Let me start with a quiz. Who said this?
I am liberating humanity from the futile vision called conscience and morality…
Compassion is weakness…
The morality of the Ten Commandments must be overcome…
This is an undying war against the Jews…
The struggle for power in the world is between me and the Jews. Everything else is meaningless.
A medieval fanatic?
A character from a dystopian novel?
A voice from the dark corners of the internet?
No.
It was Adolf Hitler.
What’s striking is not only the hatred. It is the clarity of the target. Hitler was not waging war over land or borders or rights. He was waging war against something far more intolerable: the idea that power answers to anything at all. Against conscience. Against restraint itself. Against the Jews, the guarantors of that restraint for over three thousand years, through their persistent, infuriating reminder that history is not morally neutral.
In his bloodlust, so akin to that of Gazan pogromists, he unwittingly testified to the very thing he wanted to destroy. One does not seek to annihilate a people over anything smaller than a struggle for power over the world itself.
This is why it matters to look back just a generation earlier.
After the First World War, Europe was not only broken. It was shamed. The carnage exposed the lie that progress alone could save us. Civilization had become technically brilliant and morally incoherent. And for a brief moment, a handful of leaders sensed this.
Arthur Balfour was among them.
Balfour, Prime Minister of Britain and Foreign Secretary during the war, was neither a romantic nor a radical. He was a philosopher statesman in the old English mold, steeped in Plato, Scripture, and the moral architecture of the West. He believed civilizations rose and fell not on force alone, but on what they worshipped and what they restrained. Long before Zionism became a political slogan, it was, to him, a moral question.
When he issued the declaration that now bears his name in 1917, it was written in careful, almost priestly language:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…”
That sentence is often quoted for its politics, but rarely for its theology. Balfour was not offering only land. He was acknowledging return. He was recognizing that the Jewish people were not only displaced from their ancestral homeland, but dislocated from history itself. And that history, unmoored from ethical memory, had just torn itself apart in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun.
In private, Balfour spoke of the Jews not as a modern nation among nations, but as a people whose moral witness had shaped the conscience of the world. He called them the sons of the prophets, a phrase that reveals the intuition behind the policy.
The return to Zion was not only a Jewish necessity. It was, in his mind, a civilizational one.
He and others in the British establishment were not secular in the modern sense. They were shaped by Scripture. They believed, however imperfectly, that the Jewish people carried something the world had misplaced. Beyond its political aspects, the Balfour Declaration reveals this intuition: the return of the Jews to their land was not merely restitution, but repair. Not only for the Jews, but for the world.
This is easy to forget today, given how badly the declaration was later administered, even cynically. History rarely honors its best impulses. But at its origin, the idea carried a seriousness that now feels almost embarrassing to name. The Torah was widely understood, even by many who were unsure about the existence of God, as the moral spine of the West. Not a relic, but a living reference point. A reminder that law preceded power, that commandment restrained kings, and that conscience was an intangible reality handed from generation to generation.
And perhaps this is why the Jew remains so problematic for those who believe that modernity, that “progress,” no matter what it leaves behind, is always righteous.
We live in an age that mistrusts the past. Identity is treated as a problem to be solved, not a gift to be received. Nation, faith, sex, gender, memory all are expected to dissolve into the hubris of a modern day Tower of Babel.
History shows that when universal systems attempt to erase inherited limits, they take different names but share the same impulse. Communism. Authoritarianism. Nazism. And in features of today’s Progressivism, the desire is the same: a universal system of global citizens administered by courts, treaties, and initiatives that must conform to the latest orthodoxies. Its promise is always identical: to replace stubborn loyalties with new ideas deemed so advanced that they supersede whatever came before. A globe managed by people who believe themselves wiser than the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years.
The academy’s moral alchemists, celebrity activists, and cultural tastemakers burn civilization’s foundations on the altar of a meaningless thing called modernity, forgetting that people in 1526 thought themselves modern too.
But the Jew does not fit comfortably into this arrangement.
The Jewish people carry a calendar that interrupts ordinary time with rituals that sanctify it. Traditions that perforate the illusion of time as something cursory rather than holy. For over three millennia, they have carried laws that restrain power and outlast fashion, and a tradition that refuses erasure. They insist that particularity is not the enemy of morality, but its condition.
And Israel, the Jewish State, flawed, maddening, and beautifully human, stands as the embodiment of that refusal to disappear.
This is why the language of accusation keeps changing while the fury does not.
Colonialist.
Apartheid.
Genocide.
The words have become fashionable, even virtuous. But the impulse is ancient. It is the same impatience that told Hitler conscience had to be destroyed before power could be free. The same resentment toward a people who insist that history answers to something higher than consensus.
So perhaps the quiz was never really a quiz at all.
Perhaps it was a mirror.
The words feel familiar not only because we have heard them before, but because we hear their echo now. Moderated, translated, moralized, politicized, cleaned up for polite company. Hitler said these things without shame, which is why we recoil. We prefer our absolutes disguised as compassion, our annihilations renamed as justice, our pogroms framed as resistance.
But the target remains the same.
Not land.
Not borders.
Not only Jews themselves, but the reminder they carry.
That there is a law before consensus.
That there is a memory older than fashion.
That there is a Creator who does not require permission.
This week marked what should have been Yarden Bibas’s son Kfir’s third birthday. He was nine months old at the time of his kidnapping. His older brother, Ariel, was three. Both were strangled by human hands in Gazan captivity. There was no ceremony, no cake, no photographs of a toddler with frosting on his face. Only a sentence, written by a brave and loving father who still insisted on speaking:
“Kfir, I am sorry that I brought you into such a cruel world.”
That line contains the entire tragedy, not only of a family, but of a people who continue to bear witness in a world that resents being reminded.
And so let me offer this reminder. We must pick up the mantle of what we have been entrusted with, without fear and without shame.
Am Yisrael Chai.
“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.”
— Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King
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