Greatest Danger For Israel
Although I won't be in my usual place in the Sun next week, I will be in New York. This is because I'll be at Queens College, attending what is being billed as "a major conference on the state of world Jewry." Its cheerful title is: "Is It 1938 Again?"
A disinterested observer might ask what's with us Jews. As if it weren't enough for us always to be talking about the last Holocaust, we're already holding conferences about the next one.
But of course, that's a question that might be better directed to the many people around the world, mostly but not entirely in Arab and Muslim countries, who are calling for, or are in agreement with those who call for, the destruction of Israel. You can't blame Jews for being worried by them. With our experience, we'd be crazy not to be.
Is it 1938 again? Not if the analogy is meant in a strict sense. 1938 was a year before the outbreak of the World War II and three years before the start of the mass annihilation of Europe's Jews. Even if another Jewish catastrophe is lurking somewhere down the road, we're nowhere that close to it.
1928 might be more like it.
Actually, 1928 was not a bad time for the Jews. Hitler was still a demagogue without a future. The communist regime in the Soviet Union, while hostile to Zionism, Hebrew, and the Jewish religion, was pro-Yiddish and genuinely committed to giving Jews the opportunity to advance and integrate in Soviet society. Jewish life in the rest of Eastern Europe was thriving intellectually and culturally, too; in countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, the government persecutions of the 1930s had not begun. Nor had British policy in Palestine tilted strongly against the Jews and in favor of the Arabs yet, either.
In fact, had anyone in 1928 predicted a coming catastrophe for Europe's Jews, he would have been considered an irrational alarmist. Which, this isn't to say, that a rational alarmist would not have had cause for worry.
Such a person might have noted that democratic governments were non-existent or unstable in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in which the majority of Europe's Jews, many of them living in poverty, were to be found; that widespread anti-Semitism was endemic in all of them; that Western democracies had closed their gates to Jewish immigration and that the British were unlikely to allow large numbers of Jews into Palestine; that overall attitudes toward Jews were far from friendly in the West, too; and that if, therefore, anti-Semitic dictatorships came to power in Central and Eastern Europe, millions of Jews would be trapped there and exposed to their fate with no one to come to the rescue.
It might not happen in five years — it might not happen in 10 — but it could happen.
Such a person would not have been far wrong.
2007 is also not a bad year for the world's Jews. Indeed, their situation has never been better. Nearly half of them are concentrated in an independent Jewish state, wealthier and more powerful than any that existed in antiquity.
Almost all of the other half live in democracies where they are well-off economically — the great majority in America, the most hospitable country to Jews in the history of the Diaspora.
But there are good reasons to be worried now, too.
As militarily strong as it is, Israel will not necessarily remain forever stronger than the hostile Arab and Muslim world around it. Should it one day be deprived of its military superiority, its only way of assuring that it did not lose a conventional war would be by means of its nuclear deterrent.
In such a situation, a nuclear Iran, should it come to exist, could spell Israel's doom even if it did not choose to play with national suicide by attacking Israel with atomic weapons.
Merely by neutralizing Israel's own atomic arsenal, it could condemn it to a military defeat that might lead to its dismemberment. The result might not be a Holocaust in the sense of millions of deaths, but it could be a death blow to Jewish peoplehood.
Could this happen? It certainly could if other things won't be there to prevent it, among them a clear signal from America and Europe that they would not allow it as they allowed the Holocaust.
And it's here that, in 2007, one has the most reason for worry, because, as was the case with the Jews of Europe in 1928, Israel has few friends and the trend is running against it.
This is true especially of Europe, where Israel has been voted, in country after country, one of the world's two or three least popular states.
But in America, too, there has been a steady slippage in Israel's image, particularly in academic and intellectual circles — and these are the circles one needs to watch, because they almost always, in the long run, have a trickle-down effect on the rest of a population. One can often know what an entire society will be thinking tomorrow by looking at what its intellectuals are thinking today.
The greatest danger to Israel is that, should it ever grow weak enough to lure the sharks who would like nothing better than to tear it apart, it will look around and find no one to aid it, just as the Jews of Europe had no one to aid them. This is why, when it comes to Israel, the battle for public opinion is so important.
The Jews lost it in 1928 and they're losing it again today. That's where the analogy is closest.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
