In the past, I have often cited George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It is sound advice for those not seeking to replicate past wrongs. Yet, what if someone seeks to weaponize the past to justify perpetuating and recreating its horrors? For such moral reprobates, there are unfortunately fertile fields of extant hate to sow and reap.
In former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Dr. Michael B. Oren’s authoritative history, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, one finds this heated exchange between the United Nations ambassadors for the Soviet Union and Israel:
American-Israeli differences, though sharpening, were minuscule compared to those between Israel and the Soviets. “Israel’s military hordes [are] following in the bloody footsteps of Hitler’s executioners,” ranted [Nikolai] Federenko, and Gideon Rafael responded in kind: “Neither Israel nor the Jewish people concluded a pact with Hitler’s Germany, a pact which encouraged Nazi Germany to unleash its aggression against the world.”
What is striking is how little has changed within the latest eruption of violent anti-Semitism spurred by the barbarous Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2024. And, in the above exchange, we can therefore glimpse the broad contours of how such anti-Semitism proceeds and is protested—if, however tragically often, in vain.
Ambassador Federenko’s remark has vilely and selectively remembered history, diminishing the horror Nazi Germany perpetrated upon the Jewish (among others) people to inflate and ascribe to them “genocidal” behavior on behalf of Israel. This hideous slander—as well as others, such as “colonizers” and “imperialists,” etc.—was par for both the Soviets and their Arab allies, who were being routed on the battlefield, if not in diplomatic circles.
For his part, Ambassador Rafael corrected the historical record to place blame where blame was due: not on the Jewish people, but on Stalin and his communist regime for concluding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
In sum, an implacable opponent on behalf of their allies distorted the historical record to perpetuate the latest iteration of the blood libel upon the Jewish people to delegitimize Israel. Yet, what that intrinsically entails is the delegitimization of Israelis, particularly, and Jewish people, generally. Anti-Semitism is not known for its subtle distinctions, as the haters are well aware—as is Ambassador Rafael, who calls out Ambassador Federenko and the Soviet Union for abetting it.
The current efforts to delegitimize Israel recycle the same old slanders, yet this seems to be lost upon the newest generation of anti-Semites. Their historical ignorance facilitates their subscribing to the regurgitated anti-Semitic tropes infused with a political rationalization (again, nothing new). They feel empowered and morally justified in their animus, blind to the reality that in embracing and professing the delegitimization of Israel, it also poisons their view of Israelis and, ultimately, Jews. These new anti-Semites embody everything they claim to oppose. They are not liberators but haters, their deadened moral sensibilities allowing them to side with killers and kidnappers rather than their victims—unaware that the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ is a genocidal slogan.”
In our national capital, outside the Capital Jewish Museum, we have witnessed the bitter harvest found at the confluence of hate and historical ignorance. After the American Jewish Committee’s annual Young Diplomats Reception, a soon-to-be betrothed couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who were on the staff of the Israeli Embassy, were brutally murdered, targeted for being Israeli. The assassin, Elias Rodriguez, was roughly the same age as his victims. He imagined himself not as a killer but a liberator, intoning after his crime, “Free, free Palestine.”
In his remembrance for the victims in The Times of Israel, David Schiff offered this trenchant passage written by his murdered friend, Yaron:
“‘Delegitimization’ is defined as the categorization of a group into extremely negative social categories that exclude it from the sphere of human groups that act within the limits of acceptable norms or values, since these groups are viewed as violating basic human norms or values and therefore deserve maltreatment. In essence, delegitimization denies the adversary’s humanity and morality, providing a kind of psychological permit to harm the delegitimized group.”
As David Schiff sorrowfully noted, “Years later, the same delegitimization Yaron warned of would claim his life.” And that of the love of his life, Sarah.
Yaron and Sarah’s killer did not learn the lessons of history and how delegitimization paves the road to hate and violence. Like Yaron, Mr. Schiff understands this:
It is the same insidious delegitimization that compelled protestors to rip down the posters of Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7; that has incited violent attacks on institutions deemed as “Zionist;” that has inspired libelous and baseless accusations against those bearing even the most tangential of connections to the state of Israel, alongside calls to “bring the war home.” Yaron and Sarah’s murders were not an aberration or an isolated event—they represent the culmination of a multi-year campaign of increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric that on Wednesday finally reached its breaking point.
Already, the same perpetrators of this campaign are now attempting to justify the murder of two civilians in America’s capital as a legitimate act in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
Once again, one sees that for the haters, politics can excuse and/or justify any crime and ennoble the criminals, and a fanatical adherence to delegitimization, empowered by a total or selective historical ignorance, instills and ingrains anti-Semitism into its perpetrators. As the saying goes, it is hard to kill a brother; it is easy to kill “the other.”
For the opponents of anti-Semitism and delegitimization, the lessons of history are both a blessing and a curse—but ones necessarily born. Historical understanding teaches us the means to combat both scourges, but we must also accept the harsh reality of how the intellectual cockroaches that are anti-Semitism and delegitimization resist extirpation. Their persistence and virulence outlived many of their practitioners, including Ambassador Federenko’s Soviet Union. Yet, we must combat it, for not to do so would render us the hypocrites we oppose.
It was a truth recognized more than 60 years ago by Ambassador Rafael—and more recently by Yaron and Sarah. Let it be as David Schiff wishes: “May their memories be a blessing.” And may the lessons of history be remembered—not twisted—to prevent reprising such sins.
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee; and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles; a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.