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December 12, 2023

As Israel deals with a multi-pronged Hamas-led invasion from the Gaza Strip amidst unwarranted international pressure, Canadian writer David Solway’s scholarly collection of essays, Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam and the West, comes as a timely reminder of how multiplicity in self-identification is undermining Jewish unity.  The book, to be released today, December 12, also addresses the idiosyncratic position of Israel among the nations of the world, the threat to liberal Judeo-Christian values posed by Islam, and the Left’s catalysis of the subsuming of Western culture.

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Solway is a man of many parts – poet, scholar, teacher, chess enthusiast, education theorist, and literary critic.  Born Jewish but not particularly religious or identity-conscious, he underwent a transformation post 9/11.  He began to question his rejection of Jewish kinship and asked himself difficult questions that rid him of his Leftist inclinations.  Among other things, the book speaks of his epiphanic recognition that the fate of Israel is the fate of every Jew, regardless of nationality or political view.  In the light of the October 7 attack – Israel’s 9/11 (equivalent proportionately to seven 9/11s) – this exploration of personal change along with the impersonal twists of history makes for poignant reading.

Why, Solway asks, is Israel the only nation whose right to exist is questioned and threatened?  Why is it labeled an occupier and a colonizer when Eretz Yisrael and Judah predate any Arab presence in the Holy Land by more than a thousand years?  Why is it the only country that has been pressured to return captured territory after winning wars started by Muslim neighbors who have vowed to eradicate it?  Why are its defeated enemies allowed to dictate terms of peace? 

In their now internalized anti-Israel stance, the media, academia, the political class, and a significant section of the public embody antisemitism.  They vilify Israel as an Apartheid state though it is perhaps the most pluralistic in the region.  The U.N. and the E.U. censure Israel constantly.  It is routinely treated as a pariah state while countries with abominable human rights records – communist China, Venezuela, Qatar, Iran, Cuba, and Turkey – get a pass.  And in the worst aspersion, global antisemitism is blamed on Israel’s policies and the Jewish nation is exhorted, ad nauseum, to trade “land for peace” and end a conflict its enemies do not want to end. 

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Discussing his conflicted feelings about his Jewishness, Solway identifies self-loathing in the Jewish polity and its strong bent towards assimilation as leading causes of self-betrayal.  He asks Jews to realize that antisemitism does not spare any Jew – whether pious, secular, leftist, ignorant, or perfidious.  Even the Jews who have created a fallacious equivalence of immorality between Israel’s defense of its citizens and a terrorist group’s attacks on innocent civilians will not escape antisemitism.  Jews, he says, are uniquely defined by their enemies and by “an uninterrupted chronicle of antisemitic bloodletting culminating in the Holocaust and morphing today into the multi-pronged attack by the Muslim world, the international Left, the United Nations and the European capitals….”

The dilemma represented by the Holocaust for Jews today is the quandary of wanting to live a good life but needing to remember the “sheer unaccountability of human evil festering beneath an indifferent heaven.”  This is something ineludible; indescribable and impossible to understand by proxy; and yet must somehow be confronted and absorbed.  Jews are defined by a perpetual vulnerability: they never really have been safe throughout history, a fact they often reject.  But, belonging to a culture that celebrates memory, they should remember – zakar, in Hebrew – lest another cataclysm be visited upon them.  This is especially relevant as Jews face rising attacks in Europe, where it has become dangerous for them to wear visible signs of their faith, and where such attacks are willfully ignored by the media.

Hope was born for the Jews with the birth of Israel, which rose from the darkness of history with conviction, pride, and strength of purpose, promising that Jews will no longer be defenseless in the face of terror.  But self-estrangement and a fractured Jewish people – some of them religious, some strongly leftist, and worst of all, some court Jews, who have defected spiritually and intellectually – are working to weaken the Jewish state.  Some others foolishly believe in “universal humanity” – the idea that all cultures want the same things and share the same values – and some embrace assimilationist fantasies.

Our universities – which instead of teaching students to think, have become turbines of leftist indoctrination – are encouraging these fantasies.  The current academic campaign against Jews and Israel, accusing the Jewish nation of ethnic cleansing of Arab-Palestinians, calling for its annihilation, and promoting boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), is an update of the ancient blood libel.  Not only does this make hatred of Jews respectable in the guise of academic freedom, it paves the way for the destruction of Western culture, based on Judeo-Christian values, debate, equality before the law, and freedom.

As the Left wreaks havoc by introducing, through violence and radical legislation, the ideas that human nature can be transformed, that wealth must be redistributed and property and individual rights abolished, and that mediocrity resulting from policies encouraging equality of outcome is permissible, the Islamic invasion of the West gathers strength. 

Solway says terror is rooted in the Koran as a preferred modus operandi, along with long-term strategies of massive immigration, followed by the incremental establishment of shariah courts, no-go zones, erasure of the past, and the development of Muslim vote blocs.  The left-liberal pursuit of multiculturalism feeds this metastatic growth in Western democracies.  He says this is nothing short of cultural homicide.