The horrific attack on Argentina’s Chief Rabbi is yet another signal that the days of Diaspora Jewry are numbered
Rabbi Gabriel Davidovich, the Chief Rabbi of Argentina, was brutally attacked in his Buenos Aires home yesterday by seven men who entered his home at two o’clock in the morning and told him: “we know you, you are the chief rabbi.” They then proceeded to tie him down and brutally beat him. The attackers stole personal belongings and valuables and attacked the rabbi’s wife before leaving the premises.
While it is not clear that the attack was carried out from anti-Semitic or simply criminal motives, the brutality of the attack and its apparent targeted nature are causing anger and consternation in Israel among the people and government officials alike. The Buenos Aires attack comes in a period of rampant and growing anti-Semitism in Europe and in the US, with multiple grave desecrations, anti-Semitic graffiti, and violent assaults occurring in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Madrid, and New York.
It is an interesting feature of modern anti-Semitism that it does not distinguish between places in which Jews are present in relatively large numbers like Paris and New York and those where Jewish populations are exceedingly small like Warsaw and Madrid.
The rapidly rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the Diaspora is presenting a challenge for Jewish organizations outside of Israel such as the World Jewish Congress and the government of Israel alike. While Israel is committed to protecting Jews wherever they may live, its ability to do so is limited since law enforcement is considered well within the realm of internal affairs of the countries in which these anti-Semitic incidents take place and the Jews who fall prey to these incidents are not Israeli citizens. As such, any action or even rhetoric undertaken by official Israeli organs of state can be construed as meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations.
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Additionally, the public sentiment in Israel, while generally supportive of any actions in defense of world Jewry is tempered by the feeling that Jews who are made to feel unwelcome in the diaspora should simply make their way home to Israel rather than acquiesce to being treated as second class citizens and suffer the indignities that are associated with that status.
Fundamentally, there is no escaping the fact that the fates of world Jewry and of Israel are progressively more and more intertwined, regardless of how much Diaspora Jews may wish it weren’t so. Israel is in the news every day in every corner of the world and there aren’t many people who are neutral about it. Many love it, many others hate it. Be it as it may, both love and hate towards Israel is directed in the same measure towards Jews, regardless of which passports they hold. It is this phenomenon that explains why places like Madrid that haven’t seen any significant number of Jews since they where expelled from Spain in 1492 are becoming progressively anti-Semitic.
Diaspora Jews who are Zionists and support Israel from their homes in exile may soon become an endangered species. They will be hunted down in their Diaspora homes and face the choice of returning home to Israel or turning their backs on it and joining those Jews who are trying to escape the wrath of Gentiles by denouncing their own people, culture, and even religion and allowing themselves to be used as anti-Israeli propaganda pieces.
It is high time that all decent people around the globe, Jews and Gentiles alike spoke the truth. What is called diversity in America and multiculturalism in Europe has resulted in the importation to the West of a strain of anti-Israel derived virulent anti-Semitism that when combined with age-old European and Christian anti-Semitism gave rise to the ugly hybrid anti-Semitism that is raising its ugly head around the world today. As the Western European and American Left is making its way ever closer to its totalitarian, not to say fascist, origins in 1920’s and 1930’s, the perfect storm of violent statism and virulent anti-Semitism that gave us the Holocaust is once again brewing on the horizon. Jews everywhere may soon have to decide whether to seek refuge back home in Israel or perish forever in exile.
