Six very brief lessons from history.
William of Norwich, 1144: A 12-year-old Christian boy is found dead in England. Jews are accused, without evidence, of ritually murdering him. The story becomes the prototype for the blood libel, a fantasy that would follow Jews across Europe for centuries.
The Black Death, 1348–1351: As plague devastates Europe, Jews are accused of deliberately poisoning wells. Torture produces “confessions”; Jewish communities are massacred.
The Khmelnytsky uprising, 1648–49: Cossack rebellion against Polish rule fuses class resentment, religious and ethnic hatred. Jews, associated in the popular imagination with the Polish system, become surrogate targets and Jewish communities suffer catastrophic violence.
The Damascus Affair, 1840: After a Catholic friar disappears, Jews are accused of murdering him for ritual purposes. The medieval blood libel enters the modern communications age, spreading through newspapers, diplomacy, and international politics.
The Dreyfus Affair, 1894: A Jewish French army officer is falsely convicted of treason. Evidence of his innocence is superseded by a larger cultural imperative: that Jews are, by definition, suspect. Sophisticated French society erupts in chants of “Death to the Jews!”
Kishinev, 1903: Antisemitic propaganda, including blood libel accusations, precedes a three-day pogrom in which more than 40 Jews are murdered and hundreds wounded in some of the most grisly horrors of the modern age.
Different centuries. Different countries. Different circumstances. The same recurring theme.
A crisis or unexplained event occurs. A fantastical accusation attaches itself to Jews. The allegation succeeds not because of evidence but because the story resonates with a surrounding society already predisposed to believe the worst about those people.
Repetition turns suspicion to certitude. Eventually people are convinced that the outrageous libels are true, and, being true, righteous people must act upon them.
Today, the world has succumbed to the collective delusion of a Palestinian genocide.
Just as Jews in the past did not kill people to use their blood for matzah or poison wells to kill their non-Jewish neighbors, Israelis today are not perpetrating genocide on Palestinians.
Only in a world perverted by lies and poisoned by the sorts of antisemitic libels that preceded the six historical atrocities above (among thousands of examples I could have cited) would such a disclaimer even be necessary.
By the most liberal interpretation of the definition of genocide, Israel would have to want to kill many or most Palestinians because they are Palestinian.
Not one of them has died because of their innate identity as Palestinians.
Of course, thousands of Palestinians have died in a war — a war started by their own despotic leaders.
And they have died in such large numbers because those despotic leaders maximize the death toll in order to score macabre PR victories.
But no matter how many Palestinians have died, or the specific circumstances in which they have died, that is not genocide.
Even Amnesty International admitted it had to fudge the definition of genocide in order to smear Israel with it.
Yet the world swallows the allegation with relish.
My argument, of course, is not that Palestinian suffering is imaginary. It plainly is not.
But the allegation of genocide absolutely is.
As George Orwell stated succinctly, “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”
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The Palestinian genocide fallacy is accepted as fact because several decades of hysterically escalating hyperbole — settler-colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — were testing plausibility in a process leading inexorably to the ultimate charge: Genocide. Humanity’s greatest crime.
This mass hysteria, this collective delusion, belongs to an earlier time. It is alarming especially because it takes place now in a globalized culture, rather than in the limited environs of premodern and pre-internet Norwich or Damascus or Kishinev.
One of the most bewildering characteristics of our age is that people who have been trained to interrogate narratives, challenge authority, deconstruct language, and ask who benefits from every claim can become extraordinarily credulous when confronted with an allegation that confirms their existing worldview.
Generations of cynical media consumers and skeptical critical thinkers pride themselves on their sophistication in questioning everything.
Everything except this.
They question vaccines, gender assumptions, the very idea of truth.
The one thing they accept at face value, in the absence of all evidence, is the greatest slander ever perpetrated against any people.
Despite the nonexistence of evidence, in the face of mountains of proof to the contrary, in fact, that nothing of the sort was intended or committed, the fake-genocide of Palestinians is today not just an article of faith among many of the world’s activists, academics, commentators, and diplomats. It is the animating driver of the world’s rage toward Israelis, Jews and anyone who refuses to join the howling mobs baying for their blood.
It is no coincidence that the target is the Jewish state. Just as it was no coincidence that the finger of blame for the death of William of Norwich was pointed at the Jews.
Because Israel is not merely another country in the contemporary imagination. It is the Jewish state. And the Jewish state now plays the role on the global stage that Jews have always played in smaller venues, like Norwich and Kishinev.
Witness the astonishing speed with which the most extreme possible characterization of Israeli conduct became, across enormous swaths of public discourse, not an allegation to be proved but an orthodoxy to which everyone is expected to subscribe.
Refusing to genuflect to the fake genocide is — and this beggars belief — to be accused of supporting and/or denying genocide.
A genocide that is not happening.
No matter where you go in the world today, the strident clamor of anti-Jewish hordes is inescapable. They are not even pretending anymore to be antizionist. The entire world is crawling with outright, unapologetic antisemites who know they no longer have to pretend to be anything but. Because there are effectively no consequences for being antisemitic, there are so few Jews that they make a vulnerable target (a bully’s catnip), and there are almost no non-Jews making the effort to stop them.
Amid this reality, the genocide libel is accepted as fact because it is part of a millennia-long tradition of hysterical allegations against Jews that culminate in mass violence.
Indeed, that is why the genocide libel was invented.
The end-goal of the genocide libel is mass violence against Jews.
I am sorry for disturbing my Jewish friends and readers with these frightening words. But the truth is that Jewish people already know this:
We are in a pre-pogrom phase.
What Jewish people do not know — and what I am struggling every day to understand myself — is why the vast majority of the non-Jewish world doesn’t seem to see this or doesn’t seem to care.
And this — this — is the lesson history offers us from William of Norwich, the Black Death, Khmelnytsky, Damascus, Dreyfus and Kishinev.
When the world went off the rails and turned on the Jews, good people did not come to the aid of the Jews.
They joined the torch-carrying, murderous mobs.
And here we are again.
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