Stop feeding the crocodile

You know what the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said about an appeaser feeding the crocodile, but you tell yourself it’s worse on the other side. The other party emboldens more antisemitism among the population or harbors more antisemites within its ranks. 

You see antisemitism rising all over the West, including in this country, but you blame the Republicans if you’re a Democrat, the Democrats if you’re a Republican. You know the “fringes” are ever widening in both parties, the “extremes” edging ever closer to the center of power, but you reason that there are more Marjorie Taylor Greenes on the Republican side, or more Ilhan Omars among the Democrats. The Proud Boys are more dangerous to Jews than the leaders of the Women’s March, you say. United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union, voting on whether to condemn and boycott Israel is more of an antisemitic farce than the Texas Republican County chairs alleging that Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros paid people to riot in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. 

Maybe you’re not even that crazy about your own party, but you sure dislike the other more. So you tell yourself that each party has its loonies. Never mind the leaders who keep silent, or look the other way, or in some cases even stoke the fires the lunatics have set; the Republican establishment that doesn’t bat an eye when Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) holds a fundraiser with a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi, and the Democratic “progressives” who denounce criticism of their colleagues’ antisemitic remarks as being motivated by anti-Black and anti-Muslim sentiments. What matters, you kid yourself, is that Trump loves Jews, or that Biden has a comprehensive plan to fight antisemitism. 

Both [political] parties are feeding the crocodile while you and I, thinking the other end of the swamp is more infested, waste time reviling the enemy. In the end, though, if the monster they’re indulging gets big enough, it is you and I, the Jews, who’ll get eaten.

So you give your vote, your money, your faith to a party that, at best, turns a blind eye to the rising antisemitism in this country only to defeat the other party that, at best … well, the other party doesn’t care what you think of it. It has long since written you off as the competition’s core constituent. It would like your vote and money but it’s not going to lose sleep because you think less of it than of your own. Where your vote and money actually count is within your home team. That’s where you should be crying foul, demanding action, threatening to boycott or walk. And you should be doing it now, before things get any worse. 

Because let me tell you what you already know: Both major political parties in this country are quickly ceding power to their Jew-hating factions. Both are populated by representatives who have very little by way of moral courage, and who care even less about the principle of things if it means losing the next election. Both are, as we used to say in Iran, the Wind Party — they go wherever the winds of money and public opinion will take them. Both are feeding the crocodile while you and I, thinking the other end of the swamp is more infested, waste time reviling the enemy. In the end, though, if the monster they’re indulging gets big enough, it is you and I, the Jews, who’ll get eaten.

So find out which legislators within your own party engage in antisemitic talk or action and write to them and their colleagues to ask that they be stripped of committee assignments and censured. Develop online petitions, write letters to the media, inspire your fellow party loyalists to demand action. If nothing else, speak up, recognize and acknowledge the rot in your own house instead of pretending it’s only in the neighbor’s. We’ve all become deaf to the other side’s laments and accusations, but we can still hear our own. 

Gina Nahai is the author, most recently, of  “The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.”