Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.
After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.
Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.
It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.
True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.
So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?
There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.
Demography
First, in demographic terms, the US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5–8 versus 1.6–1.7).
There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population.
Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews are not just secular or intermarried but no longer identify so strongly as Jewish, much less as supporters of Israel. More importantly, billions of dollars in the last few years from the Gulf states—primarily Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait—have flowed into American universities.
These enormous sums bankroll weaponized Middle East studies programs and enrich left-wing NGOs, nonprofits, and sympathetic politicians. The new antisemites talk nefariously of the money of “International Jewry,” and “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” but in truth, Gulf money dwarfs Israel’s lobbying budget.
An entire generation of young American elites has been groomed in universities to despise Israel and, by extension, to express hostility toward Jews. After October 7, the scab was torn away, revealing what had festered underneath for years.
Any visitor to a contemporary American campus who talks at length to protesting students quickly arrives at two general conclusions:
First, many have been taught to despise Israel and simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.
The result is that it is now “cool” on campus to trash Israel, utter the platitude that “hating Israel is not hating Jews,” and then either make life uncomfortable for Jewish students or remain silent when witnessing such harassment firsthand.
Second, today’s students know little to nothing of the modern Middle East. Most have no idea what the eliminationist slogan “From the River to the Sea” actually portends. Few anti-Israeli demonstrators could identify either the Jordan River or the Mediterranean Sea, much less distinguish between them. Yet all understand that chanting the hip and approved slogans earns social acceptance in and outside the classroom.
DEI
The DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. In this Marxist moral schema, the world abroad—and within the United States—is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims,” despite the fact that people commonly classified as white comprise only a small minority of the global population. The dichotomy is reductive and often absurd, collapsing immense differences in class, wealth, power, culture, and historical circumstance into a crude racial narrative. Instead, in this paradigm, superficial appearance—including something as trivial as adding accents to names or adopting some sort of virtue-signaling head dress or garb—can brand one as a nonwhite victim. Once so identified, the supposedly oppressed are granted collective grievances against their victimizers and, increasingly, exemptions from censure.
Thus, DEI offers a pass from charges of antisemitism on the theory that the oppressed cannot themselves become oppressors. Muslim students on American campuses were often graphic in their chants and placards wishing deaths upon Israelis, unapologetic in roughing up Jewish students, and confident—often correctly—that their purported victimhood exempted them from consequences.
The idea that minorities cannot be antisemites is, of course, not new. For example, graphic antagonism toward Jews—long at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement has long been expressed by prominent black leaders with little downside (e.g., Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “dem Jews”; Jesse Jackson: “Hymietown”; Al Sharpton: “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights”; Malcolm X: “bloodsuckers”; Louis Farrakhan: “termites” and “gutter religion”).
Thus, Jews in America found themselves classified among the whitest and most privileged of the oppressor class, perhaps by virtue of their material success, while Israel abroad was deemed a white colonialist settler state because it repeatedly defeated neighboring enemies.
Key to the DEI demonization of the Jews has been the diminution of the horrors of the Holocaust to ensure Jews are excluded from the victim side of the ledger. The murder of six million had once been a principal reason of many to support the idea of an independent sanctuary in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. Downplaying the Holocaust—or treating it as irrelevant or understandable—therefore calls postwar Zionism into question.
When Tucker Carlson declared that the unpublished podcaster Daryl Cooper was the preeminent historian of World War II, his praise rested neither on Cooper’s comprehensive scholarly work (there was none), nor bestselling popular accounts of the war (there were none), nor distinguished public lectures, seminar classes, or journal articles on the war (there were none).
Instead, the reason for such hagiography was that Cooper in his podcast shad downplayed the Holocaust in narratives of the war, whitewashed Germany, and cited a nefarious shadowy group of you-know-who for pushing supposedly naïve or sinister leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt into an aggressive and unwarranted war against a supposedly victimized Hitler and Nazi Germany.
From Underdog to Overdog
Third, Israel is no longer the Israel of 1947, 1956, 1967, or 1973, nor the Israel mired in the various Lebanon and Intifada quagmires that followed.
In the early 21st century, Benjamin Netanyahu helped open the Israeli economy and foster a meritocratic, free-market boom. Only oil-rich Qatar and the UAE surpass Israel in regional per capita income.
Its military, honed over generations of warfare, has become more capable than those of France, Germany, or the UK in key areas, especially combat aviation, the number of combat aircraft, and pilot quality. In short, tiny underdog Israel—surrounded by hundreds of millions of aggressive Muslims—has somehow been recast as the settler “overdog” bully. With a mere 18 percent of collective Arab GDP and outnumbered 50,000 to one, Israel is depicted as poised to carve out a “Greater Israel” from the impotent but simultaneously more virtuous and richer Arab Middle East.
October 7 and its aftermath, counterintuitively, accelerated the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hatred. If Israel had not responded to the massacre, the new anti-Israel cohort would have claimed their inaction was a passive admission of prior guilt for which the attack was merely partial payment.
Yet once Israel moved to destroy Hamas, it was branded genocidal. Early Israeli calls for Gazans to turn over the planners and perpetrators of the massacre were dismissed by the Palestinians as absurd or unserious—mere jest. Few in the West called on the Palestinians to surrender their mass murderers.
Yet few of Israel’s critics could ever explain exactly what the Jewish state was supposed to do after suffering mass murder in peacetime from an enemy that had abducted more than 240 hostages—to the cheers of most Gazans.
How was the IDF—or any army—supposed to descend into a billion-dollar, booby-trapped labyrinth of tunnels, its exits and entries hidden beneath schools, private homes, mosques, and hospitals, to free hostages and kill terrorists while the media effectively shilled for Hamas?
The New Jacobin Agenda
Hating Israel—and, by association, Jews—was voiced not merely by DEI or the radical new wing of the Democratic Party. Anti-Israelism instead merged into a broader leftist potpourri of open borders, illegal immigration, anti-ICE violence, Green New Deal-style wokism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
These causes came to be viewed as an inseparable package whose elements were interconnected and tolerated no apostasy from any of them.
Thus, Jacobinism became an all-or-nothing litmus test. As a result, even though Totenkopf tattoos might have been the last thing seen by Jews as they were herded by the tens of thousands into the gas chambers, such Satanic iconography scrawled into the flesh was apparently no longer disqualifying for a Democratic Senate nominee in Maine.
For figures like Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Chuck Schumer to forcefully challenge hatred of Israel—and, by extension, of the Jews—would now be treated as political heresy, a career-ending death wish. Defending Israel and calling out antisemitism became as unfashionable in progressive circles as praising secure borders, deportations, or fossil fuels and pipelines. And so the old party largely kept mum and sanctioned the new loathing.
As for conservative podcasters and internet influencers who now seem unrecognizable from what they had professed only months or years earlier, many had grown tired of being ostracized from popular culture and the establishment hallmarks of media and entertainment.
How else to explain their sudden hatred of Trump for the current Iran war, or his support for Israel, when the remaining 90 percent of his agenda has matched their own life-long conservative views, and were antithetical to the Left they now sometimes court?
But once figures like Candace Owens or a newly radicalized Tucker Carlson became fixated on the Jews, the Left found them useful as both shields and validators. Their rhetoric suggested that virulent anti-Israelism was not merely a left-wing fixation but something shared across the political spectrum.
The more such figures received establishment tolerance—or even praise and social acceptance—like addicts, the madder and louder they became until they were very nearly indistinguishable from the leftists they had so long warned about. Thus Carlson, a once eloquent conservative, came full circle and effectively rationalized the idea of allowing Iran to have a nuclear bomb. That notion after all, was the subtext of Obama’s Iran Deal and his morally neutral idea of a powerful Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Gaza axis to balance moderate Arab regimes and Israel.
The Left praised these new right-wing opponents of Israel, as if they were Liz Cheneys—who were not so bad after all. Such praise from the corridors of cultural influence and power apparently was seen as welcome shelter from the prior left-wing hailstorms that had pelted them for years.
The final irony?
The only meaningful resistance to the anti-Israel crowd is not the DEI coalition, not the new Democratic Party, not the coastal and credentialed and supposedly enlightened left-wing white elite, not the supposedly “character is destiny” Never Trumpers, and certainly not the allegedly brave mavericks who have bolted from the MAGA base.
Instead, what is left in the pathway of demonizing Israel and blaming Jews, here and abroad, is the supposed bigot Donald Trump and his “irredeemable,” “deplorable” MAGA movement—for now, the last dam holding back the rising flood.
Tragically like the song “never enough” in my 90 years have I not experienced antisemitism in all its variables. Victor Davis Hanson has the god given ability to express it so diligently and clearly. One can only hope that some of his clarity opens some deaf ears !
Israel’s Gaza problem should have been solved after Oct 7 by “ethnic cleansing”. Kill them all and/or drive them all out. This is how every other historical war has been resolved. When the Vikings invaded Britain, the anglos killed them all (at least all they could find) men, women,children, burn thier houses and fields and kill their animals. Muslim hordes did worse invading Europe. The only solution is separation of significant distance. Kill so many, that the few left leave and build new lives elsewhere. This is how Europe removed the ju’s; how African tribes fight wars, etc. the difference is you cannot make peace with Muslims, you may be able to force one.
Absolutely indisputable. The only point missing from this brilliant commentary is “Islamophobia”. The acquiescence of the western press to the continuing spread of radical Islam in fear of being labeled such, together with the described demography are putting the USA on the same path as France, the UK, and other European countries whose Jew hatred is already resulting in a similar migration of Jews that caused my grandparents to immigrate here from the pale of settlement at the turn of the 20th century. If this trend continues, there will ultimately be no diaspora of Jews to support Israel.
The reporter that Trump called out for asking such a “stupid” question regarding his cleaning of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was ABC was a young, 32 year old, prominent black ABC journalist named Rachel Scott.
What other president would have the guts to say that to a young woman, especially a black young woman, even though it clearly was true? It was indeed a stupid question.
That is why I love this man. I love that he has the guts to take on all that needs to be taken on, and do it successfully. I suspect his “guts”, are the envy of the other heads of state.
Dennis Prager said that the nations cannot forgive the Jews for introducing the concept of a moral G-d. His argument is that a moral G-d, one who demands ethical behavior from humans, is an uncomfortable and unwelcome idea, because it places moral obligations on people and nations that they would rather not have. The Jews, as the people who gave the world that concept, become the object of resentment for having introduced that burden. In his view, antisemitism is not primarily about race or economics but about this deep resistance to moral accountability.
Professor Victor Davis Hanson has a rare ability to step back from the noise of the moment and identify the deeper civilizational currents beneath it. This piece is not merely about Israel. It is about how quickly moral clarity can erode when history is forgotten, language is weaponized, and fashionable ideology replaces honest judgment.
What is most disturbing is not only the resurgence of anti-Israel sentiment, but the intellectual permission structure that now surrounds it. Old prejudices have been repackaged in modern academic vocabulary: “colonialism,” “oppression,” “resistance,” “equity.” But beneath the updated terminology, the target is often the same. Israel is judged not by the standards applied to every other nation, but by a special and impossible standard reserved almost exclusively for the Jewish state.
Professor Hanson’s most powerful observation is that antisemitism rarely announces itself honestly. It adapts to the moral language of each era. In one age it was religious accusation. In another it was racial theory. Today, it often disguises itself as human rights activism while excusing barbarism, minimizing Jewish suffering, and denying Israel the basic right of self-defense.
Whether one agrees with every political conclusion or not, Hanson forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable truth: a society that forgets why Israel exists, why the Holocaust matters, and why free societies must defend themselves will eventually lose the moral vocabulary needed t
I am an Israeli and a Jew, of course, 60 years American Citizen , and a Democrat to boot.
I am so bewildered by this eye opening article and am left feeling impotent for having to live through this tragedy and helpless to change or suade haters from their blind hatred and open their minds and eyes to the awful trap that they hafe fallen into.
OY, GEVALT.
B”H It’s a matter of deep concern that the vocal supporters of the current profoundly flawed leaders of our beloved U.S. and Israel are promoting illiberal values that are inherently anathema to Judaism and the ideas of our Founding Fathers. Those faux allies represent the fringe of right-wing politics that easily contrast with the extreme leftist Mamdani coalition. Both must be rejected. Sanity and decency will return when we reject and make the toxic politics of the present delivered to the dustbin of history; and that will surely occur in a grand coalition of a former GOP, a Republican of the Abe-TR-Ike variety, joins with centrist Democrats and independents to make us in the words of former VP Hubert H. Humphrey “happy warriors.”
Mike Caldwell, 80%+ of Orthodox Jews vote Republican. You want to solve the Jewish problem (sic)? Millenia of oppression didn’t solve it – the only solution is to educate Jews to be Jews.
Excellent analysis of what is true and what is not! But for our alliance with and support of the Jewish State and the Jewish people what would our world be like today? Lot of folks need to sit down and think hard about that!
ISRAELIS ARE CHILD KILLERS. HITLER WAS RIGHT ABOUT SOMETHING. JEWS ARE TRYING TO CREATE WAR BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS. SO THAT THEY CAN WATCH AND ENJOY.
The Jews were the first of the first and are now the last of the last. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity they needed someone to blame for killing Christ and they certainly weren’t going to blame themselves. So “tag” the Jews were it. The Catholic Church continued it. That spread to Islam. Everyone needs someone downstream to blame. And to blame when they want money and not replay it. The King of France vs the Knights Templars. The Merchant of Venice. Henry the VIII splitting off from the Church of Rome. Use to be the Irish (no dogs or Irish allowed) Italians, Catholics, Asians, and most especially Negros. One by one these groups got brought into the fold. Politicians want votes & money. The groups moving up the ladder contributed both. The Jews could contribute money and were reliable liberal but the mass votes weren’t there. The right (KKK) was anti Jewish as well as Catholic and Black. The left provided lip service, but that was about it. They had their votes anyway. Where were they going to go? Not to the R’s and if some did the number would be small. As the other groups became “legitimate” they had the money and votes the “it’s all their fault” choices on who to blame became smaller. The last group left is Jews. By being anti-semitic you pick up votes&money and lose little. The upside is greater, the downside is limited. And no one liked them anyway.
Great column, VDH!
I’ve got three horsemen: the three political viewpoints taught in most of our American universities today:
1. Communism.
2. Jihadi Terrorism.
3. Nazism.
And now all three have blended together, as the one true moral prism through which to view the world. Unfortunately, all three represent hatred, oppression, and mass murder, and our college students show increasing respect for these grave evils.
The “American vision,” the one representing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, gets no class time in most American colleges, except maybe a general daily condemnation.
And so our young graduates march out this month and next with diplomas of death.
To begin, I pray for your full and complete recovery from recent health issues and a long and vigorous life! Second, I express my gratitude for your insight and the wisdom contained in your posts and videos. There have been few, if any better exponents of Americanism than you on the contemporary scene. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not suggest that the rise of Jew hatred is a direct result of America’s abandonment of its Christian heritage in favor of a hedonistic secularism that has nothing to recommend it and everything to condemn it. I am embarrassed for the poor, and poorly educated “students” who seem to be both the primary proponents of as well as the primary victims of this pro-islamic madness.
Another factor is most major Jewish organizations are run by liberal democrats who continue to support the democrat agenda regardless of its anti-Israel, anti-Zionist anti-Jewish bias. They easily convince Low information Jewish voters to stay the course.
From appearances, it is true that Trump and MAGA are the last forces holding back the dam of antisemitism overwhelming the Jewish people. But there is a spiritual battle being fought that is largely invisible. The Bible teaches is that the Church is actually holding back a Satanic flood of Jew hatred in the world. It also teaches that one day the Church will vanish from the earth (“the Restrainer will restrain until it is taken out of the way”) and then, visibly, all hell will truly break loose. The Jewish people will endure, however, and inherit the promises God made to Abraham, Jacob, and David.
Since the time of Abraham the Jewish people have been trying to survive in a world having people that inexplicably want them eliminated from the face of the Earth. During my entire adult life I’ve witnessed the continuous attack against them and any person or country that supports their god given right to survive and flourish as individuals and as a people. I would venture to guess that Jews have positively contributed as much or more to the success of these United States of America than any other immigrant group since its founding. Yet their efforts to survive, flourish and contribute have and continue to be met with distrust and derision, even in my own “enlightened” country. What atrocities, past or present, have the Jews committed that justify such treatment? Some will now point to Gaza and say “See!”. Does anyone remember that for the last 80 years Israel has suffered suicide bombings, wars started by their neighbors, random missile attacks on its civilian population and boycotts of its commence? October 7 was the long overdue “enough” point. As Scott Adams (GRHS) taught, the right and means to survive trumps everything. In the words of my generation, “get real”.
A banger from VDH! A veritable masterclass to digest for my next visit with my anti Israel Jewish Marxist Yale professor (but I repeat myself) in-laws. Who I have great affection for, but are “enemies on paper”
Thank you Victor, you’re the best of the best.
Bill
One has to ask, what stops the march of the Muslims?
Just a minor correction:
Israeli GDP Per Capita is now $69,804
Qatar is $ 68,138
UAE is $54,214
Otherwise, very lucid article.
A historian’s analysis of contemporary events. Bravo!
Professor Peterson at U of Michigan praised students supporting Hamas and Gazans. Michigan for all practical purposes is an Islamic stronghold. Potent information for the decline of Western civilization. Teachers and Professors that have been bribed by Qatar and CAIR and Neville Bingham and Alex Soros are on the wrong side of history.
The main reasons for the growth of antisemitism in the West is the Muslim migration. During the 20th century, post WWII, the level of antisemitism in the West was relativity low. However, due to the large influx of Muslims as a result of the Iraqi war and open borders, the Islamic antisemitism gradually escalated. The ongoing pro-Palestine protests are extended antisemitism and a cover for the spread of anti-American and anti-Israel ideology. No other religion has done so much damage where ever they go as Islam.
When will Jews realize who their true allies in the U.S. are and stop voting Democrat?
You never cease to amaze me with your concise and hitting-the-target of truth by extrapolating your experience and intellect, putting it altogether in understandable form. You present current events as history is unfolding before us for all to read and never can escape this truth. God bless you and all you write and podcast!
A superlative analysis. Thank you Professor Hanson.
In times of great need, God bequeaths this special nation with heroic men of virtue and……..somewhat clay feet. At this semiquincentenial we are fortunate to have Trump, for if he continues to be as successful in the remainder of his tenure, the nation has the chance to survive. And history will be not only grateful but also forgetful of his warts. For my part I am a grateful octogenarian witnessing a truly historic epoch.
The frightening part of Professor Hanson’s analysis is typically repeated over a history of many centuries, anti-semitism or more crudely Jew hatred usually got worse before it got better. After Jews suffered annihilation and the destruction of the Second Temple then the remainder banished from their homeland they built great societies in Babylonia and Spain. After banishment from Spain they grew great societies in the Netherlands, Germany and the rest of Europe. A half century before and then after the almost unbelievable tragedy of World War 2 Jews thrived in the United States. Consistent banishment, suffering and death could not stop Jews rebounding and achieving prominence. Still, before, there was terrible banishment, suffering and death.
Thank you Victor, another excellent article.
The challenge before us now is how to defeat an evil that typically hides in
“… a billion-dollar, booby-trapped labyrinth of tunnels, its exits and entries hidden beneath schools, private homes, mosques, and hospitals …”
No one before Trump has fully accepted this challenge. Now we find supposedly reasonable people who oppose him in this fight.
Frightening.
Always enjoyed listening to you on HH’s program long ago and far away. I even bought “A War Like No Other”. Thank you.
this has been rejected 2 times . read it while you can
Here’s a rewrite of the rejected comment.
Mr. Hanson states that his first conclusion from talking to students about Israel is they “simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.”
I think that the “talking points” apartheid, genocide, war crimes, and settler colonialism could be a justified reason to switch from a supporter of the government of Israel to a condemner of the government of Israel. To hold this view, somehow, is now considered anti-Semitism.
“… what is left in the pathway of demonizing Israel and blaming Jews, here and abroad, is the supposed bigot Donald Trump and his “irredeemable,” “deplorable” MAGA movement…”
The highly insulting irony that Trump has been endlessly compared to Hitler and his supporters to White Supremacists is inescapable, unless of course you live in the insulated and abstract Orwellian world of “Liberal-La-La Land” and next door to the right – “Never-Never-Trump Land.”
Another good article, sir. Keep up the good work.
“The final irony?”, just two sentences, explains and perhaps eliminates an internal conflict for me. Since 2015, I liked most of what Donald Trump has said and done but did not like and admire the man due to some of his comments and antics. He may be the best president in my lifetime and that will be a great final irony for me.
Here’s a rewrite of the rejected comment. Mr. Hanson states that his first conclusion from talking to students about Israel is they “simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.”
I think that the “talking points” apartheid, genocide, war crimes, and settler colonialism could be a justified reason to switch from a supporter of the government of Israel to a condemner of the government of Israel. To hold this view, somehow, is now considered anti-Semitism.
Why wasn’t my comment allowed to be posted? I saw it after I hit post. It said “checking for moderation”. There was nothing in the post that would have violated any guidelines. It was respectful, coherent, and without ad hominin bios. How about an email telling me why it was rejected.
It seems to me while noting the origin of the Switch, as talking points, from a supporter of Israel to a condemner of the policies of the Israeli Government Mr. Hanson states…
“First, many have been taught to despise Israel and simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.”,
Mr. Hanson seems to dismiss the factual causes (“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism”) as a justifiable reason to condemn the tactics of the state of Israel and somehow this becomes “antisemitism”.
VDH, you are the light at the end of America’s tunnel. You show us the way. May your days be long, and may God open the eyes of the craven politicians, myopic elites in academia and the media, our working people and business leaders, our dependent classes, our activist judges, our allies and enemies, so that they all listen to and understand your words. The world has become a complicated mess, while our human nature has stayed the same. You have a gift that permits you to see how our ancient nature as humans can cope with and navigate the massive changes brought on by technology and globalization. We need your wisdom and insights, and we need them every day. May God continue to bless you, and through you, us.
Errata.
The population of the 22 Arab states is 509 million.
The population of Israel is 10.3 million
509 / 10.3 = 49, not 50,000.