The wave of anti-Semitism is not confined to America. In Sydney, Australia, a Jewish man was recently assaulted by a mob of what Sky News calls “Palestine supporters” and severely beaten; he is now recovering in a hospital. In the same city, a mass protest occurred on October 9 where demonstrators chanted “gas the Jews.” Nor has Great Britain been spared. Stephen Daisley, writing from that country, comments on why so many young people seem to be drawn to anti-Semitism:

It’s not that the world is particularly woke to anti-black or any other form of racism, but that it is particularly unwoke to anti-Jewish racism. There is an empathy gap when it comes to Jews, a mental or emotional distance from their suffering that is either not present with other groups or not as respectable to let slip. This may be a generational phenomenon. In the world the baby boomers grew up in, the Holocaust was the recent past. The war loomed over the culture and, in the liberal West at least, the death camps became the ultimate symbol of evil.

The TikTok generation are coming of age in a world where Israel is no longer seen as the miracle in the desert, the return of a nation to its homeland in the shadow of its near extinction, but the racist oppressor of the indigenous Palestinians. They have no frame for understanding anti-Semitism because they have been taught that the world is divided into white victimizers and black and brown victims. Jews don’t fit into that formula, Israeli Jews certainly don’t, and nor do the Palestinians, but as the formula is all they know, it must be made to fit.

Jews are the last minority it’s acceptable to hate, and not just acceptable but progressive.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.