The ancient rot at the heart of anti-Israel activism.
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The surge of anti-Jewish hostility is particularly concerning in light of what sparked it: meticulously planned pogroms in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the abduction of hundreds of innocents. The hostages were condemned to terrorist captivity, where they endured physical and psychological torture for the crime of being born Israeli. Each of their stories has left an enduring wound on the nation’s psyche, just as their captors knew they would. Hamas broadcast its crimes during the initial attack and continued to do so throughout the war, releasing hostage videos in a concerted effort to break the spirit of the Israeli people.
In Judaism, preserving human life is a principle held above all others. This idea, known as pikuach nefesh, is as lived as it is theoretical in Israel. The nation that once supported the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners to free one Israeli soldier (perhaps misguidedly, as hindsight shows) embodies this ideal of individual sacrifice for the collective in smaller ways each day. During my two years in the country, I saw this ethos in the outpouring of volunteerism in support of the more than 200,000 residents of Northern and Southern Israel displaced from their homes over the course of the war, as well as in the readiness of hundreds of thousands of protesters to drop everything each Saturday night to demand that the government prioritize securing the hostages’ release.
So, when a deal to bring home the abductees was announced, the outpouring of joy on the streets of Israel that followed came as no surprise to me. What did was the muted response from the most outspoken critics of Israel, who for the first time were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: Most Israelis meant it when they said the war was about bringing their people home. The posters of hostages adorning benches and buildings across the country were not moral cover, but rather an urgent reminder of those in peril. Hundreds of soldiers gave their lives for that cause, not for the far-right vision of annexation and ethnic cleansing so often treated as representative of the broader Israeli public.
And they did so on one of the most challenging battlefields of the 21st century. For more than a decade, Hamas devoted its resources to building an elaborate underground network beneath Gaza in preparation for just such a war. The dense urbanity of the Strip, sprawled atop layered networks of tunnels and subterranean bunkers, protected terrorist operatives while leaving Gazan civilians exposed. Unable to beat its opponent in a conventional war, Hamas relied on a strategy of maximizing international pressure to weaken and isolate Israel.
The result was a deadly and destructive war. Each and every innocent death over the last two years is a tragedy deserving of the name. Yet very rarely has blame for those tragedies fallen on their main orchestrator: Hamas. Nor has the world’s outrage over the scale of human suffering in Gaza been extended to devastating conflicts elsewhere, such as in Sudan, where a campaign of ethnically motivated violence has left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead since April 2023.
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But even though the war has ceased, anti-Israel sentiment has not. “This is not the world of the Zionist, this is not the world of Netanyahu, this is not the world of Trump, this is not the world of the Western Empire. October 7 told us this is our world, it is the people’s world,” a speaker at a Seattle rally proclaimed on the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack, amid reports of the forthcoming truce. “We can’t ever, until liberation, adopt an attitude of defeat and hopelessness.” The anti-Israel advocacy group Samidoun, despite hailing the ceasefire as a victory for the “resistance,” insisted that the fight for liberation is not over: “This is our moment to escalate, and to make clear, that we will become a strong bulwark of support for the Resistance as it continues the struggle, as we stand for nothing less than … the complete international isolation and dismantling of Zionism and the Zionist entity.”
Have the “ceasefire now!” champions abandoned their guiding slogan? Or do many of these purported human rights activists share Hamas’ belief that the armed struggle is not over until Israel ceases to exist—from the river to the sea?
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
