Jews are receiving a familiar message and its lethal.

By David E. Kaplan

Recollecting a conversation I had as a youngster with my late dad in South Africa, he related how his good friend Walter Levy, whom he enjoyed smoking cigars with and playing billiards, arrived in Cape Town 1936 on the last boat to sail from Germany, with Jewish refugees before the start of the Second World War.  

What was remarkable was that Walter was 16-years-old at the time and he arrived in South Africa alone.

Emigrating without any member of his family, I pressed on: “How come?”

My father continued:

“Walter was very popular at school, and was a star in his football team. His best friends were his football mates. Then one day, he came onto the field for usual practice and these same friends spat at him and called him a filthy Jew. These were his BEST friends. He was stunned! He ran home and told his parents, “That’s it; I’m leaving school and leaving Germany; alone if needs be.”

And that’s what he did and within the year, and on October 27,1936, under the shadow of Table Mountain, the SS Stuttgart arrived at Cape Town docks, and young Walter, with some 550 other Jewish refugees, disembarked to start a new life.

Walter, who would emerge as an outstanding businessman in Cape Town, had read the writing on the wall at the age of sixteen and immediately understood on a football field, an ancient hateful millennial message:

“Jews not wanted”

It is a message today following October 7 that Jews around the world are receiving loud and clear across the globe.

From the individual Jew on campuses across Europe and North America to the collective Jew of the State of Israel, that same message is clear. The recent behaviour of France was a dark reminder of an era in Europe we believed we left behind and now feels ever closer to revisiting! When the French government earlier this month BANNED Israel from participating in the prestigious Eurosatory defense exhibition – where the merchandise of Israeli companies is always in high demand – sent the same message Walter Levy felt in Germany in 1936 of “not wanted”.

Held every two years in the Paris-Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre in Paris, the Eurosatory is the largest international exhibition for the land and air-land defence and security industry. In 2022, it gathered over 1,700 exhibitors and approximately 62,000 visitors from 150 countries. This year, the city whose police and gendarmes on 16 -17 July 1942 mass arrested Jewish families at the behest of the Nazis, banned Israelis.

It went further.

Upon the request of pro-Palestinian groups, not only were Israeli companies prevented from exhibiting their products as they traditionally do, but a district court furthermore barred Israelis from even attending the event.  Apparently, the petition filed by the pro-Palestinian groups were not satisfied with cancelling the Israeli pavilion as it:

 “Did not guarantee the absence of Israelis at the event.”

The court sided with this disgraceful argument,

So, while the representatives of China and Iran – two of the world’s worst violators of human rights – were free to come and go, of course, Israelis were barred.

And then, reminiscent of 1930s Berlin windows of Jewish-owned stores painted with the word “JUDE” (Jew), the French court ordered that the letter announcing the ban at the exhibition be posted at the entrances to the exhibition. Although long and convoluted, its message was clear:

 “No Israelis allowed”

As The Jerusalem Post columnist, Liat Collins wrote, it was only a step away from “No entrance for Jews.”

France’s decision to exclude Israel and its citizens from the fair was in its words driven by “suspicions of war crimes and genocide in Gaza”.  Really?

Apart from no evidence of either, Israel will never “get a fair shake from most of the world,” writes Eric R. Mandel, director of the consulting firm, Mandel Strategies. Writing in The Jerusalem Post (March 11 ‘Convincing American’), Mandel notes that:

 “Some 69% of protests in the first week after Hamas invaded Israel, on October 7, 2023, were against the Jewish state. This, despite Hamas causing the worst loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, with unimaginable sexual violence. And the Jewish state hadn’t even started its ground operation.”

In other words, the world had turned on the hate BEFORE Israel responded to the massacre of October 7. Hence, it does not matter what Israel says or does; it only matters to antisemites that Israel exists.

While Israel is being unreasonably pressurized to consider “the day after” offering a “political vision for tomorrow,” I cannot help but subscribe to the position that a people that base their right to self-rule, forfeit that right if their cause rests on the destruction of another.

That today is the position of the Palestinians where according to a Palestinian poll published by the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research released on June 12, “more than two-thirds support Hamas’s decision to launch its killing spree in southern Israel on October 7.”

Clearly, we have a clash of “visions for tomorrow”.

Israel is not obliged to commit suicide.

Masada fell once. It will never fall again.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).