Who’s Really the Victim?

As if it isn’t enough that the media and the anti-Israel camp have vilified Jewish daily life, now our suffering is being usurped before our very eyes. Those who would revel in Israel’s demise are claiming victimhood on every front and denying attacks on us in the same breath.

The New York Times had to print a retraction to its own coverage of Israel. A rare event in today’s media landscape. When reporting on the NAZA documentary — the latest salvo in the never-ending blood libel campaign against Israel — the Times wrote, “Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war. But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” insinuating that Israelis are not the victims.

The outrage to this statement must have been furious and vocal because the NYT capitulated. The retraction read, “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”

This is not the first time the reality of both Israelis and Jews around the world has been negated. For the past three years we’ve been told that the trauma we experienced didn’t occur and that Israel is the true aggressor in the region. No matter how often or loudly our detractors repeat this notion, it doesn’t make it true. However, truth is no longer a requisite and our opponents are not letting up.

For the past three years we’ve been told that the trauma we experienced didn’t occur and that Israel is the true aggressor in the region. No matter how often or loudly our detractors repeat this notion, it doesn’t make it true.

Macklemore, Ed Sheeran’s opening act on tour, went on a one-sided anti-Zionist tirade on stage. This is not Macklemore’s first foray into the realm. In 2014 he appeared onstage wearing a black wig and beard and an oversized prosthetic hook nose.

In response to Macklemore’s most recent controversy, Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ football team owner, who owns the stadium where Sheeran and Macklemore were slated to appear, threatened to cancel the event if the rapper performed. “Gillette Stadium has a longstanding commitment to providing a welcoming environment for all guests and ensuring that events held at our venue do not provide a platform for hate speech,” Kraft wrote in a statement. Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the tour.

As expected, Ed Sheeran tried to remain neutral but the other acts on his tour quit, saying artists should not be silenced. But where’s their concern for “free speech” when Jews are canceled for supporting Israel? Reggae artist Matisyahu, comedian Michael Rapaport and countless others have had their shows canceled these past few years after anti-Zionists campaigned against them, and these same musicians cheered. Macklemore, like many other artists, applies his worldview of restraint to only one side of the equation — Israel —  while ignoring the atrocities committed by Hamas.

Kraft and the other stadium owners have every right to refuse artists who want to use their venues to whip up hostility against Jews. Macklemore’s behavior is an affront to the Jewish patrons who have attended his shows. Now because his platform has been taken away, he’s portraying his lot as victimhood. He is not being silenced; he’s being taught a lesson.

Many claim that “silencing” is also occurring on the diplomatic stage to Mahmoud Abbas and other members of the P.A./PLO, after the U.S. State Department denied them entry visas for the United Nations General Assembly for the second year in a row. Critics of the State Department’s decision claim this is an intentional targeting of these leaders. The administration defends its actions, noting the P.A./PLO have not curbed the glorification of terrorism, both in education and in the “pay-for-slay” remunerations which continue unencumbered.

Mahmoud Khalil, the campus organizer associated with SIPA Palestine Working Group and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), is now suing the university. Khalil served as the key negotiator and spokesperson for the Gaza Solidarity Encampments and related protests. The suit, filed in September with the U.S. District Court of New York, alleges that Columbia University “created and maintained a hostile environment through deliberate indifference to severe, persistent harassment of pro-Palestinian students.”

This lawsuit is the ultimate usurpation of victimhood. SIPA and the CUAD both organized the library seizure and the campus tent cities of 2024-25. These protests were not peaceful, and many who participated in them harassed Jewish students all over campus, barring them from classes and from attending religious functions. At the height of the campus tensions, Jewish students were reported to fear for their own safety all over the United States. The universities typically did little to protect the Jewish populations.

Hearing Khalil claim that pro-Palestinian students at Columbia are the victims is the ultimate distortion of reality. The Jewish people have suffered enough since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. As if the raping and murdering of our innocent women and children weren’t enough, Jews all over the world have become the targets of religious hate crimes at an unmatched rate.

Now those who hate us not only tell us that we aren’t victims but the aggressors when battling our enemies, but they add insult to injury by claiming that those who have incessantly harassed us are actually the victims. Methinks they doth protest too much.

As important as it is to set the record straight and make sure the world knows who the aggressors are and have been, if our enemies want the title of victim, let them have it. If there’s one thing we Jews have learned since Oct. 7, it’s that we are not victims. As history has proven time and again, we are the most enduring nation to ever grace God’s earth. And to our enemies, just know that the world can see through your lies. More importantly, so can The Almighty.

Hayim Leiter is a rabbi, a wedding officiant, and a mohel who performs britot (ritual circumcisions) and conversions in Israel and worldwide. Based in Efrat, Israel, he is the founder of Magen HaBrit, an organization protecting the practice of brit milah and the children who undergo it.