Fighting this global evil requires Jews to get out in front.

By Melanie Phillips, JNS

This week’s Jerusalem conference on antisemitism was boycotted by a number of international participants who withdrew on account of the presence of “populists” from European parties they termed “far right.”

The boycotters claimed that these parties themselves harbored antisemitism. Some European populist parties do have fascist or antisemitic histories that they haven’t properly renounced. Others, though, have disavowed their unsavory pasts.

The organizer of this week’s conference, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli, has made common cause with such penitents because he perceives that, unlike most of the European political mainstream, they unequivocally support Israel and are tackling antisemitism by calling out radical Islam and its alliance with the left.

Those who pulled out of the conference appear to have no problem sharing platforms with the Israel-bashers and antisemites who constitute much of the mainstream left. Instead, the boycotters have smeared Israel for being in bed with alleged neo-Nazis and racists, thus giving credence to a principal trope among left-wing antisemites that Israel itself is a Nazi or “apartheid” state.

Small wonder if Israel concludes that its interests no longer lie with such people and gravitates instead toward those populists whose support is unconditional in a global crisis of unprecedented scale and severityfor the Jewish people.

Since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7 and the war that followed, there has been a tsunami of murderous hatred against Israel and the Jewish people who are identified as a global contagion. This ideological cancer has metastasized across the West and is now normative among vast swathes of the intelligentsia and cultural and political elites.

As I have written in my new book, The Builder’s Stone, this is a civilizational crisis for the West. Its reaction to Oct. 7 has repudiated rationality, conscience and justice in a society that’s spent more than half a century dismantling the cultural codes that gave it rationality, conscience and justice in the first place.

Some Diaspora Jews tell themselves that antisemitism has always been with us, that they’re safe enough inside their community bubble and if they keep their heads down the danger will eventually pass. In every generation Jews have retreated into these fantasies, only to recognize the danger far too late.

Jews need to wake up and change the habit of centuries. They must step up to the plate to engage directly and proactively with the outside world and take the fight to the enemy.

They must abandon their habitual posture of defensiveness against the West’s attacks. To play defense is to lose the argument before it has begun by being induced to fight on the treacherous ground defined by the enemy.

They should instead seize the initiative by confronting head-on the cultural forces driving this evil.

Much of it has been orchestrated by malign global actors such as the Iranian regime, the Muslim Brotherhood and the revolutionary left whose aim is to destroy the West. The principal mechanism, however, has been support for Palestinianism, the signature cause of the West’s entire liberal and left-wing classes.

This has never been addressed by the Jewish world. While it has focused on one malevolent outcome after another, it has never challenged the underlying pathology that drives them all.

So it protests against measures taken by the United Nations, the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice; against malicious NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch; against the institutionally anti-Israel BBC or the double standards involved in the policing of pro-Hamas hate marches.

It also identifies Hamas as the problem. But the real driver is the entire Palestinian cause, which is based upon an explicit Islamic theological agenda to destroy Israel and wipe out the Jews.

What the Jewish world should be doing is calling out the West for conniving at this agenda through its support for that Palestinian cause.

It should be shouting from the rooftops that virtually everything the public is being told about Israel and the Arabs by governments, the media, the NGOs and the United Nations is a lie because the Palestine cause is a lie from start to finish.

It should be telling people facts that they never hear stated and of which they are almost wholly unaware. Facts such as that the Jews are not just members of a religion but are a people and an ancient nation.

That the Jews are the only people for whom the Land of Israel was ever their national kingdom. That they are entitled under international law to what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza.

That there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, a concept invented in the 1960s by the Egyptian-born Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and the Soviet Union.

That most of today’s “Palestinians” descended from Arabs from neighboring countries who arrived in pre-Israel Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s to benefit from the prosperity brought by the returning Jews.

That the West has helped foment murderous antisemitism through spreading the lie that Israel is the aggressor in the region by depriving Palestinians of a rightful claim to the land—a right they never possessed.

That by supporting the Palestinians, Western liberals are supporting colonialists who want to conquer another people’s country. That by demanding Israeli “settlers” be removed from the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, Western liberals are demanding the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the state of Palestine they want to create.

And that they are supporting people who teach their children to murder Jews, who demonize Jews with Nazi tropes, and are led by a man, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who hero-worships the Islamist Grand Mufti in Mandatory Palestine who signed a pact with Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

The Jews should also be telling the West that beneath Palestinian Arab antisemitism squats the endemic antisemitism of the entire Muslim world, which inspires the Iranian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood who are also engaged in a war of conquest against the West.

Diaspora Jews will only be safe if the West decides to stop itself from going off the edge of the cultural cliff toward which it is sliding at increasing speed.

But it’s astounding that throughout these last terrible 17 months, the Jewish world has never publicly countered the fundamental lies and misapprehensions that fuel so much of the West’s attitude to Israel and the Jewish people.

That’s partly because an astonishing number of Jews are themselves ignorant of these truths about their own people and its history, partly because they are clueless about Islamic Jew-hatred—or, worse still, have themselves absorbed many of the lies, a tragic development that has made some of them into the most lethal enemies of Israel and has turned so many American Jews in particular into the unwitting front line of global antisemitism.

Israel itself has also signally failed to counter these fundamental lies. It has never said that the Palestinian cause is in itself inherently evil. It doesn’t explain that its presence in the disputed territories is justified in international law. And although it tries to equate Hamas with ISIS, it doesn’t describe what it’s up against as an Islamic war of conquest rooted in theological Jew-hatred.

In part, this is due to innate Jewish feelings of vulnerability. It’s also due to the necessary focus on the physical wars Israel has to fight without remission, and the extreme dysfunctionality of the Israeli political system.

But it’s also due to the Israeli attitude that it is not worth the bother because Britain and Europe are incorrigibly antisemitic. And there’s also a view that, by choosing not to live in Israel, Diaspora Jews have made their bed and so now must lie in it.

So what price this week’s antisemitism conference in Jerusalem, with passionate speeches about the antisemitism that has consumed the free world, when Israel and the Jewish people have so signally failed to do what’s needed to fight it?