Born in what is now Ukraine, Rabbi Baruch Korff, who died twenty years ago, spent most of his life in America. During World War II, he served as the director of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People, an organization dedicated to rescuing Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe. He also became a confidant of President Nixon, whom he defended to the bitter end. Robert Philpot writes:

Not for nothing had Nixon introduced Korff to Chicago’s mayor as “my rabbi” earlier that spring. For, during the dying months of his presidency, Korff had emerged as Nixon’s most full-throated supporter. The previous autumn he had launched the National Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, which was committed to reaffirming “our faith in God and country, in constitutional government, in the presidency, and in our beloved president.” Its full-page newspaper advertisements were no less effusive, charging that Nixon’s media enemies had “scandalized him, brutalized him, [and] savaged him day after day, night after night.” . . .

[U]nlike many of the Jews who voted to re-elect him in 1972—when Nixon captured the second-highest share of the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote in the previous 60 years—Korff seemed prepared to give the president a pass. After [Korff’s] death, his daughter said her father “felt a kinship to Nixon in no small part because of his aid to Israel.” That sentiment was justified. In October 1973, when Israel faced an existential threat, Nixon was consumed by Watergate. With the Soviets flying arms into Egypt and Syria, Nixon’s aides debated how they could aid their ally without antagonizing the Arab states who had already imposed an oil embargo. Nixon took charge and, with the command “do it now,” ordered the Pentagon to start resupplying Israel’s depleted forces.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.