A World Without Jews

The Holocaust was not a childhood disease. Having experienced it gives the Jewish people no immunity. And it requires extraordinary optimism to believe that the worst crimes against humanity are behind us, rather than still to come.

Many people dismiss comparisons between Nazis and militant Islamists. The Nazi goal was a Europe without Jews. The militant Islamist goal is a Middle East without Jews. Is it really so far-fetched to perceive similarities? True, the Nazi project largely achieved its goals whereas the Islamist project looks forward to accomplishing its mission over the decades ahead. But does that justify complacency?

I made this point recently to the commentator Pat Buchanan, generally viewed as no friend to Israel. I cited the Hamas charter that calls for Israel to be “obliterated.” Hamas, I pointed out, receives funding and instruction from Iran’s Islamist rulers, who have called Israel “a black and dirty microbe,” a “stinking corpse,” a “dead rat” that must be “destroyed,” “wiped out,” “eliminated.” Despite this, Buchanan replied that Hamas probably would be satisfied if the “Jewish state” were replaced by a state with an alternative concept of national identity.

Even if you buy that—I do not—it is absurd to suppose that Jews would be able to remain in such a re-conceptualized country. A largely ignored fact of recent history is that about a million Jews have been driven out of almost all Arab and Muslim majority lands (e.g., Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen; an oppressed and shrinking remnant remains in Iran) where they had made their homes for centuries, in many cases since before the advent of Islam. It has not mattered whether these Jews were Zionists, anti-Zionists or ambivalent about Israel. They were Jews. That was enough.

It also seems unlikely that Israelis would be able to pack their bags and board planes bound for other places where they’d be welcomed. An orderly exodus is not what groups such as Hamas have in mind. Hamas-owned Al-Aqsa TV has promised: “We will wipe out the people of Zion and will not leave a single one of them.” Hamas spokesmen Sheikh Ahmad Bahr has pledged that not just Israel, but also America “will be annihilated” and urged, “Kill them all, down to the very last one.” Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said because so many Jews have gathered in Israel, “It will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide.”

In global capitals, such genocidal threats stir little concern. “It is a mark of disgrace for humanity,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently told the Knesset, “that several decades after the Holocaust the world’s response to the calls by Iran’s leader to destroy the State of Israel is weak, there is no firm condemnation and decisive measures.”

To the contrary, anti-Semitism is resurgent. In Europe, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the first three months of this year exceeded the total number for all of 2008, according to the European Jewish Congress. Synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are being vandalized, Jews are being attacked and anti-Jewish rhetoric is spreading and intensifying.

Recently, Pat Oliphant, America’s most widely syndicated political cartoonist, distributed a drawing showing Israel as a monster preying on mothers and children whom he labeled “Gaza.” His imagery would not have been out of place on the pages of Der Stürmer, the Nazi newspaper of the 1930s that editorialized in favor of Europe’s “liberation” from Jews through “expulsion or extermination.” Until now, such moment/images have been rare in mainstream American media.
With this as backdrop, it should be clear that Iran’s progress toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons creates an urgent challenge. There are those who argue that deterrence—the prospect of what we used to call, during the cold war, “mutually assured destruction” or MAD—could be sufficient to prevent Iran from deploying any nuclear capability it acquires.

But the Soviets were atheists who had no hope for a reward in the afterlife. Islamists, by contrast, believe that the doors of paradise open to those killed while pursuing jihad. Indeed, Bernard Lewis, the dean of Islamic studies, has said that to someone with the religious views of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mutually assured destruction is “not a deterrent; it’s an inducement.”

Even if Iran’s mullahs decide not to initiate Armageddon, a nuclear-armed Iran could use its power to shield Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. A war of attrition could be waged against Israelis—how many generations will want to live with such a sword hanging above their heads?

For the moment, President Barack Obama is hoping that diplomatic engagement can cause Iran to change course. If that approach proves fruitless, tougher sanctions— particularly those aimed at Iran’s vital and vulnerable energy sector—would be a way to ratchet up the pressure peacefully. But if that route, too, leads to a dead end, Israel’s leaders may decide to use military force to prevent Iran’s nuclear armament, as they did against Saddam Hussein’s Osiraq nuclear facility in 1981 and against Syria’s nuclear facility (built with Iranian assistance) more recently.

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” Netanyahu recently told The Atlantic. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

Millions of words have been written about the Holocaust but its most fundamental lesson is simple: When someone says he is going to kill you, take him seriously.

Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.