March 19, 2024

Five months ago, Hamas deliberately broke a ceasefire with Israel, resuming a war that began nearly the moment Israel abandoned the enclave back in 2005. A familiar reprise took shape over five wars: Hamas instigated hostilities; Israel retaliated, resulting in many Palestinian casualties of war; Hamas claimed victory in the battle for public opinion.

This latest war is different, however. The savagery on Oct. 7 was not merely an instigation. The stakes were raised by a troika of Hamas terrorists, UNRWA employees who, apparently, have always been in the raping and pillaging business, and “ordinary Gazans,” who have little claim to innocent civilian status. Together they laid siege to southern Israel in ways that demanded a resolution that will foreclose any future repeat performance.

The co-conspirators of Oct. 7 demonstrated once more for the world to see (because they chose to film it!) that they obey no laws of war, and boast how little value they place on life—whether it be Israeli, or their own. 

When will fair-minded people finally start believing them? Excusing barbarism has done neither the world, nor the Palestinian people, any good.

Much has happened, and not happened, since October 7. Lots of blood, ink and digital bandwidth has been spilled on land that few can even find on a map. Vastly larger losses of life went wholly unnoticed in the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, China and Syria — not to mention those valiant Kurds who never once hijacked a plane or placed a suicide bomber in a pizza shop. The world seemingly had no interest in those headlines, and not just because the press kept those stories off the front page.

What separates those hot spots of genuine mass murder from Israel’s existential wars of self-defense? Well, obviously, you can’t blame any of those other killings on Jews. If Jews were killing Kurds, even in self-defense, the Kurds would be treated like Palestinians. And, unlike the Palestinians, the Kurds actually deserve preferential treatment. 

This tells you everything you need to know about why, whether at the United Nations, the mainstream press, think tanks or academic institutions, the entire world appears to be against Israel — especially now. 

That’s precisely why we have already reached a do-or-die moment. Almost every day, in major cities across Europe and Canada, violent protests break out where the police are outnumbered, the Arab Street is one neighborhood closer to taking the West hostage, and Jews, many of whom have never been to Israel, are deemed legitimate targets if found walking the streets. 

America has not yet quite graduated to a European “No-Go-Zone” lifestyle, but give it time. Any day now the neighborhoods around Detroit will resemble Stockholm, and the people who live in them will suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. We all know that universities, nearly everywhere, have become infested with rabid antisemitism. The marketplace of ideas has been consumed by scavengers of hate. 

Meanwhile, American Jews have some serious decisions to make about their political and professional affiliations. 

Just over the past several weeks, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has called for the halting of aid to Israel, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called upon the Israeli people to oust their premier. A noted economist at Columbia University charged the United States with complicity in genocide for arming Israel with aid. A film director receiving an Academy Award denounced Israel. Vice-President Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter raised money for UNWRA on Instagram. (Her father, the Second Gentleman, sits on a White House task force to quell antisemitism. How’s that working out?) 

What do they all have in common? You guessed it: they are all Jews — although two of them — the film director and the Second Daughter — have publicly renounced their religion. 

In the case of Schumer, he’s undoubtedly haunted by the specter of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a likely challenger to his left. He just so happens to possess the worst combination of credentials to remain in office: An elderly Jewish white male who supports Israel. Schumer can’t do anything about his age, gender and skin color, but chucking Israel to placate the progressives is apparently a small price to pay if it results in the cameras still being pointed at his face.

For all of them, the sources of their Jewish betrayal, their lack of remorse, are of no consequence. Returning them to the tribe is a hopeless endeavor. Many reasons might explain their abandonment. Cynical gamesmanship. Career enhancements. Moral narcissism. A bad Hebrew school experience. Dropped on their heads during their bris is always a possibility. 

None of it matters. They comprise the weakest link in the Jewish chain, the fatal flaw in our flank. Better to be rid of them.

We are at war, and not just in southern Gaza and northern Israel. At wartime, you depend on those you can count on. Those with whom you can make common cause, who recognize the moral imperative of a democratic state surrounded by Islamist theocracies that hate the West. That Jewish canary in the oil field, hemmed in by terror. 

Embrace the people who can read a map, know their Old Testament and Middle East history, aren’t easily deluded by lies, and couldn’t care less if A-listers and social media influencers like them or not.

Embrace the people who can read a map, know their Old Testament and Middle East history, aren’t easily deluded by lies, and couldn’t care less if A-listers and social media influencers like them or not.

Robert Downey Jr. is not Jewish, but he openly wears a chai. Paul McCartney, Jon Voight, James Woods and Bill Maher have long stood beside the State of Israel. Cindy Crawford, Amy Smart and other non-Jewish celebrities have recently taken to Instagram to proclaim their support for Jews and rejection of antisemitism. 

Rocker John Mellencamp presented an award several years ago at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony by stating emphatically, “F— Antisemitism!” Chris Rock honored his old pal, Adam Sandler, when he received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, by acknowledging, “Jews … nice people.”

Evangelical Christians live in Red States, but support Israel in ways that far surpass Jews in Blue States. Why? For one thing, they are not impressed with Hollywood glamour or coastal literary elites. Such shallow calling cards are, regretfully, crack cocaine for Jews. 

But they also understand what happens to Christians under Sharia law. When Jordan occupied the Old City of Jerusalem from 1949-1967, the Christian Quarter, where Jesus Christ walked along the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher remains, was treated like a garbage dump. 

When Israel reclaimed the Old City after the Six-Day War, each of the Quarters were restored and respected. 

This is a time for serious people who will choose a side and take stands, and for Jews who are fully committed and won’t flinch. The calculating operators, opportunists and apologists can go stand somewhere else. It’s time to take names, and perhaps even more importantly —to dispose of some.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.” 

It began with a smart, skinny, good-natured guy with a Trotsky goatee, whom I met at UC Berkeley as I was protesting South African apartheid. It was 1985. I thought the Trotskyist group he belonged to was dogmatic and nuts, but that didn’t stop me enjoying his company. By the following year I’d become his girlfriend and, in an overnight conversion that suggests I wasn’t the independent-minded woman I thought I was, determined that the strident newspaper he sold was the brave bearer of essential truths.

I’m shocked and ashamed today to reread the articles that must have impressed me when I was 19, stupid, desperate for meaning and eager to please my boyfriend’s comrades. The Zionist madmen threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear apocalypse, they screamed in a front-page article, and I became convinced of the urgent need to fight for socialism. They told me Natan Sharansky, who had just been released from the gulag and was going to speak in San Francisco, was a traitor who had spied on the Soviet workers’ state, and I joined them in picketing that magnificent man. Soon after, I joined their youth organization and later their party, staying for over 25 years. During that time, I not only firmly believed I wasn’t antisemitic: I thought I opposed antisemitism. But running through my belief system was the conviction that history had unfortunately put the Jews on the side of evil reaction, and the righteous must mobilize against their sovereign and ugly offspring, the State of Israel.  

Running through my belief system was the conviction that history had unfortunately put the Jews on the side of evil reaction, and the righteous must mobilize against their sovereign and ugly offspring, the State of Israel. 

Then the Soviet Union fell, and we found solace for our demoralization and grief in the rising struggle of the Palestinians. Communism is dead, we were relentlessly told, but the intifada lives. Sept. 11 and the war on terror ushered in forces hostile to our most basic vision of progress, and it required some mental gymnastics — which is to say, a steady erosion of truth — to justify our belief that the Islamic fundamentalists slaughtering people at Baghdadi neighborhood markets were on the side of progress, because at least sometimes they fought the world’s greatest enemy, the U.S. military machine. 

The unchallengeable dogma on which so many of our lies were based — a tenet shared by countless left-minded people today — is that nothing is, and cannot possibly be, worse than U.S. imperialism. The doctrine cannot be shaken by any evidence. Once a person accepts that Western imperialism is the greatest possible evil, she must cheer any atrocity carried out by the neocolonial oppressed against it; or if she has any kind of conscience, lie about what her heroes actually do. A corollary of the doctrine is that tiny Israel is the U.S.’ war-crazed puppet, if not the puppeteer. Antisemites have always used Jews to represent whatever it is they hate. So for today’s anti-imperialists, Israel is the quintessence of imperialism, truth be damned.  

Once a person accepts that Western imperialism is the greatest possible evil, she must cheer any atrocity carried out by the neocolonial oppressed against it

My former party’s zeal for the Soviet Union was unfashionable in the 1980s left and sounds quirky today. But my ex-comrades must be gratified that their anti-Zionist vitriol, a niche passion of the far left when I was young, are de rigueur for today’s “progressives.”  When college students and Hollywood stars rail that Israel is carrying out a genocide, Gaza is a concentration camp and Israelis are acting like Nazis, they’re echoing the propaganda of my former party, which we in turn snapped up from the Soviet Union. I can find frenzied claims of a Zionist “Final Solution,” “Holocaust” and “genocide” of the Palestinians, in the yellowing pages of my group’s press many decades ago. 

People ask: How can anyone believe such obvious lies, or deny the atrocities of Oct. 7? I’ll wager that most don’t believe a lot of what they’re saying. They take the claims on faith, as I did, because they are made by people they respect, trust and even love. The first hesitant “I guess so” leads inexorably to accepting the next questionable “fact,” because they’ve already invested too much emotionally to challenge their comrades or friends. Soon they’re committed to defending a network of wild assertions about things they know nothing about. In an electrified region of their minds marked “Danger — Do Not Cross,” they suspect the things they’re saying may, in fact, not be true. 

But adhering to truth is nowhere near as important as being loyal to their tribe — a beloved yet tyrannical community, which makes life a misery for those who fail to uphold the creed. Today’s self-styled progressive is every bit as beholden to the party line as I, in my explicitly Leninist organization, was. This partly explains their rage: At some level they know they’re spouting lies. This makes them hate even more passionately those who make them feel guilty about it.  

At some level they know they’re spouting lies. This makes them hate even more passionately those who make them feel guilty about it.

One of the more sickening moments of my life was about five years ago, in my London apartment, when I realized that things I’d believed and fought for were ugly lies. At first I was naïve enough to think it was an honest mistake, which my intelligent, scrupulous comrades would rectify if I brought it to their attention. Instead they turned on me with the viciousness of an abused wounded pit bull, and when I still challenged them, my life fell rather dramatically apart. So I can’t offer immediate assurances to anyone wondering whether to probe behind that electrified fence. There will be a price.

But I soon found support and belonging in a new community, among my own Jewish people, and forgiveness I often don’t feel I deserve. I’m prone these days to second-, third- and fourth-guessing, but I’m confident about those things I do assert as true. I’m endlessly gratified about the open intellectual climate I’ve found on the other side, which contrasts so starkly to what I’m used to, and reflects the Jewish tradition of healthy skepticism and argument. There’s freedom here — to question, to read unapproved books, to hear forbidden speakers, to think for yourself, to search for truth as you genuinely see it. 

So to those who hesitate: Courage. You will suffer losses and pain, but soon you’ll be asking, as I did, What took me so long? As Liel Leibovitz wrote in his essay “The Turn”:

“The freedom you feel on the other side is so real it’s physical, like emerging from a long stretch underwater and taking that first deep breath in the cool afternoon air. None of it makes the lost friends or the lost career opportunities any less painful; but there’s no more potent source of renewable energy than liberty, and your capacity to reinvent—yourself, your group, your life — is greater than you realize.”

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”