In the Western world of years past, Jews tended to be pro-liberal, if not outrightly pro-socialist, and liberals, in turn, supported the equal rights and legal and societal emancipation for the Jewish population. The right, by contrast, was viewed by some as the traditional home of nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism.
In recent years, however, three historical processes have given birth to a shift in the place of the Jews along the ideological and political spectrum.
The first process grew following Israel's victory over its Arab neighbors in the 1967 Six-Day War, with the enshrinement of the issue of Palestianian refugees and the deepening of Palestinian hostility. Since then Israel, along with the majority of Diaspora Jewry that supports it, turned from an acclaimed little David into a Goliath, mighty and cruel.
Some groups on the European left tend to identify with those viewed as the weak, even before examining if they are truly weak - and especially, if their cause is truly just. In the same vein, automatic anti-Americanism confers the halo of the saintly and the just, and this also has turned into a central criterion in the European left's views regarding Israel.
The second, much more recent process appeared along with the rise of anti-globalization movements. These groups quickly became synonymous with anti-Americanism, and their ranks were joined not only by elements of the extreme left, but also of the extreme right, as well as pro-Palestinians, anti-Zionists, and anti-Semites.
In Israel, less attention is devoted to a third process, whose impact, on Jews as well as others, is liable to prove more significant than the placards and the chants of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. This third factor is the change in the demographic face of the West.
Post-World War I U.S. laws restricting immigration discriminated against the entry of southern Europeans (in other words, mostly Catholics) and Eastern Europeans (largely Jews and Orthodox Slavs). To a great degree, these laws barred the entry of Jews who sought to flee the Nazis prior to the Second World War, standing in the way of the rescue of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. This fact was to have a crucial bearing on the circumstance that American Jewry became the most active of groups backing a change in immigration laws.
Passed in 1965, the new law also opened the gates of the United States to immigration from the Third World, in short order bringing about changes in migration patterns throughout the world.
The Jewish fraction of the general American population continues to decrease, due more to the numerical rise of such groups and Hispanics and African-Americans than to high assimilation rates and low birth rates among. At the same time, the Muslim proportion of the population, many of them of Arab descent, is rising. In fact, there is a continuing debate over whether the Arab-Americans already outnumber U.S. Jews.
This situation has yet to have had a significant influence on the make-up of the U.S. Congress, but has already been felt in local politics in certain cities.
According to demographic estimates, by the year 2050, there will be four times as many Arabs as Jews in the United States. An awareness of the possible demographic repercussions has begun to penetrate the consciousness of the Jewish community.
In recent months, the question "Is broad immigration 'good for the Jews'" has begun to be asked openly in the United States. In other words, is it right for Jews to continue to support liberal immigration laws?
It is reasonable to assume that the issue will soon join the Jewish debate over liberalism versus conservatism, and to the argument over supporting Israeli government policies regarding the Palestinians, as well as to the question of the mounting shift of Jews from the Democratic to the Republican Parties.
The Jewish-Israeli implications of mass emigration to Western Europe are already prominent. North Africans and Asians enter Western Europe easily, and the disputes among members of the European Union (mainly, as usual, between France and the rest of the countries) block effective decisions aimed at reducing both legal and illegal emigration.
Muslim immigrants already present a considerable voting population in France, Germany and Belgium. The many anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe, attributed to the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, were carried out mainly by Muslims. Different political observers trying to explain the increasing anti-Israeli stand of most western states ascribe great importance to the increase in the influence of the Muslim population.
These processes are dangerous in both the United States and Western Europe. In the U.S., cultural and conceptual processes beyond political influence may take place to the Jews' misfortune. The U.S. is considered today to be a country with "Judeo-Christian" values, and when speaking of the "three religions" in America, the reference is to Protestants, Catholics and Jews. This may change in the not-so-distant future, when the country may be spoken of as a "Christian-Muslim-Jewish" nation. It is not hard to assume what this means for the Jews in America.
A similar process may take place in Western Europe - sooner, and with greater intensity. A "Christian Europe" means not only a tradition of anti-Semitism, but also an anti-Muslim tradition, that has remained in the continent's consciousness since the Crusades, the subsequent Arab invasion of Spain, and the Turkish military missions that reached the gates of Vienna.
The accelerated secularization process weakens not only church anti-Semitism but also the anti-Muslim tradition. At the same time, low birth rates in Western Europe will oblige it to open its gates to provide a work force vital for its economy. It can be assumed that Western Europe will prefer immigrants from Eastern Europe, but reality will require a continuation, if not an increase, in the number of Arabs entering the West.
And while the immigrants of the past, from India as well as East Europe, wanted and still want to integrate into western society and culture, there is an opposite trend among today's Muslim immigrants: they want to win cultural, social and political influence not by assimilation but rather as a body that maintains its Muslim and Arab character.
Talk about returning Islam to its early days in Europe may sound imaginary, but that's not how they see it in the fervor of Muslim extremism.
Even without these extreme predictions we must remember that large numbers of immigrants and their children in their adopted nations are turning into lobbies for their countries of origin. This is not the exclusive invention of the American Jews' pro-Israel lobby. In the near future, the widening of Arab lobbies in Western Europe and America to the centers of political influence is liable to enable them to compete with the Jewish lobby.
In the future, Israel and the Jews may face a dilemma: it may be that the conservatives and the nationalists will, in fact, be their allies in a fight against immigration.