Victor Davis Hanson: What’s Behind the Demonization of Israel?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

Recently, I say in the last two years, but especially the last three months, there’s been an increasing demonization of Israel and, by association, Jews who support it.  

We’ve seen these campus protests on American universities where they have these signs, “From the river to the sea.” That’s an eliminationist slogan that Israel would be wiped off the map from the Jordan River all the way into the Mediterranean Sea and, I guess, dumped into it. 

And, of course, we’ve had antisemitic incidents of students chasing Jewish students into a library and trapping them there, roughing them up on campus. Demonstrations where they get quite violent, and they’re overtly and proudly antisemitic. 

And the point is, what’s behind all this? Why in America now? Because after all, there are more Jewish citizens, or at least roughly comparable in the United States than there are in Israel, which has about two and a half or 2 million Arabs and a number of Christians as well.  

So why in the so-called bastion of Jewishness in the West here in the United States, which has avoided the antisemitism of Europe and the Middle East, why is it starting to come out now? What’s behind this? And from people that you wouldn’t expect it from. 

Well, the first is DEI. Diversity, equity and inclusion, divided the nation into a 70/30 binary. It was dreamed up by [Barack] Obama because he felt he didn’t have enough traction with the old binary of 12% blacks being victimized, which was true, they were, by the 88% whites when, due to immigration, the country was no longer 90% white.  

So he bundled a new group and said, it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, it doesn’t matter what your class is. If you’re not white, you are a victimized, oppressed person with legitimate grievances. 

What that did is it allowed people exemptions, so you didn’t question somebody’s performance on the job or how somebody was hired if it was race-based, because that would be insulting or racist.  

But it also did another thing. It meant that people could express themselves in racist, biased fashion. But if they were from that protected binary, you couldn’t say anything.  

Now, that had been true of the black community, unfortunately, for a long time. I can’t think of a major black leader other than Martin Luther King that didn’t voice antisemitic tropes. 

I mean, Jesse Jackson said “Hymietown.” The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said, “Them Jews won’t let me see.” Obama, remember [Louis] Farrakhan called Jews “termites” and a “gutter religion.” Al Sharpton said, I’ll put on my yarmulke, and you come over here, and he had all this about diamond merchants. Pretty bad stuff.  

No need to get into Kanye West, what he said. Malcolm X said a lot of very antisemitic things.  

So it was there, and that was based on you don’t dare call a black leader an anti-Semite or biased given his protected status as a victim. So DEI allowed people to express overt antisemitism, sometimes cloaked as anti-Israelism, without repercussions. 

The second is demography. There had traditionally been about, oh, 6% to 7% of the population was Jewish and maybe 1% was Muslim, and that has radically changed now—mostly through immigration—and the Muslim birth rate in the United States is about 2.6, and all other ethnic groups, white, black, it’s about 1.7. And that population is about 5 million, and it’s projected to increase to a number higher than the Jewish population.  

But you can see the trends already. 

And then you have to factor in that it’s very hard for a Muslim to be secular, agnostic, atheistic, Christian. But in the case of Jews, they’re more and more being secularized or intermarrying much more, and their support of Israel is not contingent on their being Jewish. 

More importantly, we’re getting billions of dollars. The UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are among the top five donors to universities in America, and they have founded Middle East studies programs, and those are not Middle East studies programs. They’re indoctrination centers for the entire student body.  

So demography means that people feel that in states like Michigan, the future will be you have to say something critical of Israel. 

I mean, remember [Abdul] El-Sayed, the candidate in the Democratic primary, said he didn’t want to really criticize anything about Iran, and if he said anything positive about the United States taking out, or Israel taking out, this atrocious leader, [Ali] Khamenei, the supreme leader, then his constituency in Michigan would be upset.  

That was, kind of, an admission that there’s a growing minority in America that hates Israel. And they have a lot of money, and they are gaining political power. And that’s going to increase. What we see in the university is going to be mainstreamed to society at large. 

The third is the Democratic Party is not democratic anymore. As I’ve said before, it has a Jacobin agenda, a French revolutionary party agenda. It’s not just that they want to tear down statues and rename buildings and change the foundational date to 1619. Those were all Jacobin trademarks. 

But they have a holistic socialist agenda: open borders, illegal immigration mainstream, mass amnesties, no-cash bail, critical legal theory, DEI and massive cuts in defense, raising taxes and more entitlements. And of course, in the Green New Deal.  

But embedded in that agenda is anti-Israelism and indifference to antisemitism. 

I say embedded because that’s a non-negotiable agenda. If you want to be nominated for an office in the Democratic Party, you can’t come out for pipelines or more drilling. “Drill, baby, drill.” You can’t say we need tougher criminal prosecutions. You can’t say, I love the wall. It’s a good idea. You can’t say anything.  

And by that same reasoning, you cannot say you support wholeheartedly Israel.  

Anybody who does so in the Democratic Party, like John Fetterman, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, becomes persona non grata, in his own party. 

Finally, there is a sense that the institutions in the United States that bequeath laurels and mainstreaming and adulation, they’re all Left-wing. All the awards are Left-wing. All the book reviews, the major venues, are Left-wing. The major media is Left-wing.  

And a lot of people feel that they’ve been in the wilderness. They’ve been pelted with this Left-wing hailstorm, and at some point they get tired, and they want to come out of the storm.  

And so we’ve seen people at The Bulwark, for example, who have flipped over, and now they receive adulation. 

So when Tucker Carlson said he was going to interview a number of really strident antisemites and anti-Israelis, and he wants to have Graham Plattner, the notorious would-be nominee, he is the nominee now, from Maine, who had a Totenkopf death’s-head Nazi tattoo on him, then there were people—he immediately won a New York Times interview.  

The New Yorker wants to interview him. The Atlantic writes about him. They would not have touched Tucker Carlson two years ago.  

So there’s a sense that in this growing momentum, a lot of people want to piggyback on it, whether for clicks, especially foreign audiences.  

We’re starting to learn that a lot of our people on the Left that hate Israel and a lot of the people on the right that do, get enormous audiences overseas, mostly from the Middle East. 

So you add this all together, and for many people without strong convictions, they look at the ledger and they say, well, the DEI community is anti-Israel. And probably many of them think they can be antisemitic without consequences. The demography is there. The money is there. The whole Left-wing agenda is a parcel, so you can’t really defect from it. You have to embrace it if you’re a Democrat. 

And there’s some money to be made, or there’s some power to be gained, or there’s some approval to be had. You add it all up, and we’re going to see a lot more antisemitism. 

The final irony, the so-called, “bigot,” Donald Trump, the so-called, “racist,” Donald Trump, he has admitted he’s probably going to be the last president that wholeheartedly supports Israel.  

For now, he is the last dam holding back this deluge. 

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