In 1898, a Jewish lawyer in the United States wrote to Mark Twain. He had read Twain's account of the riots in the Vienna Parliament: the Jews had no party and insulted no one, and yet nineteen warring people agreed on one thing alone: being against them.
His questions were simple and terrible: Why? "Will it ever come to an end? Will a Jew be permitted to live honestly, decently, and peaceably like the rest of mankind?"
Twain answered in 1899 with his essay "Concerning the Jews." His explanation was economic: the Jew was hated not for his religion but for his success. His advice: organize, stop being spectators. Half in jest, he mentioned Dr. Herzl's plan to gather the Jews in Palestine, with a government of their own.
The Jews took the advice. They organized, founded a state, built an army. Today Israel has a voice and a vote among the nations.
But almost no one foresaw that hatred of the Jew as a person would be transferred, as condemnation, to the Jewish State.
Antisemitic libels endure over time; so does hypocrisy
In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to use their blood. In 2009, a Swedish newspaper accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian Arabs' organs, and the accusation resurfaces, without evidence, in every war.
In the fourteenth century, Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells and causing the Black Death. Today, accusations circulate that Israel poisons Palestinian Arab water.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion invented a Jewish plot to dominate the world. Today people speak of a "Zionist lobby" that controls governments and media.
Stalin called the Jews "rootless cosmopolitans." The UN denies those roots and portrays the oldest people of that land as a foreign colonizer.
And there is a new libel, born after 1945: Holocaust inversion. The people who suffered genocide is accused of genocide.
Natan Sharansky proposed the "3D" test:
- Demonization: portraying Israel as absolute evil.
- Double standards: demanding of Israel what is demanded of no other country.
- Delegitimization: denying its right to exist.
The double standard
In 2024, according to UN Watch, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 resolutions against Israel and only 6 on the rest of the world.
The Human Rights Council, moreover, keeps two permanent items on its agenda that expose it:
- Item 7: the only agenda item devoted to a single state (Israel). (Iran, North Korea or Russia have no item of their own: they are diluted in the general debate under Item 4.)
- Item 9: in theory, it protects every minority from racism; in practice, it is a platform for antisemitism. It follows up on the Durban Conference (2001), at whose NGO Forum Zionism was equated with racism and leaflets were handed out bearing Hitler's photo and the words "What if I had won?"
The test is simple. A country that abstains on principle abstains every time. In December 2024, 95 countries refused to condemn Iran for violating human rights. Three months earlier, 124 had voted against Israel. Many were on both lists. In them there was no principle: there was interest, complicity, cowardice or blindness.
And the same Assembly has never managed to condemn Hamas. In October 2023, an amendment condemning its attacks and demanding the release of the hostages won 88 votes to 55, but failed for lack of a two-thirds majority. The murderers of some 1,200 people did not receive a single condemnation; their victim received seventeen in one year.
During the two years of captivity, the International Committee of the Red Cross could not visit the Israeli hostages even once: Hamas never allowed it. This month, its president, Mirjana Spoljaric, acknowledged that pressing earlier for their release could have saved more lives.
October 7 was planned in Gaza, carried out in Israel and filmed with pride by its perpetrators. Yet withi days the global debate moved from the massacre to accusing the victim: "genocide in Gaza" was installed in place of "genocide in the Negev."
Truth is not reached by averaging falsehoods. It is reached by verifying every claim.
The bridge that proves it
If hostility toward Israel were merely foreign policy, it would stay in the foreign ministries. It does not. In 2024, antisemitic incidents in the United States reached the highest level in the ADL's 46 years of record-keeping, and for the first time a majority involved references to Israel or Zionism.
A Jewish student at an American university does not govern Gaza. A synagogue in Paris does not decide a military operation. When they pay for it, the target is not a policy: it is the Jew.
Loyalty is not enough
Moïse de Camondo bequeathed his mansion and his collection to France; his son Nissim died fighting for France in 1917. One generation later, his daughter Béatrice, her husband and their two children were deported from France to Auschwitz. Loyalty did not protect them.
Today the Jewish people has what it lacked for nearly two thousand years: a state, whose bond with its land was recognized by San Remo (1920), the League of Nations Mandate (1922) and the UN (1947).
But the protective umbrella left by the Holocaust has worn away: intolerance has returned to levels reminiscent of the years before 1939, now compounded by the demonization of the region's only democracy.
Responsibility
The UN and its Security Council bear responsibility for regional instability. In 1948, when Arab armies invaded Israel, they neither condemned the aggression nor named the aggressor: they merely called for truces. Since then, the UN has acted as the notary of the Arab and Islamic bloc, which seeks neither peace nor coexistence. Is this not how one fosters the victory of a jihadism that does not stop?