‘Assault on Judaism is a national security threat to the United States’

Felice Friedson/The Media Line|

Gol Kalev, head of the Judaism 3.0 think tank, has an unequivocal answer for what’s behind the overwhelming rise in antisemitism over the past year and a half. His answer is clear from the title of his new book, The Assault on Judaism: The Existential Threat Is Coming From the West. What many in the West don’t realize, Kalev argues, is that antisemitism from the West is threatening their own Western values as well.

“The assault on Judaism is not just an assault on Judaism,” Kalev told The Media Line’s Felice Friedson in a recent interview. “As I explain in the briefings I’ve had in the United States, it is also a proxy for an assault on Americanism, and therefore it needs to be treated in a national security context. The assault on Judaism is a national security threat to the United States.”

By way of illustration, Kalev pointed to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comments during his recent confirmation hearing. Rubio said that the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment of Israeli officials set “a dangerous precedent.” “I think the United States should be very concerned because I believe this is a test run for applying it to American service members and American leaders in the future,” Rubio said.

In other words, if Americans don’t want to see their own institutions destroyed, they ought to take antisemitism seriously.

Kalev explained that the ICC ruling also opens the door for antisemitism from other actors. “When the ICC, a credible institution, perceived to be a credible institution, is certifying that once again, Jews are doing those horrible things, deliberate starvations of others, committing crimes against humanity, others can take actions against the Jews through the Jewish state as well,” he explained.

The ICC’s approach also results in demoralization among Israelis and Jews and holds Israelis back from traveling out of fear that they could be arrested for serving in the military, he said.

The West’s role in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment is nothing new, Kalev said. He said it was European involvement that led to the chaotic Middle East we know today.

“In 1920, we had a peaceful, utopic Middle East based on what we call today a two-state solution,” Kalev said. “We had a Jewish state in the making in what today is Israel, including the West Bank, including possibly the East Bank, living side by side next to a pro-Zionist Arab kingdom in Syria that supported the establishment of the Jewish state.”

Although Palestinians supported the arrangement, France did not, Kalev said. “They deposed the Arab king and started a process that eventually led to a hundred-year conflict,” he said. “Europeans, till today, through the conflict industry to the EU involvement, have been inciting Palestinians against the Jewish state.”

One modern form that this incitement takes is a biased response to Israeli military action. When Israel attacks another nation, even if it’s provoked, the international response is to condemn Israel.

“There is this sort of instinctive reaction to assault on the Jewish state that says, oh, you’re attacking Gaza. You’re the one who’s creating war. You’re attacking Iran. You’re the one who’s creating war,” Kalev said.

Israel’s enemies are well aware of that dynamic and use it to their advantage, he said, causing a feedback loop between ideological attacks on Israel and physical attacks. “Hamas knew on October 7 that when they attack us, they’ll have the Western media at one point or another trying to stop Israel. That was what happened in all previous rounds,” he said.

“We have to prepare, as I’ve said in the book and in my articles, for a prolonged period in which the Western mindset will be nonsupportive of Israel because we are accused of starting wars,” he noted.

Kalev said that Western media has become a mouthpiece for Hamas narratives. Mainstream media aims to portray both the pro-Israel side and the pro-Hamas side of the story, he said, which he compared to reporting “the side of the murderer and the side of the victim” in an article about a murder.

By the time media outlets end up retracting false information, the damage has already been done, Kalev said. “If you ask today the average person, if you do a survey, who bombed the hospital in Gaza at the beginning of the war, I bet that, I don’t know, 60%, 70% percent of people would say it was Israel because the media reported at that time that Israel did it,” he said. “None of the media that reported Israel did it claims today that Israel did it. They know it was an Islamic Jihad missile, but people don’t remember the retraction a few days ago because the news cycle has moved away.”

Western preoccupations have led to harm toward both Palestinians and Jews, Kalev said. One example of such a preoccupation is the issue of humanitarian aid to Gaza, which he described as “essentially financial aid to Hamas.”

“If you want to get food, then you’ve got to join Hamas,” Kalev said. “So Israel in the war was able to kill Hamas terrorists, but Hamas was able to recruit more terrorists faster because they controlled their lives through this humanitarian aid, that was obviously a political issue for the Biden administration, and secondly, prolonged the war and the sufferings of Palestinians and Israelis alike.”

Another example is the Western preoccupation with the idea of a two-state solution, which Kalev said is a foreign concept to the Palestinian people. “I don’t hear Palestinians talk about from the river to the Green Line, so the West Bank will be free,” Kalev said. “These are not the jargons of the Palestinians.”

Kalev said he has heard rumors that Western insistence on promoting a two-state solution is part of the reason why so many are opposed to President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.

“Some people are saying that this is the reason why the West would not allow the Palestinians to leave Gaza, because you’re needed there for the two-state solution, for the Western idea of a two-state solution,” he said. “So again, here, the Palestinians are an ancillary victim.”

That stance is particularly frustrating for Kalev since many of the people decrying President Trump’s plan to relocate the Palestinians from Gaza once claimed that Palestinians in Gaza were in fact refugees from other parts of their ancestral homeland.

“Now that Trump is suggesting that you should leave Gaza, all of a sudden, those same people are saying, oh, no, you are from Gaza,” he said. “So which one is it?”

Kalev also denounced UN Secretary General António Guterres for saying in October 2023 that the Hamas attacks “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” “Once again, the Western mind is being indoctrinated,” he said, pointing to social media posts that equate freed Palestinian prisoners with freed Israeli hostages as another example of indoctrination.

Criticism of Israel in itself can be legitimate, Kalev said. “But that criticism has quickly turned into an obsessive onslaught against the right to exist,” he said. He noted that one prominent mainstream senator had recently questioned Israel’s “biblical right to exist” during a recent confirmation hearing.

For Kalev, the fact that the most blatant examples of antisemitism are related to anti-Israel sentiment is no coincidence. “Opposition to Judaism always follows the most relevant aspect of Judaism,” he said. “In our era, the most relevant aspect of Judaism is Zionism and the Jewish state, and therefore age-old opposition to Judaism and violence against Jews is a derivative of that.”

The insight into the shifting nature of hatred toward Jews dates back to Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, Kalev said. During Herzl’s youth in the late 19th century, many Jewish thinkers believed that anti-Jewish sentiment, which until then had been based on Jews’ religious practices, would abate now that Jews had become more secular.

Herzl, on the other hand, predicted that anti-Jewish hatred would simply evolve alongside Judaism, and he was unfortunately proven right. “It evolved into this new thing that was known as antisemitism, secular-based hatred against the successful Jew, against the secular Jew,” Kalev said.

Today, in response to a further evolution of Judaism, antisemitism is evolving once again.

“Judaism evolved,” Kalev said. “Zionism is becoming its organizing principle. The Jewish state is becoming the most relevant aspect of the Jewish experience, whether it’s in the positive or in the negative, and therefore age-old opposition to Judaism is funneled through Zionism and the Jewish state.”

Just as Europeans in the 20th century were made to believe that Jews were polluting humanity, so too are today’s Westerners being made to believe that there is something wrong with Jews and the Jewish state, Kalev said.

“The Jewish question is back. The Jewish question is back in the form of the Jewish state question,” he said. “And it’s the same question that exists for 2,000 years: What to do with those badly behaving Jews?”

According to Kalev, that was essentially the question posed by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader at the time, when he said in March that Israel “cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world.”

“That question was asked by Haman during the Book of Esther: There’s a pariah opposed by the rest of the world. What to do with them? That question was posed by Europeans even before the Nazis: What to do with those pariahs opposed by the rest of the world?” he said.

During President Trump’s meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month, the president expressed firm support for Israel and its struggle for security, which has led some to predict that these trends of anti-Israel sentiment may be coming to an end, at least for now.

For his part, Kalev is measured as to what to expect from the president. “Even the biggest pundits and journalists do not know what transpires in close meetings between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu and other world leaders,” he said. “And I think the best that we should do is pray that God bestows those two leaders with good advice.”