The global counter-intifada

The Jews are facing a worldwide terrorist campaign, and Israel must help.

I recently had a conversation with an Israeli friend of mine who is planning to travel to the US. Their primary concern was conversing with their child, who was not yet fully proficient in English, because for reasons of physical safety, they wanted to avoid speaking Hebrew in public.

I can think of no better proof of the monstrous reality of what we are facing now. We have reached the point where the Jewish language itself cannot be voiced for fear of violence. The holy tongue is being erased from the world.

This is too large a thing to be ascribed to a “wave of antisemitism” or some other euphemism. It is more than that. It is exactly what its perpetrators say it is when they shout “globalize the intifada.”

We should finally accept the fact that, when they shout this slogan—as thousands of psychopaths recently did once again in New York City at a march for inhumanity—they are not expressing an aspiration but describing a reality: The “intifada” has already been globalized. It is everywhere.

I hardly need to run down the butcher’s bill that constitutes the evidence. Every one of us has already thought of at least a dozen examples off the top of our heads.

What is required is to see them in their proper context and to understand what is actually happening: a low-intensity global terrorist campaign against Israelis and Jews everywhere.

This terrorist campaign is not a confluence of disconnected events. It is a conscious policy, undertaken by recognizable actors who make no secret of their involvement or intentions. It is both a strategy and a tactic: the terrorists, protester-terrorists or otherwise, know that they cannot break Israel without breaking the Jews, and they are trying to do both.

As a result, Jewish life is becoming unlivable and the Jews, sadly, are adapting. Stars of David and kippot are going unworn or concealed. Areas of major cities are being avoided. Events and universities are going unattended. Synagogues are locking down. Hebrew is unspoken. People are learning to live in fear.

This, needless to say, is not acceptable. A life lived in fear is a partial and truncated life; it is a ghetto life. We should not allow ourselves to be returned to the ghetto, even if it is only a ghetto of the mind.

The question, then, is what must be done.

Obviously, Diaspora Jews must act. First and foremost, they should organize for self-defense and adopt a proactive strategy that deters the terrorists and protester-terrorists while reasserting the Jewish presence in the larger world. That is, by hook or by crook, by any legal means necessary, the world must be made a “safe space” for Jews again.

I have written a great deal about this issue before, but there is another factor: Israeli involvement.

Israel, despite its military prowess and global profile, is often a parochial place, small and isolated from the rest of the world—even the rest of the Jewish world. This is understandable. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of simply defending your borders.

But today, this is not enough. Israel must view not just Hamas or Iran as strategic threats, but also the “global intifada.” It must understand that the death of a thousand cuts is as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. And it should act accordingly.

Just as important, Israel is the Jewish state and, as such, has a responsibility to global Jewry. It should defend not only its own citizens but the people whom it represents as a nation-state.

Indeed, if recent events have proven anything, it is that only Israel is willing or able to consistently defend Jews. If France, Italy, or indeed the US are not willing to fight the “global intifada,” then Israel must do it. The impunity must end, and end now. Israel and global Jewry must launch a counter-intifada.

In saying this, I do not mean that the Mossad should start engaging in targeted assassinations or sabotage. I mean that Israel should bring its enormous resources to bear on aiding global Jewry in organizing for their own self-defense.

Indeed, Israel is a world expert at defending itself, and can offer global Jewry state-of-the-art training, organizational skills, strategic and tactical expertise, supplies, political and legal support, intelligence gathering, and numerous other forms of aid that would be invaluable to countering the “global intifada” and carving out the “safe space” that the Jews so desperately need.

All of this should be done within the limits of the law but right up to the limits of the law.

Naturally, a great many countries will see this as interference in their sovereignty, and since the Jonathan Pollard case, Israel has been loath to even hint that it might be doing this in the United States.

But this is specious. Certainly, Israeli involvement in Jewish self-defense would be a delicate matter, but it can be done in a legal, open, and public way.

Moreover, many of the countries that will complain have no room to talk. They lost their sovereign rights on this issue when they refused to defend their own Jewish citizens against a terror campaign they know perfectly well exists and constitutes an existential threat to those citizens.

If they will not uphold their own laws due to racial discrimination, the Jews have every right to take matters into their own hands with Israel’s help.

Moreover, even the mere fact of Israeli involvement would be a massive psychological blow to the “global intifada,” because the “intifadists” are, after all, ferocious antisemites. That is, they really believe it. They genuinely think that the Jews rule the world and Israel is a titanic, world-dominating global power that can reach out and crush them at any moment.

As such, Israeli involvement would throw them into paroxysms of paranoid terror. This alone would substantially truncate their activities. The Jews can turn the “global intifada”’s racism against it.

This alone is a highly effective means of self-defense and, indeed, a step toward completely defeating the adversary. As Sun Tzu said thousands of years ago: “When your enemy is angry, agitate him.” For Israel and the Jews, the time for agitating, and more than that, has come.