Mobilize Now, Save the World

Just over three years ago, at the first-ever global forum on anti-Semitism organized by the State of Israel, the essential task was to define the beast - the new anti-Semitism. Since then, as the fourth such global gathering meets this week, efforts to incorporate the "three-D" distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism - demonization, double standards and delegitimization - have become part of international documents and discourse.

These and other accomplishments, as important as they are, have been dwarfed by the quantum leap anti-Semitism itself has taken. It has leapfrogged from isolated attacks against Jews to incitement to genocide - the actual elimination of the Jewish state.

This shift has come in the form of a pincer movement. On one side, we have the Iranian regime, which is denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" while racing to develop the physical means of doing so. On the other side, we have what is, in effect, international silence in response, coupled with growing willingness to discuss Israel's existence as a mistake, an anachronism, or a provocation.

We must recognize the fact that though sympathy for Iran's expressed goal of Israel's destruction is hardly mainstream, the idea of a world without Israel is more acceptable in polite company, the media and academia today than Hitler's expressed goal of a Europe without Jews was in 1939.

Given this situation, it should be clear that we are beyond the stage of definitions. The Jewish world now must mobilize at a level no less than during the struggles to establish the State of Israel and to free Soviet Jewry. It is this latter struggle that presents the most potent model for action today.