Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

In recent weeks, reports have saturated the media claiming that PM Netanyahu was warned about an impending Hamas attack by Egypt, the UAE, Ronen Bar, probably hundreds of others, and ignored them. No report has been corroborated in the slightest, which has not stopped his foes from using this information as campaign fodder to try to unseat him as prime minister. Indeed, that is the sole purpose of these reports, which reminded me that this is a movie that I have seen twice before.

A look at the reaction to similar catastrophes in the United States is instructive. The two analogous intelligence failures in American history were the bombings of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941(roughly 2400 Americans killed) and the Arab terror attack of September 11, 2001 (roughly 3000 Americans killed).

On May 16, 2002, just six months before the midterm elections in the United States, the New York Times breathlessly reported that on August 6, 2001, scarcely a month before the Arab terror attack of September 11, President George W. Bush was warned by the CIA (!), with the Presidential Daily Brief headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” The criticism was thunderous and caustic, with Bush lambasted for his indifference to this report (he received it while vacationing in Texas) and his failure to respond.

Almost two years later (well into his reelection campaign), Bush released the full text of the briefing and explained that this warning meant nothing. Bin Laden was “determined,” but the CIA provided no details of what he was planning or when and where he planned to do it. Essentially, Bush said, someone “who hated America” was going to attack, and the FBI since 1998 had detected “patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks” (italics mine), none of which was any actionable intelligence. The briefing said nothing that Bush didn’t already know but that did not prevent the Times from falsely claiming that Bush was actually told who was planning an attack, with “hints” of what the attacks would be and where they would occur. Not quite accurate – but the leak was meant to cause political harm to Bush, not reflect historical reality.

Similarly, soon after the Japanese sneak attack, reports circulated in the United States – it continued for years – that FDR knew about the Japanese attack in advance but did not respond because he was seeking to enter the US into World War II. Nothing came of either accusation which was devoid of credible evidence but such accusations persist until today.

This is what is happening here and now in Israel – and we can expect a few more such excited offerings in the coming weeks from the anti-Netanyahu media, none of which will be true but all of which are designed to suppress his vote from a public the leftist media believes can be easily manipulated.

It is as if someone three years ago or today said that Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Iran is planning a terrorist attack against Israel. Yes, duh, one or another group of Arabs have been planning attacks on Jews for more than a century…and are still planning. The purpose of this hysteria is purely political. Not a shred of credible evidence has ever been adduced that suggests that Netanyahu had actionable intelligence that a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, was imminent – just allegations repudiated by the purported sources. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case – that actionable intelligence was concealed from Netanyahu, before and even as the massacre was unfolding, and by some of the very people who are now leaking to the tendentious media to impugn Netanyahu and salvage their own battered reputations.

This is not to suggest that Netanyahu bears no responsibility for the massacre. He certainly does, as the prime minister, but the problem his enemies have to contend with is that responsibility is shared by almost everyone in the political class, the military and security establishment, the courts, and the media. No one is immune from criticism, including some of his biggest critics. It was a colossal, systemic failure.

Yet, the failure was so widespread and the flawed intelligence so pervasive that it is fair to say that the Hamas massacre would have taken place regardless of which party was in power on October 7, 2023.

It is also fair to say, in retrospect, that what has happened since October 8, 2023 – the devastation of our enemies on multiple fronts, the deterioration of Hamas and Hezbollah, the battering of Iran, the disintegration of the Syrian threat, and Israel’s emergence as the leading regional power – could only have happened under Netanyahu.

Most of the political establishment would have within months cut a cease fire deal that returned the hostages and let Hamas survive, rebuild, and regenerate, and never attacked Hezbollah.

In truth, the antipathy towards Netanyahu from his adversaries in politics and media long preceded October 7. What remains a mystery is the differing reactions of Israeli and American societies to national traumas.

No American hung placards saying that “FDR is guilty!” or that “Bush failed!” No American highways were littered with signs calling on either president to resign or be incarcerated. Indeed – timely message to Netanyahu’s irrational haters – both FDR and Bush were reelected, approximately three years after their respective catastrophes. Both men were judged for what they did in the aftermath of the attack and less for not anticipating what they did not know.

Additionally, the Israeli media, goading the public, has a peculiar obsession with hearing (and recording) Netanyahu saying the words “I am responsible.” This is not because they are avid proponents of the “Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility,” a two-volume work I published years ago, but because they want to use the clip of “I am responsible” to open and close the evening news and flash it several dozen times in between.

For the record, neither FDR nor George W. Bush ever accepted responsibility for their respective failures. In FDR’s famous speech to Congress on December 8, he said nothing about his own role. In Bush’s address on the evening of September 11, and in a subsequent speech to Congress several weeks later, there was nothing remotely close to an acceptance of responsibility. The focus was on the enemy. The obsession here is purely political and personal.

FDR and the American people blamed Japan and waged against it a brutal war of unconditional surrender. Bush and the American people blamed Al Qaeda and fought it for two decades. Yet, too many Israelis blame Netanyahu and let Hamas off the hook. Who is the enemy? Not Hamas but Netanyahu. That is pathological.

Certainly, there are differences in the two forms of government. Israel’s parliamentary system has a history of prime ministers resigning, whereas no US president (except for Nixon) has ever resigned. But that does not mean it couldn’t have happened. And both FDR and Bush acted immediately. Within days, FDR fired Husband Kimmel, the head of the Pacific fleet, and appointed Chester Nimitz to succeed him. Contrast that with Netanyahu’s inability – owing to the corruption and even sordidness of Israel’s courts and Attorney General – to fire the heads of the IDF, Army Intelligence, the Southern Command, and Shin Bet despite their blatant failures on and before October 7. Strange indeed.

President Bush rallied the nation and began a long campaign called “the War on Terror,” which, despite avoidable and unavoidable errors, and with the involvement of his successors, has kept the US safe from similar terrorist attacks in the quarter century past, and dispatched Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Qasem Soleimani to the nether world. And FDR rallied the American people to fight a two-front war for four years in which more than 400,000 American soldiers were killed.

Nevertheless, it should be underscored, the Muslim war against the world has not ended, not here obviously, and not against the West, and all non-Muslim nations remain targets.

Are we preternaturally different as a nation that many are hellbent on ascribing blame to someone, soon, especially someone so detested by the media? The oddity is that the media hope to replace Netanyahu, liable in their eyes for October 7, with another person who is perhaps even more liable for October 7. Those who advocated and recommended the coddling and funding of Hamas, were reluctant to eliminate it when given the opportunity, neglected the tunnel networks of Hamas and Hezbollah, and proposed a “small and smart army” should be kept far from politics. People whose policies created the conceptziya that engendered the catastrophic intelligence failures are the problem, not the solution, and the proof is that their campaigns are devoid of substance beyond “anti-Bibi” and platitudes. And yet they are all running.

His opponents are running on October 7. Netanyahu is running on October 8 and beyond.

Who is responsible for the colossal failure of October 7? Here is a brief list: Netanyahu, Gallant, Herzi Halevi, Aharon Haliva, Ronen Bar, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Yaron Finkelman, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan, Naftali Bennett, and others, and everyone who endorsed the conceptziya. Add to that list Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres, Yitzchak Rabin, and Yossi Beilin who thought it was a grand idea to invite terrorists into Israel and arm them. Add to that list the Supreme Court and the Military Prosecutor who imposed Draconian “open fire” laws on our soldiers that effectively preempted a meaningful response and counted it among the highest aspirations of Jewish morality never to win a war.

This is one reason why true accountability for what happened on October 7 will not come for fifty years. Every branch of government, and almost every political figure for the last 35 years, has something to hide.

And add to that list the segment of the Israeli public that, had Netanyahu been apprised of Hamas’ plans and launched a preemptive strike on October 6, would have accused him of fomenting a war to distract from his legal problems. And there are plenty of others.

We are not the only country in the world in which many people have a neurotic hatred for an elected leader. But we are the only country that has real enemies that want to destroy us. We would do well as a nation to recall the words of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “The Jewish people right now needs leaders, people unafraid to face the challenges of today and build for tomorrow instead of, as so often happens, fighting the battles of yesterday.”

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

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American Jews are dealing with the reality of distressing Jew hatred, manifested by sporadic physical attacks and more prevalent verbal confrontations. Worse, it has become mainstreamed in the Democratic Party, with elected officials and prominent nominees unafraid to spew hatred against Jews poorly disguised as anti-Israel “activism.” Some of these Democrats are poor excuse for Jews, such as Bernie Sanders, while others, like Chuck Schumer, are so blinded by ambition that they pretend it doesn’t exist or rationalize its presence by blaming Israel.

Increasingly, this is becoming a viral strain in the Republican Party as well, engendering an insipid debate over who is or isn’t an anti-Semite, and ignoring its true causes. Why, indeed, has Jew hatred exploded in America and become commonplace across the world? Is it because of Gaza, as if Israel should have just accepted the October 7 massacre and the brutalization of its hostages, licked its wounds, and prepared for the promised, next massacre? Is it because the world has suddenly determined that Israel – alone among countries and Jews unique among nationalities – really has no right to exist? Burundi and Bhutan have an undisputed right to exist – but not the Jewish state of Israel?

That doesn’t seem credible, and for the apparently abrupt escalation in Jew hatred we must look elsewhere. As is often the case, history is quite instructive.

The United States was founded upon religious tolerance. Indeed, there were very few Jews living in colonial America (not many more than 1000 Jews lived there during the Revolutionary War), and Jews were treated well – better than well. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport Hebrew Congregation in 1790, using language literally borrowed from Moses Seixas, Washington wrote: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” Tolerance? No. Jews are no different than any other group in America and are not “tolerated” but fully accepted.

As such, Jew hatred was largely unknown for almost the first century of the United States. Sure, there were some states that took time eliminating electoral provisions that barred any non-Christians (i.e., Jews) from holding public office, and General Ulysses Grant temporarily banned all Jews from entering the Tennessee territory during the Civil War, but there were few recorded attacks on Jews and Jews lived essentially unimpeded lives.

Could this be attributable to the dearth of Jews in America? Possibly, but not necessarily. There are plenty of Jew-hating countries in the world today where no Jews live. Jew hatred can flourish without Jews, as long as there are a sufficient number of Gentiles reared with this spiritual and psychological malady.

Even the large influx of German Jews to the United States in the mid-19^th century did not provoke any Jew hatred, perhaps because they were generally assimilated, their temples and services reminiscent of churches, their day of rest not Shabbat but Sunday, and their intense desire to blend into American life, which they did quite successfully. In fact, there was far more fear and hatred of Catholics in 19^th century America than there was of Jews.

Of the 300,000 Jews who lived in the United States in 1880, more than 200,000 were German Jews. But in the next forty years, more than two million European Jews came to America, such that by 1920, the Jewish population of the United States had increased tenfold, to over 3,500,000 people.

By the early 20^th century, Jew hatred had become more common in the United States. Leo Frank was falsely accused of murder, freed, and then lynched. A host of Jewish “defense” organizations arose (they all still exist). Jews were hassled on the teeming city streets. But the 1920’s university quotas and job restrictions limiting Jewish opportunities became standard and even persisted into the 1950’s when civil rights laws cracked down on private conduct that had any public nexus.

What changed? Was it the mass influx of Jews that attracted Jew hatred?

No – it was the mass influx of European Gentiles. While two million Jewish immigrants came to America in that period, that number was dwarfed by the more than twenty million Gentiles who came – Poles, Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, Slavs, and others. These immigrants, arriving from lands where they imbibed Jew hatred with their mother’s milk, brought their Jew hatred with them.

Jew hatred was never indigenous to the United States. It was imported, along with these millions of immigrants. Some of it was religious based – Polish, Irish, Italian Catholics reared on Jew hatred in their native lands – and some of it was sociologically based. Some of these newcomers, the lowest tier on society’s totem pole, simply sought out an ethnic group long despised in their native land, and disparaged them, persecuted them, and harassed them.

In a very short time, this imported Jew hatred spread to the establishment as well, and Jews (and blacks) became conventional targets for discrimination. For Jews it didn’t last or even sting as much because we were successful, skilled at adaptation, ambitious, educated, social climbers, and blessed. Law firms, hospitals, and country clubs didn’t want us? We just made our own, and better ones too. And built businesses. And Hollywood. In time, and the Holocaust played a role in this as well, Jew hatred receded from American life (although you wouldn’t know it from the billions of dollars spent for many decades combating it) and became unfashionable.

Jew hatred is again fashionable, and not because the culture changed, or Israel became too bellicose, or Netanyahu is unlikeable, or Jews are too successful. The same dynamic that swept America over a century ago has repeated itself in the last thirty years – the large influx of Muslims, especially radical Muslims, who have brought with them the endemic Jew hatred that characterizes their native lands.

Millions of Arabs and Muslims have immigrated to the United States in the last fifty years, many claiming refugee status because of the depraved conditions in their countries of origin. To be sure, not every Arab or Muslim is a rabid Jew hater (any more than all of the twenty million European Christians who came to the US were), and many have become productive citizens, embodying the American ethos. But many have not.

Armed with literal fortunes in money – donated by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Muslim countries – they have poisoned the American bloodstream with their radical ideas, even insisting in some locales on the implementation of Sharia law. They have infiltrated local school boards and endowed university chairs, not surprising then that most Jew hatred in America has emerged on college campuses. Their culture is one of hatred of Jews and Israel, if not America itself. And it did not take long for some of their most radical imports – immigrants or children of immigrants, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and others – to achieve important political positions.

They did it very slyly, cleverly, and surreptitiously. Who would have thought that a radical Muslim NYC mayor could preside next month over the 25^th anniversary of the Arab terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? It is because their PR teams and useful idiots in the media immediately identified the major crisis in US life after 9/11 as “Islamophobia,” statistically insignificant as a social phenomenon but dominant and pervasive as a deflection. What better evidence than the universal hesitation to characterize the attacks of 9/11 as “Arab” or “Muslim”? Instead, it is just a date, 9/11, no perpetrators need be identified, for propriety’s sake.

Not only is “Islamophobia” used as a shield against exposing odious behavior on the part of Muslims, but it also rests on a fundamental hypocrisy. “Islamophobia” is premised on the reasonable idea that all Muslims should not be blamed for the detestable acts of a violent few, or even many. Yet, that same deference is not showed to Jews, who must be held accountable, hounded, beaten, attacked, vilified, and persecuted for the (righteous) acts of the State of Israel.

It is not just that “Islamophobia” is a crock of drivel as a real phenomenon, but rather that it is employed as armor against any criticism of even the most radical Muslims, and in turn is used as a weapon that has intimidated many Americans into silence and acquiescence in the transformation of their country.

Similarly, the infiltration of billions of petrodollars into the university system in the US has changed curricula and radicalized students. When American campuses erupted in anti-Jewish fury on October 8 (!), with spirited defenses of the Hamas massacre and vile accusations of genocide in Gaza even before Israel had responded militarily (!), these campuses had literally been preparing for years for just such a moment. Tents, signs, fences, loudspeakers resolutions had all be readied in advance, and pressure points against vulnerable Jews had already been identified.

And, just like a century ago, the Jew hatred that emigrated to America along with the Arabs and Muslims, slowly spread to other classes as well – including some American blacks and Hispanics (who are disproportionately assaulting Jews in NYC for no discernible reasons) and the old WASP class that has long resented Jewish success.

Undoubtedly, the Jew hatred in Europe over the last several decades has a similar provenance – the large, and until recently, unstoppable incursion of Arabs and Muslims into the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere. It is no surprise that all those countries, like the USA, has been visited multiple times by Arab mass terror attacks, and no surprise that Jews are repeatedly victimized there. The Jew hatred in Australia and New Zealand follows the same pattern – Muslim immigration that is accompanied by Muslim Jew hatred. But go ahead and blame Israel for it.

Is there a solution to this problem? A century ago, time played the largest factor and Jew hatred receded within several decades because of our prosperity and societal integration, each a divine blessing of sorts. But time may not be our ally here. And the hoary staples of outreach and dialogue will be of limited value when dealing with an entrenched, religious-based hatred, which is not to say it won’t be tried, and when it fails, tried again.

America is changing. Its establishment is reproducing itself far below replacement rates and thus it is becoming ever more distant from the Enlightenment roots that spawned the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Hence, the current demand of the Socialists to gut the Constitution, the product of dead, white, European males. Jews, who do have a homeland that will welcome them happily if they so choose, will mostly try to ride out the wave, making deals with the devil when necessary (including turning on Israel), and wondering why the US continues to elect more and more radical Jew haters rather than the pareve Protestants who made the US such a palatable home for so many for so long.

Is it possible that the children of radical Muslim immigrants will over time mainstream and Americanize, what once was the dream of every class of immigrants? It certainly is possible, but the early returns are not good. The children of radical Muslim immigrants are just as radical but they have sufficiently acclimated to American society to perceive how to attract votes, money, and support, how to camouflage the most despicable ideas behind the toothiest and oleaginous smiles.

Immigration changes every nation, and many for the better, the United States among them. But some types of immigration transform in ways that obscure the national purpose and obliterate the founding ethos. That is what has occurred in Europe and is occurring now in the United States.

This is one of the ways in which exiles come to an end.