How the West will lose its Jews
A civilisation that once vowed “never again” is abandoning the people who helped build its freedoms. The quiet Jewish exodus from the West has already begun.
The West is sleepwalking toward the loss of its Jewish citizens in what may be the most absurd chapter in the Jews’ long history of tragedy. Unlike previous moral cataclysms, this undoing comes not from a single tyrant or ideology, but from the corrosion of a civilization that has forgotten how to protect the people who built so much of it.
Even as a fragile and tentative ceasefire holds in Gaza, Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable and—in some places—borderline unlivable.
The question is well past whether Jewish persecution could happen again in the West. It is happening. The mechanisms are unmistakable, the patterns familiar, and the implications dire and permanent.
If you want to understand what will make Jews leave, look at the police. Western governments vowed “never again” after the Holocaust, and for a good while they meant it. Even a hint of antisemitism would bring the fuzz to your door. Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life.
In London, Melbourne, Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, and elsewhere, Jews report the same dismal experience: they call the police about an antisemitic threat and see no action taken. They are told harassment is “protected speech,” that antisemitic assaults are “difficult to prove,” and that even death threats must be understood in the “context of global politics.”
Hypothetical concerns are fretted over while Jewish victims’ very real dangers are dismissed.
The police are trapped in a pseudo-academic hallucination—trying to maintain “balance.” They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. So the police retreat, and Islamists and other grotesque antisemites advance.
As history shows, and as we shall sadly see again soon, civilizations that cease defending their Jews reveal a deeper societal decline. It is a lesson the West refuses to learn or, for some reason, is now incapable of learning.
The ultimate test of a society’s tolerance is whether someone visibly Jewish can walk down the street without fear. In too many Western capitals, the answer has become “no.”
Jews are again donning caps instead of kippahs, dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it. When a minority must erase itself to move safely through a city, its civil rights have already been eroded.
This is not normal or acceptable, and it is certainly not “different this time.” Those who insist the present situation is unique because Jews are now merely one minority among many in a multicultural, multireligious mosaic are suffering from an acute condition called being completely wrong.
