My latest: the next battlefield is closer than you think

It’s the next front in the war.

There’s been no ceasefire reached yet. Fighting is still going on, in and around Southern Gaza. Rockets and bullets are still being fired into Northern Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.

Slowly but surely, however, Israel is winning the war.

As of last week, more than 12,000 Hamas terrorists have reportedly been killed. Three-quarters of Hamas’ 24 battalions – each containing more than 1,000 men – have been wiped out. Missile attacks on Israel have dropped off dramatically.

And, like Adolf Hitler in his final days, Hamas’ leadership is in hiding in subterranean bunkers, moving from one hideout to another, more preoccupied with survival than directing the fight against the IDF – who, incredibly, have lost only 300 troops since the war began in earnest on October 27.

So, Israel is winning. After the military “mop-up” is done, Israel will relinquish governance of Gaza to someone else – possibly some amalgam of the Palestinian Authority, humanitarian agencies and peacekeepers.

One thing is clear: as in the past, public opinion in Israel overwhelmingly opposes governing Gaza. They want Hamas defeated, and the remaining hostages back, but no role in governing the ungovernable.

The Middle East, however, is just one front in the war that broke out after the horrors of October 7. There is another battle raging, and it is not centred in Gaza and the West Bank.

It is the war against Jews taking place around the world.

Not even the “pro-Palestinian” protestors – some of whom are being paid to protest, as this newspaper has documented – dispute the reality anymore: they don’t just oppose Israel’s government (which isn’t anti-Semitic to do). They oppose Jews (which is).

Their Jew hatred has manifested itself, in Canada, in firebombing and shootings and acts of vandalism from coast to coast – at synagogues, Jewish schools, businesses, and even the private homes of Jews. The same sort of anti-Semitism is happening around the planet, too, every single day. It is, as noted, the next front in the war that commenced on October 7, 2023.

This writer has authored ten books, most of them about anti-Semitism, racism and their variants. Regularly, I get asked by exasperated and frightened readers: where does this anti-Semitism come from? In the year 2024, why have we not killed it off, once and for all?

It’s no longer true to say that anti-Semitism is caused by Christians. While the Holocaust was indeed conducted in European Christian nations, no one seems as preoccupied, anymore, by the notion that “Jews killed Christ.” (They didn’t: the Romans did.). And polling shows that the vast majority of Christians in the West strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, within safe and secure borders.

No, the genesis of modern anti-Semitism is a lot harder to pin down. A lengthy essay in the new Time magazine by Noah Feldman, a professor (ironically) at Harvard’s law school, is now making the rounds. In his “New anti-Semitism” piece, Feldman writes: “Anti-Semitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Anti-Semitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances.” Jews, he continues, are the targets of whatever hatred is fashionable at the moment.

And Feldman is right. Whenever there is a global calamity, people cast about for a scapegoat, and Jews are always the best candidates. So, 9/11 was caused by Jews, because no Jew was killed that day. The 2008-2009 global financial crisis was caused by Jews, who disproportionally benefitted from the economic chaos. Covid was a Jewish invention, because they own the pharma companies.

Even wildfires has been the fault of Jews: in his amusing (but disturbing) new book, Jewish Space Lasers, Mike Rothschild – who ironically, bears the surname of a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory – tells the story of MAGA Trump fanatic, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She promoted the notion that Jews were “beaming the sun’s energy back to Earth” with non-existent “space-based solar generators,” and missing non-existent “receiving stations.” And thereby causing wildfires in California.

Anti-Semitism, then, is indeed a shape-shifter, never dying, never completely going away. It adapts, like cockroaches adapt. It is unkillable.

So, since October 7, anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance, globally. It is the new front in the next war.

And, as in every war, the frontlines will grow. Other targets will be added.

Because what starts with Jews never ends with Jews.