The struggle to prevent the genocide of the Palestinian people has gathered a strong and welcoming momentum. Concurrent with the liberation of the indigenous people of the Levant is the severing of the bonds of contemporary Jewish people to spurious narratives of perpetual persecution and victimization, which has driven them into clan behavior that clashes with internationally accepted norms. A too often referred biblical tale of Moses freeing the ancient Israelis from slavery, repeatedly mentioned in film, song, book, sermon, ceremony, and press releases, has provided a twisted memory of a non-history and kept the Jewish people in bondage for three thousand years, slave to the concept that they are perpetual victims who have a unique place in history and deserve a special place in the firmament. Two drives to freedom go together and are dependent on one another. There will not be a Palestinian liberation without Jews discarding the chains that bind them to spurious narratives of perpetual persecution and victimization, and Jews will remain ostracized and be party to more crimes if the Palestinians remain oppressed.
Major impediments to mutual liberation are those who perceive Israel’s genocidal intent as a temporary aberration, who believe the genocide will halt by re-connecting Israeli Jews with “diaspora” Jews and by asserting a moral duty of not going “from victims to perpetrators.” Several problems with the former thesis, one being there are no “diaspora” Jews, a self-serving and fraudulent identification that entices all Jews to join the fracas. Jews, as all people, are at home in the country in which they were born and raised, are socially, physically, and psychologically attached to the culture, environment, soil, air, and climate that nurtured them, and are not cognizant of being mysteriously transported from a non-existent land to the ground beneath them.
Barry Finestone and the Jim Joseph Foundation, might have good intentions by being dedicated to, “Engaging, educating, and inspiring young Jewish minds,” “Re-imagining Israel Education,” and believing, “We can shape the relationship between the two largest Jewish communities in the world — Israel and North America.” The foundation is duplicitous and wasting its time. A growing number of American Jews, especially its new generation, have no connection and aren’t inclined to establish connection, let alone a dubious re-connection with criminal, murderous, and genocidal Israeli Jews. Who would?
Western Jews’ connection with Israel was flimsy until Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. The French sociologist Georges Philippe Friedmann argued in his work, The End of the Jewish People that “the complete emancipation of the Jewish people signaled by both the creation of Israel and their assimilation of the West would lead to the demise of the Jewish people. Israel was a melting pot in which Israelization was bulldozing the differences of 102 Jewish subcultures.” In the words of this author, who has expressed a similar view, “Gathering together forms a new Jew, the Israeli Jew.
After the 1967 war, Friedmann, as many Jews throughout the world, became emotionally attached to a winner. Links between Israelis and western Jews became stronger. Realizations have arrived. Zionism was created on a fallacy that Jews needed their own land to survive; Zionism’s thrust has been to create the conditions that force Jews to need their own land to survive; survival in Israel is precarious; Western Jews are being made accomplices to genocide; and Jews should be free to choose with whom they associate and not live in a monolithic world. if Judaism loses adherents it is because it is not spiritually satisfying to people and they have a duty to themselves to seek preferable climes. What is wrong with discarding archaic and failed institutions and finding other avenues of salvation? Isn’t that progress?
From Victims to Perpetrators is the theme of an article by Daniel Bar-Tal, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Tel Aviv University Israeli. Daniel Bar-Tal’s dialectic approach and logical sequencing of the “history of a conflict,” more appropriately termed, “the slaughter of the Palestinians,” derives flawed conclusions from the usual mind-setting distortions of history.
One of history’s most troubling paradoxes concerns the Jewish people. For nearly two thousand years, Jews experienced persecution, expulsions, pogroms, discrimination, and ultimately the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered. Yet within a few decades of establishing Israel, many observers came to view the Jewish state as responsible for the dispossession, occupation, and oppression of another people: the Palestinians. How can a people shaped by victimhood become associated with practices many regard as oppressive?
I don’t intend to mitigate persecution of the Jews before the Holocaust, but the discussion needs exactitude and qualification. A portion of Jews throughout Europe, a fraction of world Jewry, experienced expulsions, property damage, and killings (mainly due to charges of Jews causing the Black Death plague) during the centuries of feudalism, religious wars, and monarchical dominance ─ from 1300 to 1800 CE. Unlike thousands of creeds that were decimated in the thousands of years of civilization and did not survive to tell their gruesome stories, the mass of dispersed Jews found new homes and survived in huge numbers, many eventually returning to the areas from which they had been displaced. The word dispersed had value; like all organisms, differentiation assisted survival, while crowding together in one place would have assured extinction.
Concurrent with the 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century Emancipation, Jews integrated into previously restricted societies and gained positions of authority and power. Despite problems, most Jews managed to survive well.
Persecution of Jews in Western Europe
Available data does not support extensive persecution of Jews in Western Europe after the year 1800. The road to emancipation contained a number of anti-Jewish riots, a few forced and voluntary expulsions, personal anti-Jewish behavior, and some incitement against Jews, but those temporary incidents involved a minor part of European Jewry population and locations, and rarely erupted into severe bodily harm or killings.
Pursue any timeline on 19th century anti-Semitism, such as at Timeline of antisemitism in the 19th century, and the record shows that physical attacks on western European Jews, distinct from attacks on Jews in Russia, Middle East, and North Africa, after the 1819-1826 Hep-Hep riots in Germany, were few.
The Dreyfus case, an unjust conviction of a French Jewish military officer, highlighted the century of exaggerated violence against Jews in western European nations. Was Dreyfus twice convicted because he was Jewish, or was that a side issue to circumstantial evidence and became the issue by those who preferred it to become an issue, or because there was no other significant issue the anti-Semite hunters could find in late 19th century France? According to Piers Paul, The Dreyfus Affair, p. 83, “The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.” (Only five African-American officers in the much larger US army in WWII.) Why would a military institution “rife with anti-Semitism” permit a recently emancipated and relatively small minority to advance so rapidly? Why is one French officer’s problems significant to nationals of other countries, especially non-Europeans? Americans have heard the name Dreyfus almost daily with their breakfast cereal.
Persecution of Jews in the Russian Pale
Insufficient communication in Russia during the 19th century, coupled with a tendency to create sensational news and accept exaggerated rumors, has made it difficult to ascertain the nature and extent of attacks on Russia’s Jewish community and the role played by government authorities. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, an English-language reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is an objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work, are quoted.
Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.
The pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which occurred in waves throughout the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, were the first to assume the nature of a mass movement. Typically, the pogroms of this period originated in large cities, and then spread to surrounding villages, traveling along means of communication such as rivers and railroads. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons. In the course of more than 250 individual events, millions of rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed. The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.
Source: ebsco.com
The second wave of pogroms began in Kishenev, the provincial capital of Moldova, on May 2, 1903. Two days of rioting, which began on Easter Sunday and the last day of Passover, left nearly fifty Jews dead and hundreds more injured. In addition, enormous damage was inflicted on Jewish-owned property.
From Pogroms: anti-Jewish violence in modern Russian history, edited by John D. Klier, Elizabeth and Sidney Carob Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at University College London and Shlomo Lambroza, Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s College, Maryland.
The wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the Pale of Settlement after Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto in I905 reflected the ethnic and political tensions and hostilities that characterized popular unrest and marred the social landscape of late Imperial Russia in that revolutionary year. In the weeks following the granting of fundamental civil rights and political liberties, pogroms directed mainly at Jews but also affecting students, intellectuals, and other national minorities broke out in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages, resulting in deaths and injuries to thousands of people. In the port city of Odessa alone, the police reported that at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured, with slightly over 1,600 Jewish houses, apartments, and stores incurring damage.
Violation of any human life can neither be underestimated nor ignored. Bothersome is that although Jews suffered in Europe, so did almost everyone else, and Jewish travail takes prominence. For centuries, Europe featured civil wars, insurrections, peasant riots, massacres, a 30-year war, and other wars. Millions killed, injured, pauperized, entire communities and ethnicities wiped out. Wasn’t there a French Revolution? Must have occurred for a reason. Go through the statistics and learn that the Jews, despite periodic interruptions to their lives, were probably better off than most of their neighbors.
The Russian Pale included Russians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians (largest minority), Belorussians, Lithuanians, Germans (in some regions), Armenians (more common farther south) and Tatars (in certain areas). Poles conflicted with Ukrainians; Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants attacked Polish nobility and Roman Catholics; Poles and Russians fought each other. Rarely mentioned are the 15th–17th centuries Crimean Tatar slave raids.
Before the Pale of Settlement was established (1791), the Crimean Khanate conducted frequent raids into present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and southern Russia. Victims were primarily Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and others. An estimated 1–2 million people were made captive (ED: Might be exaggerated.) during several centuries. Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783 ended the slave trade and started a forced large-scale Tatar emigration from Crimea.
From what I have been able to confirm, In all of Europe, less than 200 Jews were killed and possibly a few thousand were injured in anti-Jewish riots during the 100 years of the 19th century.
Hidden from the book of woe are the overwhelming opposing stories, the protection and benefits accorded to Jews by friendly communities and leaders who valued their contributions to everyday life.
Although the Romans did not permit allegiance to Gods other than their own, Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus granted the Jewish people formal legal status across the empire. Synagogues were legally protected, and Jewish communities were exempt from the requirement to worship Roman state gods or the Emperor. From my research, I cannot find one Jewish person condemned to death by a Roman emperor for worshiping the wrong God. The Jews in the Roman Empire, as all dissidents, were politically repressed after 3rd and 4th century revolts against the Romans. Sufficient reason for the Romans to suppress them. Good reason for them to leave.
During the Persian Parthian and Sasanian Empires (248 BCE to 641 CE), communities of Mesopotamian Jews appeared in the Fertile Crescent. They housed the three great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, from where the legacy and heritage of modern Jews and Judaism are best expressed. In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, by Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein, 2012, the authors state that “Jewish life reached a high level in the Abbasid Empire during the years 800 -1200 CE. Before 900 CE, Mesopotamia and Persia contained 75% of world Jewry with the rest in North Africa and Western Europe.”
Jews living in al-Andalus, Iberian territories under Muslim rule from 711–1492, experienced relative tolerance, prosperity, and socio-cultural integration within the broader Muslim society.
in 1388, Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuanian/Poland, granted local Jews a charter that established them as a class of freemen directly under the Grand Duke’s protection, placing them equal to the lesser nobility in legal standing. Through the years 1400 to 1650, Jews leased huge estates, obtained great wealth, and engaged in commerce and trade. Jews from Switzerland, Flanders, France, Spain, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire migrated to Lithuania to enjoy the religious freedom and participate in economic opportunities,.
Little of the past plays a determining role for Jews in contemporary times. The positions and dispositions of Jews have changed. Their dress, their customs, their language, and their relations with neighbors are no longer of difference, separation, and isolation. The social, material, and political conditions of the years before the late 20th and present 21st centuries were entirely different from the present and do not apply to life in contemporary times. The oppressed Jew and the oppressed Russian serf no longer exist. Mentioning their experiences as a crutch for their modern descendants is an insult to intelligence.
Daniel Bar-Tal’s article, From Victims to Perpetrators? The Israeli Jewish Case, inevitably leads to the Holocaust.
Another critical factor is the central role of the Holocaust in Israeli collective identity. The murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany remains the defining trauma of modern Jewish history. In Israel, it is not merely remembered as a historical event but as a foundational lesson about vulnerability and survival. The Holocaust is taught extensively in schools, commemorated through public rituals, and embedded deeply within national consciousness.
The Holocaust occurred in Europe to European Jews. The concepts of “collective identity” and defining trauma” are spurious comments that have been given life by indoctrination. The Holocaust did not affect Jews who lived in the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. Few knew about the catastrophe until after the war and they initially digested it as a newspaper article. I never met a Holocaust survivor, a Jewish person related to someone who suffered from the Holocaust, or any Jew who exhibited trauma from the Holocaust, and whose future life was determined by the horrifying event.
Native Americans still exhibit the effects of the genocide. African Americans in ghetto life demonstrate lingering effects from their severe oppression. Rohingya struggle to survive from their displacement. Rwanda Tutsis have moved on and now control Rwanda. Armenians don’t plead eternal victim in their wars with Azerbaijan. Contemporary Jews are not victims of the World War II genocide. The victims are dead, with a few still surviving. Nevertheless, Jews, who have the highest standard of living in most of the countries in which they reside and don’t show a minute psychological defect from a past genocide to others claim perpetual trauma and compensation for past grievances.
Daniel Bar-Tal’s finishes his essay with,
The tragedy is that both peoples possess legitimate histories of suffering, fear, and attachment to the same land. Lasting peace will require recognizing those realities simultaneously rather than treating one narrative as valid and the other as irrelevant. Only through such recognition can Israelis and Palestinians hope to move beyond a conflict that has shaped both societies for more than a century.
The year is 2026 and Israeli governments have had 75 years to unilaterally force a two state, a bi-national state, or a one-state solution that brings peace and resolution to the area. Instead, its Nation State Laws unilaterally claim Israel is a “no state,” with no define borders, and acts as “the sole representative of all Jews.“ There cannot be peace in the Levant until Jews recognize they do not have a unique history of suffering and fear, refuse to be shaped by victim hood, and understand they have no attachment to the Palestinian lands. Not only Jews should gain the recognition, many others in this disillusioned world — strange legislators who betray their constituents by being guided from what is good for Israel, strange states, such as Maine, that iterate they “have shared an affinity with the people of Israel, and the bonds of friendship and cooperation that have existed between Israel and Maine for the past 74 years have enriched the cultural diversity of our State’s tapestry (how?),” and passed a “Joint resolution recognizing May 5, 2022 as the 74th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel” (Why is Israel or any country singled out from the tens of new and modern states created after World war II?), and implausible constructions of dozens of Holocaust memorials around the world in countries that have no relationship to the Holocaust and don’t recognize other genocides, even those that happened in their own nations.
Moshe Menuhin, son of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, In his book, “Not by Might, nor by Power”: The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism in our Time, recalls his childhood in Palestine, “It was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must extend to the ancient borders and that it must become Goyimrein (that is, free of Gentiles).”
Discard the fabric of victim hood and Jews will live freely and normally with all peoples. Maintain the thin tissue of falsifications and Jews will suffer from their self-inflicted wrath, their generated hatred toward their own selves.