Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

Anti-Semitism is a word with deep historical associations. It conjures up hatred of Jews in medieval Europe and pogroms against Jews in Russia’s Pale of Settlement before and around the turn of the 20th century, and, of course, it culminates in the Nazi Holocaust in the mid-20th century. The Holocaust, in particular, gave anti-Semitism an Industrial Age aura, with converging railway tracks as a signature of both the Industrial Age and of trains transporting Jews to death camps. But anti-Semitism can be post-Industrial, too, with its own new associations, even when wrapped around a territorial dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, as when Hamas terrorists used GoPro cameras to record their slaughter of Jewish women, children, and elderly people on October 7th. That was nihilism, violent Jew-hatred, postmodern performance politics, and Iranian grand strategy all at once, with clear-cut benefits to Russia and China.