LETTER: October 7 Hamas massacre gives anti-Semitism in SA a big boost

The origins and tenacity of historical anti-Semitism have been the subject of much debate and writing, but we are only beginning to look at the pathology of its recent universal eruption, brought on by the October 7 Hamas attacks.

It is true that there is nothing new about anti-Semitism from the other usual subjects, and that the aftermath of October 7 just gave it licence to come out of the woodwork, but there is something else going on. The enthusiasm in attacking and othering Jews on the streets and in public institutions, maliciously, virulently and gleefully needs further explanation. Could that be guilt and resentment? 

Two things are never forgiven (and I thank Howard Jacobson for this observation): helping a less competent, fortunate or successful friend or relation; and suffering a great harm. In the former it leads to the well-known outcome of “every good turn deserves a kick in the teeth” or “what have you done for me lately”, and in the latter, where the victim is vilified for “making” the perpetrator act out his harmful act and the victim is therefore blamed for suffering the harm. 

The Jews have never been forgiven for being the victims of Nazism because it destroyed the myth of  European civilisation and its progression from the dark ages through the Enlightenment to modernity. The dark underbelly of medieval Europe had not been extinguished. Nearly 6-million of the 9.5-million European Jews were furiously and intentionally shot, starved or burnt. That is six times the decimation the Romans used to punish their enemies.

Hence the conscious or unconscious European schadenfreude, which soon morphed into resentment, when the Jews not only survived as a race but again survived new attempted genocides when they beat back massed Arab armies in 1948, again in 1966 and again in 1973, all the time building up that resentment we now see acted out.

A nasty resentment compounded by the unprecedented success of their tiny start-up state, leaving its disparagers well behind. A state that grew out of its socialist principles embodied in kibbutzim, that resurrected a dead biblical tongue as its national language, welcomed Jews of every colour, gave equal democratic rights to all its citizens and developed into a modern economy leading the world in medical science, agriculture, water management and technological research, ideas and solutions.

So now the Jew-baiters sensed the opportunity to wield their weapon where they know it hurts: not only by blaming the victim for ‘allowing” itself to be attacked, but to project the absurd charge of genocide knowing the real genocide is still an open sore for the Jewish people.

Sydney Kaye
Via email

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