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Sheryl Saperia: Why they hate us

There is no configuration of Jewish existence that satisfies the hater, because the hater’s problem was never with what Jews do. It is with what Jews are

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The story of Passover is arguably the oldest, most foundational story of liberation in human history. A people enslaved. A tyrant who would not yield. A cry that has echoed across millennia: “Let my people go!”

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Two years ago, in an op-ed in these pages, I invoked those words for the hostages held in Gaza — innocent people kidnapped from their homes, their beds, a music festival and elsewhere. The hostages have come home now, alive or dead. And yet, as we prepare to sit down at the Seder table this Passover, the cry rises in our throats once more — not for captives behind tunnel walls this time, but for something that’s harder to name and harder to fix.

Sheryl Saperia: Why they hate us Back to video

This Passover — like every Jewish holiday since Oct. 7, 2023 — feels different: more weighted, more relatable, more personal. It was recently the holiday of Purim, which recounts the story of Haman’s plot to annihilate every Jew in Persia. It landed with particular force this year, as Israel and the United States confronted the Iranian regime and its network of terror. The ancient stories are now the morning news.

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The Passover Seder is built around four questions, all asked by the youngest child at the table. But there is a fifth question, arguably the oldest Jewish question of all, that has been asked in every generation, in every language, under every oppressor: why do they hate us? After the Holocaust, antisemitism was pushed to the fringes in the West. Since October 7, it is back, louder and more mainstream than most of us have seen in our lifetimes. The question demands an answer.

Here is one hypothesis. It begins with a message a friend recently received from his rabbi: that Jews should be grateful to be Jewish, because we are blessed to be in the driver’s seat of world history. That may sound audacious. But consider the evidence.

Jews are a tiny people, comprising just 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. And Israel is a tiny country, with a population of approximately 10 million (20 per cent of which is Arab), in an area roughly the size of New Jersey. Jews do not seek to convert anyone to anything. Yet Jews have given the world monotheism, the weekly day of rest, much of the moral architecture of western civilization and a disproportionate number of its scientists, artists, doctors and Nobel laureates. We ask only to live in peace.

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Yet the hatred against Jews has proven so consuming that it has become a defining obsession of human history, and certainly of our age. There are important issues in the world to contend with: war, famine, the dizzying upheaval of artificial intelligence reshaping what it means to be human. Yet, from university campuses to labour unions, from podcast studios to the floors of the United Nations, the world seems obsessed with Jews, Israel and Zionism.

The irony is that this hatred only confirms what the haters most wish to deny: Jewish centrality in the human story. The more furiously the world fixates on this tiny people and its historical homeland, the more it makes the case. In their rage, they give Jews more power, not less.

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Antisemitism operates by its own closed logic. Jews living in Europe were told to go back to Palestine. Jews who built a state in Israel are told to go back to Poland. Jews who rely on social services are accused of freeloading. Jews who build their own institutions are accused of separatism. Jews who raise concerns about antisemitism are told they are playing the victim. Jews who organize politically are called a foreign influence. Jews who express their faith publicly are accused of imposing it. Jews who keep it private are hiding something.

Jews are targeted disproportionately by hate crimes and terrorist attacks, and then face resentment when law enforcement deploys additional resources to protect Jewish communities. Jewish life is increasingly precarious in the West, and yet the one Jewish homeland, to which Jews know they can escape if necessary, is told it has no right to exist. There is no configuration of Jewish existence that satisfies the hater, because the hater’s problem was never with what Jews do. It is with what Jews are.

This hatred did not begin with any modern conflict. It is a bedrock that has underlain every era of Jewish history. Ritual murder in the Middle Ages. Capitalist exploitation in the 19th century. Racial poison under the Nazis. Communist subversion under the Soviets. The conspiracy theory changes. The hatred does not.

What we are witnessing today is not a new hatred. It is ancient hatred with fresh accelerant poured onto it. The West, having spent decades dismantling its own sense of rootedness, national identity and cultural distinctiveness, now finds itself unmoored and resents Israel for having precisely what it surrendered. As writer and editor Alana Newhouse has observed, Israel maintains a robust sense of national purpose, defends itself, chooses to have children above the replacement level and ranks among the happiest societies on earth. The western response to this has not been curiosity or admiration. It has been to delegitimize it. That is envy.

And then there are the authoritarian states — Iran, Qatar, China, Russia and others — which see in Jews and Israel a symbol of the western values they are determined to destroy. In his new book, “The Hidden Hand,” Warren Kinsella documents how the explosion of anti-Israel sentiment in the West since October 7 is largely the product of a highly organized, well-funded and deliberately orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to delegitimize Israel, spread disinformation about its conduct and foment antisemitism in western societies.

The implication is uncomfortable: many of the people who believe they are speaking truth to power when they call Israel “genocidal” are not acting on independent moral conviction. They are, wittingly or not, repeating talking points designed by bad actors who do not share any of the progressive values they claim to champion.

As we prepare for Passover, our cry is this: set us free — not just from overt violence, but from the disinformation, the double standards, the obsessive scrutiny, the ignorance, the delegitimization of Jewish life and the Jewish state, and the political cowardice of leaders who wait for tragedy before they act.

The hatred, in the end, is its own testimony. A tiny people has occupied the centre of the world’s moral imagination for thousands of years. That is not a coincidence. It is not explained by Israel’s conduct or by any particular Jewish behaviour. It is explained by something the haters themselves cannot bring themselves to name: the discomfiting, undeniable, infuriating persistence of a people who were supposed to disappear and didn’t.

We know antisemitism will not end simply because it is ill-conceived, morally reprehensible and, ultimately, self-destructive. We know that we will always have to be vigilant and proactive. We have never stayed silent, and we will not start now. We have not just survived, but thrived. We are still here. We are still telling the story. And this Passover, as we have for thousands of years, we say once more: let my people go!

Sheryl Saperia is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and CEO of Secure Canada.

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