Victor Davis Hanson writes for American Greatness about key factors contributing to antisemitism today.
Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.
After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.
Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors. …
… So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?
There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.
First, in demographic terms, the US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5–8 versus 1.6–1.7).
There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population. …
… The DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. In this Marxist moral schema, the world abroad—and within the United States—is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims,” despite the fact that people commonly classified as white comprise only a small minority of the global population. …
… Third, Israel is no longer the Israel of 1947, 1956, 1967, or 1973, nor the Israel mired in the various Lebanon and Intifada quagmires that followed. …
… Hating Israel—and, by association, Jews—was voiced not merely by DEI or the radical new wing of the Democratic Party. Anti-Israelism instead merged into a broader leftist potpourri of open borders, illegal immigration, anti-ICE violence, Green New Deal-style wokism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
These causes came to be viewed as an inseparable package whose elements were interconnected and tolerated no apostasy from any of them.
