion and desecration of Jewish life in Israel, even more than their Gazan counterparts.

Instead, the President of the United States, no less, can only find time to sign an executive order declaring a national emergency that requires banning four Jewish farmers in Judea and Samaria from entering the United States and authorizing the seizure of their American assets.

The disgrace of this laughable action is only exceeded by Bank Leumi following suit in Israel, thereby leaning credence to this latest blood libel that it is “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria that is jeopardizing any hope for peace in the region.

That Israeli police statistics show most violence that occurs in that neck of the earth’s woods comes from Palestinians who regularly bomb, assassinate, and attack Jews in their cars, on their streets, and in their bedrooms is of no consequence.

That retaliation by Israeli residents in Judea and Samaria, whose residence is totally legal according to the 1990s Oslo Accords signed by the authorities now governing the Palestinian Authority, is rare — is also of no consequence when you are trying to make it seem as though Palestinian violence and Israeli retaliation in Gaza are both morally and factually equivalent.

To which, of course, is added the omnipresent clucking of tongues about the mounting death toll in Gaza, as if war is not supposed to bring death upon those who unleash it. Ethical theory — bad ethical theory, one might add — is once again meant to replace military strategy and intelligent foreign policy.

Perhaps the cretins who demonstrate against Israel in the capitals of the Western world, like the corrupt South Africans who drag it before the International Court of Justice on charges of “genocide,” simply think that what they are watching on their digital screens is not much different from the Super Bowl. But wait until it arrives on their doorstep and see how indignant they will be when their citizens are the targets of murder and mayhem.

So what to do? For one, stop trying to convert the antisemites. Stop trying to outsmart them and outargue them. Stop answering and countering their charges. When summoned by the International Court of Justice, do not show up, like the Red Cross when asked to check on the Israeli hostages and deliver their medicine.

If Israeli farmers are not welcome in the United States, the U.S. Secretary of State is not welcome in Israel. When a Democratic President demonizes Jewish settlers, American Jews should desert that party in droves. Desert and denounce, as Jews should denounce the two-state solution as a Palestinian “Trojan horse.”

Israel should pursue the war in Gaza until there is no Hamas left standing. Announce that the Palestinians will never have a state on Jewish territory, and Jewish territory includes Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

When asked about the day after, say “wait and see”; and when the time comes, flood Gaza with Jews along with the IDF, because that is the only way Zionism has ever succeeded. And when Gaza has been pacified, turn the guns on Judea and Samaria and take down the Palestinian Authority and the corrupt Palestine Liberation Organization that rules there too.

And if people call that occupation, apartheid, and genocide, remind them that Rachel Corrie (an American activist and member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement) met her death in Gaza — and they are welcome to follow suit.

People will also wonder: What about Saudi Arabia and normalization? You shall tell them that normalization means that two states agree to recognize each other without interfering in each other’s internal affairs. Saudi Arabia is not “Palestine,” even if many people who now live in Gaza had ancestors who came from there. (Indeed, that is from where many of the “Palestinians” arrived in “Palestine” — from Arabia.)

If Saudi Arabia wants them back, they are welcome to them. But, otherwise, Saudi Arabia has no business making the Palestinian question the price of its diplomatic recognition of Israel. If Saudi Arabia wants to have dealings with Israel — be they commercial, military or cultural — they have to establish diplomatic relations. Period.

If not, there will be no dealings. No more cold peace as exists with Egypt and Jordan, where the latter benefit from Israeli military and technological assistance while fomenting Jew hatred and de facto boycott of the Jewish state. After all, does Israel demand that Saudi Arabia become Jewish before recognizing it?

As for those who insist on remaining dumber than dumb, let me remind them of the Palestinian historical record: Until 1964, there was never a self-proclaimed Palestinian people. They were vagabonds, roaming the Middle Eastern lands of the Ottoman Empire until the British supplanted the latter after World War One. Only then did a land called “Palestine” come to be known and given legal recognition in the League of Nations.

While the British governed Mandate Palestine, there were Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Today’s Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. Yes, Zionism ignited Arab nationalism, but the latter was always negative. It thrived on opposition to Zionism alone. Its weapons were lies, intimidation, assassination.

The Arab pogrom unleashed on the Jews of Hebron in 1929, not unlike the attack on Israeli communities of October 7th, led to the British uprooting a 3,000-year-old Jewish community in that city. Only this time the Jews, who have left their  communities after Hamas attacked on October 7th, have a state and army of their own with which to fight back; and so the Jews displaced by Hamas will return, and hopefully to Gaza as well.

Nor ought they to fear how they will deal with the Arab Muslims who live there. Understandably, Israelis would rather not have to deal with them and not be responsible for them, for they are indigestible to their body politic. But since no other Arab state seems willing to have them, given the Palestinian track record for causing trouble wherever they go (see: Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia), Israel will have to take them on.

And given that Israel brought the Palestine Liberation Organization back in the first place with the signing of the Oslo Accords by the treacherous Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin Nobel laureates, Israel now has to deal with the consequences of its mistake.

It is not too late to make amends. Until the Palestinians are ready to leave — and many will leave — Israel will have to keep them under tight control. No voting rights. No mosques open from which imams stream forth their incendiary Jew hatred and denunciations of Israel. Limited self-government for municipal services, run by people willing to accept Israel’s existence and committed to improving the lives of Palestinians.

Education in Hebrew and with Israeli textbooks. No NGOs. No United Nations. No outside aid unless given through Israel. All services paid for by recipients. Severe penalties for any infringement of the laws governing behavior in the territory.

If the Arab Muslims object, they can be offered the same treatment that the Jews received from the Arab Muslim states in 1948. If outside objections start pouring in with their ignorant ideas about law and morality, they shall be met with the silence they deserve.

And if Jordan or Egypt start pretending to champion the Palestinian cause in the same old way, they must be made to pay a price. Indeed, a good lesson can start right away with the eviction of Jordan from the Temple Mount and the reassertion of Israeli sovereignty over matters relating to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its neighbor.

After all, the only reason the gold-domed mosque was built in the first place was the Syrian Caliph’s pique at the keeper of the Kaaba. Forbidden access to Mecca because he was denounced as a fornicator and a drunkard, the caliph at the time decided he would create a mosque in Jerusalem that would rival Mecca, and thence was born the Dome of the Rock.

Such was the real history of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem; not the self-destructive narrative that the Palestinians insist upon, and which the world has swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Palestinian nationalism is a dead-end because it is based on nothing but antisemitism, and antisemitism is nothing but death for those who traffic in it.

Jews have a much better goal to aim for rooted in their Bible: a holy people in a holy land. When we focus on that, we do exceedingly well because it is far better to dialogue with God than with antisemites.

Besides, it is more than enough.

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