Back When Anti-Semites Actually Wanted Jews To Have Their Own Land

George Jonas remembers a time when Anti-Semites were actually quite eager for us to go and create a Jewish State:

It may sound counter-intuitive, but there used to be anti-Semites, especially in Europe, who wanted to induce their Jewish neighbours to return to Zion. Some virtually became Zionist activists, in a manner of speaking. The anti-Semitic promoters of a Jewish homeland — a Jewish penal colony, really — weren’t particular about where “Zion” was built, just as long as it wasn’t in their neck of the woods. Let Jews build their “Jerusalem” anywhere except — to paraphrase the poet William Blake — “in England’s green and pleasant land.” Or America’s, or France’s, or, God forbid, Canada’s. Such “Zionists” would have been just as prepared to exile Jews to al-Arish in the Sinai desert, or to British East Africa (the “Uganda Project” of the 1900s), or to Madagascar — there were actual plans drawn up for all these lame-brained schemes at one point — as to have them return to the ancestral region of their own history in the Holy Land. Anti-Semites didn’t care, as long as the Jews were out of their hair. But even so, when they saw that only a return to the land of the Old Testament, Theodore Herzl’s original Zionist vision, stood an actual chance of being realized, many — all, really, except some Lawrence of Arabia-types in the British Foreign Office — continued promoting the idea of a Jewish state.

It's hard today to picture a "NIMBY-based" Anti-Semitism today. But that was then. This is now, and today's breed of Anti-Semite tends to not make distinctions between Jews and Israelis, and has no interest in a relocation program:

For today’s anti-Semites Israel, the state; Israelis, the people; the Jews of the Diaspora; soldiers, shoppers, office workers, journalists, are all the same. The post-9/11 generation of anti-Semites, the people of the random bomb, aren’t there to distinguish but to extinguish. They no longer want to exclude or exile or excommunicate. They want to exterminate.

What brought about this change?
Jonas does not say.
Maybe when the village became global, that left no place for Jews in the eyes of Anti-Semites except for off the planet.

Technorati Tag: Anti-Semitism.