“A shelter that destroys the house is not safety”

When Jews Start Looking for Safety in the Wrong Places

One of the ugliest political facts of our time is this: many Jews now feel less protected by the liberal world than by forces openly hostile to liberalism.

That should terrify everyone.

For decades, Jews were told that democratic institutions, human rights language, independent courts, free media, and international norms were their best protection. Historically, that was largely true. No order ever gave Jews perfect safety, but liberal constitutional states gave minorities more protection than almost any system before them.

Now that confidence is breaking.

Across Europe, North America, and Latin America, many Jews increasingly feel that the institutions that speak most loudly about tolerance, diversity, and human dignity are often slow, evasive, or cowardly when Jews are the ones under pressure. They see anti-Israel hatred sliding into open antisemitism. They see “context” offered where clarity is needed. They see threats explained away, minimized, sociologized, or folded into ideological fashions that somehow always leave Jews exposed.

And when people feel abandoned, they look for protection elsewhere.

That is where the trap begins.

Because the alternative now presenting itself is not morally clean. It often comes from strongmen, illiberal governments, authoritarian movements, and hard nationalist forces that promise order, borders, police protection, and zero tolerance for antisemitic violence. The offer is real. In some places, it even works in the short term.

Hungary is the clearest example. Many Jews in Budapest genuinely do feel safer than Jews in Paris, Brussels, or Berlin. Synagogues function. Jewish life is visible. The state presents itself as protective. Orbán is friendly to Israel and hostile to currents many Jews distrust. None of that is imaginary.

But the price is brutal.

The same power that offers immediate protection also weakens courts, degrades democratic culture, disciplines media, narrows public life, and hollows out the institutions that historically matter most when a minority’s protection is no longer convenient. In other words: Jews are invited to feel safe inside a system that may be destroying the long-term conditions of their safety.

That is not prudence.

It is a structural trap.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In the United States, real antisemitism is increasingly pulled into the machinery of the culture war. Jewish fear is used, amplified, and weaponized by competing camps. In Brazil, Jews are pressed between a right that offers rhetorical friendship while carrying authoritarian instincts, and a left whose anti-Israel rhetoric can spill into social hostility toward Jews themselves. In both cases, Jews are pushed toward a false choice: accept protection from illiberal forces, or remain exposed inside liberal environments that no longer seem willing to defend them with seriousness.

Israel is not outside this logic. It is inside it.

That is why the report that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank was treated as “friction” matters so much. This is not a wording issue. It is the whole disease in miniature. Once external danger becomes overwhelming, internal violence starts getting downgraded, renamed, and morally demoted. Terror becomes “friction.” Fanaticism becomes inconvenience. Organized aggression becomes something the system tells itself it can afford not to see.

That is how a country rots while telling itself it is being realistic.

The deepest danger here is not hypocrisy. It is something worse: a gradual corruption of Jewish moral and strategic judgment. If Jews begin to believe that safety matters more than the institutions that make safety durable, they will once again be making a fatal historical mistake. Not because the fear is unreal. The fear is real. Not because the threats are imaginary. They are not. But because protection purchased at the cost of law, democratic restraint, and institutional seriousness is never stable. It is rented. And the landlord can change his mind.

This is why the choice must be stated clearly. The answer cannot be to deny left-wing antisemitism, Islamist antisemitism, or the cowardice of liberal elites. Those are real. They have done immense damage. But the answer also cannot be to run into the arms of people who offer Jews safety today while dismantling the very order that protects minorities tomorrow.

That is the paradox of the present moment.

And it is one of the most dangerous political paradoxes Jews have faced in decades.

The sequence is simple.

First, selective blindness.

Jews above all should know where that road leads.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)