John Jefferson
During the violence in Gaza that began in 2023, it’s been easy to spot serious-minded observers like Gad Saad. He brings real thought to whatever he considers, “wrestles” earnestly with things, and consistently denounces what he calls “tribalism.” So it was all the more intriguing when he posted a message to “all Jews around the world” on social media shortly after Israel began its campaign in Gaza.
“Consider learning Cantonese or Mandarin and keep your fingers crossed that China allows you in,” he wrote in the unique voice of muted hyperbole he uses to communicate sincere alarm. China “might become the only safe place for Jews in 20+ years,” he added. “Tragic but true.”
After this week’s joyous news of the ceasefire deal brokered by the Trump team between Israel and Hamas, it’s worth looking back and—unfortunately—also forward to consider this: Why is it that even a classically liberal atheist intellectual like Saad seems to take it as a given that Jews would be forced into tribal defensiveness—held universally to blame for the shocking actions of Israel’s corrupt and unpopular Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza?
Though an atheist, Saad at least holds an honest and therefore pessimistic view of fallen human nature. He is not one to be easily taken in by false ideological enthusiasms, based as they usually are on an implicit belief in what the Catholic conservative thinker Russell Kirk called the (erroneous) notion of “the perfectibility of man.”
“Before being Jewish, I’m a man of reason, logic, freedom, liberty, science, and common sense,” Saad recently wrote. “I wish to have our children live in a world that is free of grotesque and dark theocracies…. If an ideology is inconsistent with universal enlightened Western values then it should be scrutinized and rejected.”
Saad has not, in my opinion, himself fallen into an illiberal tribalism that refuses to find fault with the state of Israel because of its status as “the Jewish State.” Insofar as he perhaps was tempted to defend Israel’s attempted genocide in Gaza based on a belief that the Palestinian people and their cultural heritage are incompatible with “enlightened Western values,” I, as a Christian, could never follow him toward that inhumane conclusion.
But I don’t think that is where Saad’s impressively consistent thinking honestly leads. Rather, I think he’s onto something more than is dreamt of in his philosophy: the mystery of collective blame among semitic peoples.
I have deep personal motives to avoid this mystery rather than write about it.
First of all, as the great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt already recognized by the end of the 1950s, denouncing Jew-hatred has become a cheap, easy, and self-serving ritual especially favored by those who are both powerful and eager to re irresponsible. Comfortable Westerners have made it a passtime to defend Jews so frequently and so officiously that the practice does as much to single out, corral, and “other” Jewry than Jew-hatred itself does. I want no part of that.
Secondly, I and my organization the Vulnerable People Project have actively worked to defend and advocate for the innocent Palestinians who suffered through Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing up until this week. I frankly don’t want to give the Palestinians we have served the impression that we’ve been defending them only as a strategy to fend off an anti-Jewish backlash that their deaths might cause.
In other words, as Christians we ought to understand that neither Palestinians nor Jews are means to an end. Each Palestinian and each Jew—like each of the rest of us—is made in the image and likeness of the Creator, with an inviolable dignity and worth that transcends political strategies.
But Saad’s “wrestling” with Israel’s actions in Gaza was what first focused my mind on both Jews and Palestinians simultaneously in the midst of that horrible bloodshed. And what he revealed to me—albeit through my own Christian lens—was that these two semitic peoples share one and the same mystery of collective blame.
Given Saad’s grasp of human nature and its inherent faults, I’m sure he knows as well as I do that people are prone to bouts of violent scapegoating against any group of people.
I owe my own last name (Jones) to the fact that my great-grandfather felt the need to change it from Johannes during a brief but truly dangerous rash of anti-German sentiment that overtook the United States during the First World War.
But there’s a difference between passing, ordinary human angers like that one and the mystery of collective blame that sticks to Palestinians like velcro—not for a few years but for a century and more. And there is a difference between the sentiments that rise and fall with wars and the mystery that never fades—the mystery Saad was onto when he warned the West is capable of wholly driving Jewry into China.
It’s a difference somehow both everywhere known and nowhere articulated—hence my naming it a mystery.
“Please remember,” Saad recently wrote: “I’m apparently personally responsible for anything that transpired in Gaza because I’m Jewish BUT no Noble Person is responsible for the 44,000+ terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11 alone.”
I can corroborate half of his point from experience: During the time I’ve spent in the region, I’ve certainly encountered Middle Easterners who cast collective blame on Jews. But I have never encountered locals who cast the same kind of blame on the United States and other Western nations. Even after all the great damage Western superpowers have inflicted on them, these anti-Israel locals—many of them of semitic peoples—are more likely to blame the West for “helping the Jews” than for hurting themselves.
But I say I can only corroborate half of Saad’s point. The other half is the blind spot—the mysterious thing that evades the understanding not only of Saad but of the whole world, if it were possible….
Because when Saad spoke sarcastically of the “Noble Person” who is never held blameworthy, he was in fact joining much of the world in casting blame on that person.
And Saad’s blame was not directed at the powerbrokers of the West who leveled the Middle East, meddled in its customs, drew artificial barriers, and fomented radicalism and genocidal hatreds.
No. Rather, like the descendants of his semitic ancestors in the Middle East whom I have met with, and like an ever-present, bloodthirsty element in the churning world of Western opinion, Saad chose a semite to blame.
And yes, it is not a stretch to say he blamed, at least indirectly and by association, the Palestinian himself.
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