By Henry Srebrnik, Shalom Magazine, Winter 2026
I am not only the child of Holocaust survivors, having been born in Poland right after World War II, but I myself, it turns out, am a survivor. Last summer I found a book, by accident, listing child Holocaust survivors in Poland. I was surprised to see I was on the list since I was born July 19, 1945, after Poland had been freed. But it seems being conceived during the war in a Nazi camp made me one.
To confirm this I filed a claim, with a lot of evidence, with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. I did not file under the hardship category (something that is probably true, unfortunately, for most elderly survivors) because, of course, I am not suffering hardships.
In December I got a call from New York confirming my status. They explained that although I am not a hardship claimant, I will nonetheless receive benefits at any Jewish Community Centre in North America, including medical and dental ones, should they include those. I was very surprised! Also, should my annual income ever dip below $66,000, I would be eligible for a monthly pension. Even in retirement, my UPEI pension will be well above that, of course, so that is a moot issue. What I am most pleased about is that this is now “official.”
But I don’t use it as an “excuse” for my “Zionist” views. Maybe Arnold Toynbee was right that we are a “fossil” people, who should have disappeared with the rise of supersessionist Christianity and Islam. But we didn’t. We were dispersed, yet no anti-Zionist calling us “settlers” can give an answer to this question: where, then, if not the land of Israel, are we “indigenous”? The way Cree, Estonians, Kikuyu, Laotians and tens of thousands of other ethnic groups are, even if they migrated from somewhere else. Those assimilated Jews who saw themselves as “indigenous” within the French, German, Hungarian, Polish, and other European nations were in for a rude awakening in World War II. The same happened with those Jews in the Middle East after -- but also, as in Iraq, before -- 1948.
This is what it can lead to, as described by Noah Smith.” In his article “No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land,” published in the Free Press of New York Nov. 27, he points to this problem, which affects all Jews – including, according to our “anti-Zionist” enemies -- even those in Israel:
“My ancestors were Lithuanian Jews. I could leave the country of my birth and go ‘back’ to Lithuania -- a land I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak. Yet my ancestors were not ‘indigenous’ to Lithuania either; they moved there from somewhere else. What if the ethnic Lithuanians chose not to accept me? Where would I go then? Israel? But the folks who do land acknowledgments would consider me a ‘colonizer’ there as well. Would I then wander the Earth, desperately seeking some ethnostate that would allow me and my descendants to live there as a permanently precarious resident alien?” He truly paints the age-old picture of the “wandering Jew!”
Jews, however, have returned – ideologically, even if not completely “genetically” – to a place with which they never lost touch culturally, religiously, and so forth. The land of Israel. It’s a libel to compare this with white Rhodesians, South Africans, the French in Algeria, and indeed Anglo-Canadians, none of whom had any contact or history with those places before conquering them. For that matter, even Afro-Liberians and the Krios of Sierra Leone were “settlers,” since they were freed former Western Hemisphere enslaved people, who didn’t originate in that particular part of West Africa but moved there through American and British auspices.
The Arab claim to Palestine, indeed to the whole Middle East, was itself the result of conquest and settlement, displacing other peoples and religions. No one complains about this, for some reason. Israel, which looms like a giant monster in antisemitic imagery, is but a dot on the map, of about 10 million people, in a sea of billions of Muslim peoples stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Those, too, were, after all, conquests. The claim to Palestine, shorn of all the “academic left post-colonial” stuff is, to bring it down to Occam’s level, simply this: It is Muslim land, and that’s the long and short of it. This is the non-negotiable truth for Hamas and others of that persuasion. We just don’t buy it.
I consider that what has happened in Gaza is tragic, though to my mind no genocide. If anything, it may perhaps have been an overreaction to a shocking event that triggered the worst fears in Israeli and Jewish minds, given our history. Still, I will never apologize for Israel’s right to exist. I do however worry for the state’s future, given the forces arrayed against it.
Meanwhile, things in the diaspora show little sign of improving. “Have we Crossed the Antisemitism Rubicon?” wonders Jacob Dallal, managing director of the Comper Centre for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa, in a Nov. 24, 2025, Times of Israel article.
“The intellectual worldview that has taken root in academia, casting Israel as colonialist and genocidal, and Jews as members or even leaders of the white oppressor class, has spread far beyond universities into other cultural institutions,” he suggests. We may be entering a new era marking the end of the post-World War II hiatus in Western antisemitism.
“Jews will come to face more widespread and systemic discrimination, with silent and not-so-silent boycotts of Jewish and Israeli artists, writers, and academics spreading, largely out of public view.” As anti-Jewish sentiment increases and potentially becomes official policy, the Golden Age for Jews in North America, he contends, may well be over. It certainly seems the case in Canada, where antisemitism has become almost normalized.
