When I was 19, my father and I took my rabbi, Sinai Adler, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington because the rabbi was a survivor, and he refused to believe that the American government kept a permanent exhibition in which it admitted it could have interrupted the machinery of Auschwitz and chose not to.
He needed to see the admission with his own eyes. The gallery held a US War Department letter explaining the decision not to bomb the rail lines and a reconnaissance photograph of the camp taken from an American bomber. That photograph was made 17 days after Rabbi Adler had been brought through the gate.
As we walked out, my father tried to lift him. The halls were thick with school groups, and most of the children were not Jewish, which my father offered as proof that the world had learned something and that the next generation would not repeat the crime. Rabbi Adler answered that they were only coming to study their mistakes and to learn how to do it better the next time.
Years later, in a study hall in Israel, a student told him that German visitors were standing at the back of the room. They had come, they said, to see the miracle of the Jewish state. Students argued that these Germans had not been alive during the war and that six decades had passed. Rabbi Adler had them removed from the campus.
Those two scenes can be filed under trauma if you want an easy label. Rabbi Adler was a careful reader and a disciplined mind, and the conclusions he drew did not begin in shock.
He returned again and again to the Talmudic teaching that Esau hates Jacob. He treated that line as an operating instruction. Gentiles will persecute Jews, and a Jew who forgets that fact is unprepared for what history holds.
I hear the same complaint about Israel that I have heard for years. If only the country explained itself more clearly, if only the press operation were sharper, the world would grant the benefit of the doubt and perhaps even real support, especially after the massacre of October 7.
The evidence offered for that hope is the long stretch of Western backing that Israel enjoyed through most of its first seven decades. There were breaks in that pattern.
The West changes how it treats Israel
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened Israel over the Sinai campaign of 1956. France embargoed arms on the eve of the Six Day War. Boycott campaigns gathered in universities and unions. Still, until about three years ago, the West as a bloc treated Israel as a partner more often than as a defendant.
The hope that better public relations will restore that climate misreads the record. Rabbi Adler and the sages were right about the ground under our feet. Antisemitism is the baseline we can count on. Support is the exception.
A common theory holds that the goodwill of those first decades was an aftershock of the Holocaust, a period in which even polished antisemites understood that Europe had gone too far and that open annihilation had become embarrassing.
That aftershock never erased the double standard. Friends still applied rules to Jerusalem that they would not apply to themselves. The pockets of hostility were the older pattern showing through the courtesy. The courtesy has worn off. The Holocaust survivor bump has ended. Baseline antisemitism has returned. We can argue about the date it faded.
But its end is no longer in dispute.
Support from Evangelical Christians is the large exception that still holds, and it grows out of their theology rather than out of a sudden affection for Jewish power.
Other help arrived from sources that were moral and strategic at once. US president John F. Kennedy approved weapons sales. US politician Henry M. Jackson tied aid for the Soviet Union to the release of Jews who wanted to leave. American president Richard Nixon ordered the airlift that kept Israel standing in the Yom Kippur War.
Those acts matter, and we should remember them with gratitude. They do not rewrite the longer pattern. Not all the gentiles hate us all of the time, but most gentiles will hate us most of the time. History is stubborn on this point for anyone who finds the sentence extreme.
Zionism began because that pattern would not dissolve. For two thousand years millions of Jews absorbed hatred and exile as a condition of life and waited for gentile mercy to improve.
Early Zionists first trusted emancipation and the Enlightenment to repair the Jewish situation from outside. When the repair failed, they concluded that the Jewish people needed a state of their own, a place that could shield them from persecution, let them work at full capacity, and for many restore a life of sanctity in their own land.
At eye level from Rabbi Adler’s seat in his study sat a set of Mishna books that he liked to take down for guests. The volumes had been printed in Berlin in 1936, three years after Hitler took office and three years before the first mass killings.
The publisher added an introduction that explained away the Mishna warnings about trusting gentiles. Those laws, the introduction said, belonged to an ancient world in which pagans hated Jews. The German gentile of the present was the most refined man civilization had produced. Jews could rely on him and did not need to apply the old suspicion. The books were still on the shelf when the refined men began the work the introduction had declared impossible.
The belief that Jews can talk the nations into permanent friendship treats 20 centuries of evidence as a public-relations problem. “Never again” was not coined to fund a better press office.
It was coined to remind Jews what happens when they rest their survival on the goodwill of people who have already shown them the limit of that goodwill.
The museum photograph, the German visitors at the back of the hall, and the Berlin Mishna of 1936 belong to one argument. Learn the baseline. Build as if the exception will not last. Keep the state strong enough that the next improvement in gentile technique never gets its laboratory.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published a new book, Zionism Today.
