September 23, 2026

Everyone is talking now about the film Naza, and in my view, they are asking the wrong questions. Did the twenty-four interviewees actually serve in Unit 8200? Is every detail they gave accurate? Are the images authentic? Are the things described moral or immoral? Of course facts matter, and certainly a functioning state must investigate serious allegations. But when Israel’s very existence is repeatedly placed in the defendant’s chair, we must not allow the factual questions posed by the accuser to become the only framework within which we explain ourselves. If we immediately enter that discussion, we have already accepted its rules of the game.

There are questions we should not allow to define the conversation. When someone asks, “Did the Holocaust really happen?” the Jewish response is not necessarily to open a file of documents and conduct the debate as though both possibilities were equally legitimate. There comes a moment when the very question reveals its purpose. Our strength also lies in the language with which we refuse to accept the premise of the questioner.

The Jewish people have already encountered many forms of rejection. Every exile formulated “the Jewish problem” differently. In Babylon, there was exile from the land. In the Greek world, the confrontation was with Torah and with the Jewish way of life: not necessarily that you Jews are the problem, but your Torah, your difference, your covenant. In the Christian world, the very existence of the Jew became a theological problem. Augustine did not seek to destroy the Jews; he wanted them preserved as witnesses to Scripture. In other words, even when the Jew was permitted to exist, his very existence required an explanation.

Later, harsher voices appeared. Martin Luther, who early in his life hoped that Jews would convert to Christianity, reached the end of his life writing virulently anti-Jewish texts. And here something disturbing becomes visible: sometimes even conversion does not solve “the problem.” The Jew is no longer judged only for his faith, but for the mere fact of being Jewish.

And here we come to one of the most difficult and astonishing phenomena in Jewish history: the apostate.

Who is the apostate in the deeper psychological sense of the word? Not merely someone who changed religions. Sometimes it is a Jew who seeks to escape belonging itself. He wants to be “normal,” to be accepted, to free himself from the burden, the memory, the covenant, the Jewish fate. But he discovers something painful: the other still sees him as a Jew. And the more he tries to distance himself, the more his origins pursue him.

Then an extreme psychological phenomenon may arise: in order to prove that he no longer belongs, it is not enough for him to be indifferent to Judaism. He must stand against it. It is not enough to say, “I do not believe.” He must say: They are guilty. They are corrupt. They are dangerous. He tries to free himself from the Jew within by condemning the Jew outside himself.

Not every Jewish critic is an apostate, of course, and not everyone who opposes Israeli policy suffers from self-hatred. We must not turn every political disagreement into betrayal. But the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred exists, and it is ancient. There is a difference between criticism that comes from responsibility and love, and an almost psychological need to prove to the world: I am not one of them.

Throughout history we repeatedly encounter Jewish apostates who became among the fiercest accusers of their own people. Nicholas Donin, a Jewish apostate in the thirteenth century who converted to Christianity, brought accusations against the Talmud before the Church, leading to the Disputation of Paris and the burning of Talmudic manuscripts. Pablo Christiani, another Jewish apostate who became a Christian, played a central role in the Disputation of Barcelona against Nachmanides. In other periods other apostates appeared, and in the eighteenth century some among the Frankists also acted against the tradition from which they had emerged. This is not a marginal phenomenon in our history.

It appeared in modern Europe as well. There were Jewish thinkers, or thinkers of Jewish origin, who sought to distance themselves from Judaism to the point of internalizing antisemitic images. Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character is one of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon: a man of Jewish origin who converted to Christianity and wrote about “the Jew” in deeply negative terms, almost as though he had to expel from himself something he could not bear.

And this is precisely where a film such as Naza becomes, in my view, more than another political work. When Jews take part in creating a work that portrays Israel and the IDF through the most extreme images of European evil, I do not think it can be understood only as a question of Left or Right. Here the question of the apostate appears again in its broader meaning: How far must a person go in order to prove to the world that he does not belong to the collective from which he came?

When Jewish creators such as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shor place Israel inside such a framework, the question that interests me is not only whether every claim in the film is true or false. I am also interested in the psychological and historical question: Why does the Jew sometimes need to become the harshest voice against the Jewish collective itself? Why is criticism not enough, and why is a total indictment required?

I am not claiming that I know what motivates a particular person in the depths of his soul. We cannot know another person’s thoughts. But the historical phenomenon itself exists, and therefore it deserves to be examined.

Perhaps because there is nothing simple about being a Jew.

We are a small people that remained alive after exiles, expulsions, forced conversions, pogroms, and extermination. We lost sovereignty, lived scattered among other nations, and yet remained a people. And in the twentieth century, after nearly two thousand years, we returned to the same land and established a state there. It is difficult to find a historical story parallel to this one.

From the perspective of Jewish faith, this is not merely historical coincidence. It is covenant. “And I will establish My covenant… as an everlasting covenant.” A people with whom a covenant was made, with a memory that cannot be erased, with a longing that returns again and again to Zion. A miraculous people, possessing a history experienced from within as a history of Providence, survival, and return.

And perhaps that is the problem. A blessed people. That is what there is.

Once we are too weak, and once we are too strong. Once we were too “feminine,” powerless and without a state, and today we are too “masculine,” too armed, too sovereign. Once we were accused of having no homeland and living among other nations; today we are accused precisely because we have a homeland. Once the Jew was called a coward; today he is called an aggressor. Either way, in the end, he is guilty again.

When the Jew is on the cross, he can evoke compassion. When he comes down from the cross, stands on his own feet, and defends himself, suddenly, in the eyes of part of the world, he becomes Judas Iscariot.

This is one of the tragedies of the European discourse about Israel. Palestinians are, of course, human beings with suffering, rights, and a story of their own, and real suffering must be taken seriously. But there are moments when it seems that the issue is no longer only the Palestinians. Israel itself becomes the symbol onto which ancient European arguments about Judaism, Christianity, guilt, power, and redemption are projected.

That is why I do not believe that public diplomacy alone will solve the problem.

This does not mean that we should abandon truth, facts, or morality. Quite the opposite. We must examine ourselves rigorously. The prophets of Israel did not spare us. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah did not say: The world hates us, therefore we are exempt from self-examination. On the contrary: they demanded more of us precisely because we are the people of the covenant.

If an Israeli soldier committed a forbidden act, it must be investigated. If a system failed, it must be examined. If indeed twenty-four people who served in Unit 8200 gave the testimony attributed to them, we must establish who they are, exactly what they said, in what context, and what is true. And if it turns out that people who entered the most sensitive systems of the state act against it or improperly disclose information, that becomes a serious internal question Israel itself must confront.

Internal criticism is not weakness. It is a profound part of the Jewish tradition.

But there is an enormous difference between Jewish self-examination and accepting an indictment against our very right to exist.

That is the distinction I am trying to make.

My own family history teaches me something about this as well. My grandparents in Persia lived in a world where Jews knew they had to keep a low profile. In my family it was told that Jews were even careful about how they stood in the rain, because of beliefs in the surrounding society about the “impurity” of the Jew, and that they did not always dare to wear clothes that were too new or conspicuous. My father’s uncles, tall and handsome men, insisted on wearing beautiful suits and appearing in the street with dignity, and at times they came into conflict with Muslims who attacked them for doing so. Eventually their father, Yehezkel, the physician to the Khan and the grandfather of my father, Yaakov Zion, understood that the time had come to rise and return to the land of their ancestors.

For me this is not an exotic story about Persia. It is part of a much larger Jewish story: generations of Jews who learned to make themselves smaller so as not to provoke the anger of the majority.

In Europe too, memory lives inside the very stones. One can walk through German cities and encounter memorial stones, plaques, and remnants of communities that were erased, sometimes embedded directly in the ground on which people walk every day.

And now we have returned to our land. Precisely for that reason, we cannot build our lives once again around the question of how to make the world love us.

We can and should build relationships with peoples and nations. Rabbi Allalouf suggests, for example, that Israel should not remain completely dependent on Europe and should strengthen its ties with the non-Western world: Japan, China, Singapore, and other Asian countries. One can debate the exact policy, but the principle matters: we should not build our entire future on the approval of a single continent.

And on the social level, we must understand that Jewish life has never been simple. At times the world will be hostile. At times a film like this will receive applause, prizes, and wide distribution. At times it will affect public opinion, economics, trade, international relations, and even Israel’s freedom of action in matters of security. We cannot ignore the price.

But neither can we live constantly asking permission.

There is no point in turning every trip abroad into a public-relations campaign and every encounter with a non-Jew into a test in which we must prove that we are “the good Jews.” No person in the world has the right to demand that we stand trial again and again for the very fact of our identity.

And here I return to the apostate.

Perhaps he is the most tragic figure in this story. The Jew who finally wants to be “like everyone else,” to be freed from the burden, the wars, the bereavement, the responsibility, the belonging. He wants the family of nations to accept him. But sometimes, in order to be accepted, he feels that he must bring with him, as a gift, the indictment against his own family.

And perhaps the harsher that indictment becomes, the more clearly he hopes to establish the distance between himself and his people.

But history teaches us that even this does not always succeed. The world does not necessarily forget his origin.

And now we arrive at the Ten Days of Return.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this discussion comes now. Because true self-examination is not only asking what the world says about us. Self-examination begins with the question of what we say to ourselves: Who are we? Are we faithful to our own truth? Are we able to criticize ourselves without hating ourselves? Can we repair without dismantling? Can Left and Right, religious and secular, Sephardi and Ashkenazi still remember that they belong to the same story?

The strength of a people lies not only in its army. It lies in its identity, its memory, its mutual responsibility, and in knowing why it exists.

Perhaps there will always be those who accuse us. Perhaps there will always also be Jews who try to escape the Jewish story by attacking it. There is no need to despair of them, and there is no need to spend all our energy trying to persuade every person in the world.

We must do something far more difficult: become worthy of our covenant.

To be better. More honest. More successful. More prosperous. More united. Not united in our opinions — that has never been the Jewish people — but united in the knowledge that we depend upon one another.

And to remain awake to the Providence that hovers above us, guiding and directing us.

Perhaps this is the call of the Ten Days of Return: to examine ourselves without handing ourselves over to the judgment of those who hate us.

To engage in soul-searching without losing the soul.

To clarify the facts when necessary, but not to accept the premise of a question that asks us, every time anew, to prove our right to exist.

Our existence does not begin with the applause of the world, and it does not end with its condemnations.

It begins with the covenant.

And from there — with our responsibility to live within it.

We are moving into times where we can stop begging to be accepted- Israel is entrustued to be a light to the rest of the world. The light goes first – the rest will follow.

In the 1960s, when Cher performed as one-half of a popular duo with her husband, Sonny Bono, they recorded songs as “Sonny and Cher.” One of their biggest hits was “The Beat Goes On.” I always thought the song’s title was a metaphor for the persistence and continuity of life: that despite all the turmoil and upheaval of a tumultuous era, there are things that remain constant: the beat goes on.

Having recently returned from two months in Israel, I keep thinking about that song.

We once assumed that antisemitism was a thing of the past—something discredited and unfashionable in a post-Holocaust world. Yet today, the political landscape is filled with candidates and public figures who openly traffic in antisemitic tropes. Some win elections without being meaningfully challenged for their hostility toward Jews, Israel, or Zionism.

We have seen Israeli flags burned in public to the cheers of crowds. Businesses owned by Jews or Israelis are defaced, and Jews are physically assaulted. College campuses have become centers of intense anti-Israel activism, with Jewish students bullied and intimidated. Even some elementary-school curricula distort Jewish history or minimize Jewish contributions to Western civilization.

And all of this is happening in the United States.

In parts of Europe, the situation is even more troubling. Jews are accosted in the streets of major cities, usually with no consequences for the perpetrators. Governments and political movements increasingly take positions hostile toward Israel and its very existence. Some countries have moved to restrict or sever business relationships with Israeli businesses and industries, while actions are taken to isolate and ostracize individual Israelis.

There is a bitter irony in all this. The attacks against Jews and Jewish businesses, the hostility toward Israel, and the efforts to isolate the Jewish state only underscore the very reason Israel exists: to provide a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people, a place where Jews can seek safety when they are threatened elsewhere.

And the hostility does not end in Europe or in segments of American society. Much of the most virulent anti-Israel sentiment emanates from the nations and radical Islamist organizations surrounding Israel. Iran and its proxies, while weakened have not given up pursuing their goal of destroying Israel. It, along with Turkey and Qatar, compete to see who can claim the title of most virulent opponent of the existence of the Jewish state.  

Yet, despite being surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction, despite a hostile world, despite security threats within and beyond its borders, despite the false and unfounded accusations constantly leveled against Israel — despite all this, the beat goes on.

With so much hostility and so many questioning and threatening its very existence, nevertheless, Israel continues to rank among the happiest countries in the world. When I was there this summer, I saw restaurants, coffee shops, shopping malls, roads, beaches, and cultural events filled with people—often young people—who simply want to enjoy life.

There was energy everywhere I looked—an unmistakable sense of vitality, creativity, and forward motion.  Construction cranes dot the landscape. New buildings are rising at an extraordinary pace. Transportation hubs and infrastructure are expanding. Technology, commerce, culture, and everyday life continue to move forward.

One could almost forget that much of the world is condemning and isolating the Jewish state.

Reflective of the optimism, resilience and determination is the song that has become almost a new national anthem.  Released in 2024, the song with a catchy tune and the refrain, “Od yoter tov, v’od yoter tov” — meaning “it will be better and even better” — became an instant hit.  Based on the teaching of a Bratzlaver Hasidic rabbi, Shalom Arush, it captures the essence of the Israeli perspective of faith in the face of tragedy.  

This is not to suggest that all is well or that Israel is somehow untouched by the events surrounding it. Far from it. Many Israelis are still coping with the trauma of the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre and the war that followed. Families continue to grieve. Soldiers and civilians carry wounds — some visible, many not. 

And yet, life continues.

That may be the most striking thing I witnessed.

While so much of the world seems obsessed with and consumed by its hatred of Israel and Jews, Israelis continue to build, create, work, celebrate, argue, raise families, and plan for the future.

The threats are real. The pain is real. The uncertainty is real.

But so is the resilience.

The beat goes on.

Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt is chairman of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. 

I have a confession to make: I find the great debate over whether artificial intelligence is going to save humanity or bring about the apocalypse profoundly uninteresting.

Perhaps AI will cure cancer, eliminate mindless work, unlock unimaginable scientific discoveries and usher in an era of human flourishing. Perhaps it will destroy millions of jobs, hollow out our brains, flood the internet with synthetic garbage and eventually decide that humanity was an unfortunate beta test. I have no idea, and neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

I also have surprisingly little interest in figuring out how AI is going to reshape every aspect of my family’s existence. Maybe that comes from a place of protectiveness. Maybe I simply hate the idea that a handful of technology companies and their executives could have such an enormous role in determining how our children learn, how we work, how we consume information and how we interact with one another, while the rest of us have remarkably little say in the matter.

Or maybe it comes from having spent considerable time in parts of the world where the conversation about transformative technology feels almost absurdly detached from daily life. I have lived and worked in communities where access to clean water, reliable electricity and quality education are not the norm. Against that backdrop, listening to wealthy people debate whether artificial intelligence is going to transform humanity can sometimes feel like a conversation about which humanity we are actually talking about.

Or perhaps I just find the whole thing a little boring. Call me crazy.

What interests me far more is the considerably less cinematic question of what happens between now and the arrival of either utopia or Armageddon (or neither), because whatever AI eventually becomes, today it is a collection of extraordinarily powerful products being built by extraordinarily powerful companies competing for market share, capital, talent and dominance.

We should dispense with some of the romanticism surrounding this industry and recognize these companies for what they are: corporations seeking to make enormous amounts of money. That is not an indictment of capitalism. It is how capitalism works. Companies identify opportunities, exploit advantages, capture markets and maximize profits, and when protecting the public conflicts with those objectives, history gives us very little reason to assume that the public interest will prevail voluntarily.

There is therefore no reason to grant AI companies the benefit of the doubt. When safety conflicts with growth, we should expect growth to frequently win; when restraint threatens market share, restraint becomes considerably less attractive; and when voluntarily delaying a product means allowing a competitor to capture millions of users, it would be foolish to expect executives to choose the public good over the commercial interests of the companies they are paid to lead.

The executives running these companies also have no democratic mandate to decide how much risk the rest of society should tolerate. They did not receive one because they founded a successful company, raised billions of dollars or built a remarkable piece of technology. If their products are in fact going to transform humanity, then the public has every right to establish the terms under which that transformation occurs.

We have already made a version of this mistake with social media, where the early promise of a great democratizing force that would connect humanity, expand access to information and give ordinary people a voice eventually collided with a business model that turned human attention and rage bait into a commodity. The platforms discovered that understanding and exploiting our psychological vulnerabilities could be extraordinarily profitable, and they built increasingly sophisticated products designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, reacting and returning.

It’s not up for debate – social media platforms have contributed to an information environment rife with harassment, hate, conspiracy theories, extremist content and mis-/disinformation, while features designed to maximize engagement have created particularly serious concerns for children and adolescents.

The companies behind these platforms also did not simply stand by as the evidence of these harms mounted. For years, major platforms fought regulation, deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers, challenged restrictions in court and resisted efforts to impose greater responsibility for what happened on products they designed, controlled and monetized, while Washington repeatedly failed to summon the political will necessary to meaningfully constrain them.

Consider Section 230, a provision of the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, when AOL was mailing CDs to American households and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t bar mitzvahed. The basic principle behind this type of protection is easy enough to understand through an analogy. If I picked up the telephone and told a friend I was going to kill someone, I could be held responsible for that threat, but the phone company would not be liable simply because I used its network to make it. The phone company provided the means of communication; it did not decide what I said, whom I said it to, encourage me to say it, or reward me for saying it.

Section 230 gave emerging online services a powerful version of that intermediary protection. Online platforms generally could not be treated as the publisher of something simply because one of their users posted it, which made considerable sense for an early internet in which a service hosting millions of conversations could hardly be expected to assume legal responsibility for every sentence typed by every person using it.

The problem is that today’s social media platforms bear very little resemblance to a telephone line.

When you pick up the phone, Verizon does not listen to your conversation, determine which statements make you angriest, search through millions of other conversations for even more provocative material and then start piping those conversations into your ear because an algorithm has calculated that outrage will keep you on the phone longer. You choose whom to call, you choose whether to continue the conversation and, if your friend starts spouting hateful rubbish, at least the rubbish came from the person you chose to speak with.

Social media fundamentally altered that relationship. Its algorithms decide what billions of people see, recommend what they should see next and learn from every click, pause, like and share what will keep each individual engaged. Hate, conspiracy theories, radical content and outrage do not simply sit somewhere on these platforms waiting for someone to find them. Recommendation systems spoon-feed users material they never requested because the system has learned that provocative content keeps them watching.

Yet these companies benefited for years from a legal and political framework rooted in the notion that the underlying speech belonged to somebody else. Section 230 is not absolute immunity and it is not responsible for every failure of technology regulation, but the broader arrangement became increasingly difficult to justify as platforms designed the systems selecting and amplifying what people saw, profited enormously from the attention those systems generated and then distanced themselves from responsibility by emphasizing that somebody else created the underlying content.

Policymakers should have confronted that contradiction much earlier, rather than allowing the companies to scale first and asking the hard questions later. By treating regulation as something that should arrive only after harm had been conclusively demonstrated, quantified and litigated, we gave the platforms years to capture markets, normalize their products and make themselves nearly indispensable to modern life before seriously debating the rules under which they should operate.

AI companies should not receive the same luxury, and part of preventing that outcome begins with consumers because these products are useful, which is precisely what makes dependence so easy.

Parents should be deeply skeptical about allowing children to outsource intellectual development to machines. Teachers should establish strict rules governing when AI can be used, with serious consequences for students who violate them. School districts should be developing policies now that preserve the development of critical thinking, writing, research and problem-solving skills, while universities need to determine what intellectual work students must still be capable of performing without machine assistance.

Adults should apply the same scrutiny to ourselves. If AI is making you less capable of writing, thinking, remembering, navigating, researching or making decisions independently, perhaps the appropriate response is not simply to celebrate how much time you saved, but to ask whether the convenience is actually worth what you are giving up. There is something bizarre about worrying that artificial intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence while eagerly outsourcing every task that requires us to exercise our own.

Consumers were also part of the failure of the social media era. We knew these products were manipulating our attention, watched what they were doing to our children, our politics, our information environment, complained about it endlessly and then opened the apps again. We never built a sustained consumer movement capable of seriously affecting the companies’ bottom lines, which made government and civil society even more important at precisely the moment when both proved far too slow to respond.

We cannot afford the same timidity with AI, particularly as we begin hearing familiar arguments about why meaningful regulation should wait: policymakers do not understand the technology, regulation could stifle innovation, America cannot afford to fall behind China and the technology is changing too quickly for laws to keep pace. There will never be a perfect regulatory framework for a technology that is constantly changing, and insisting upon one before acting effectively allows the companies developing these systems to set the rules themselves.

Government should instead establish meaningful standards for safety and transparency, give independent researchers access to study these systems, strengthen protections for children and subject particularly high-risk applications to independent testing and oversight. Policymakers should also be willing to overregulate and correct course where necessary. If a rule turns out to be unnecessary, burdensome or poorly designed, we can change it. It is much harder to claw back control after a technology has become deeply embedded in society and billions of people have become dependent on it.

Nor are policymakers starting from scratch. Organizations such as the Center for AI and Digital Policy, Encode, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Fathom are already advancing approaches to AI accountability that policymakers can draw upon. The objective should not be getting every rule right on the first attempt, but acting, studying the consequences and adjusting where necessary rather than allowing the absence of universal agreement to become an excuse for paralysis.

Civil society needs to move just as quickly. During the social media era, children’s advocates, civil rights organizations, Jewish organizations, democracy groups and others spent too long treating technology as somebody else’s policy problem, only to discover that they were confronting different manifestations of problems traveling through the same technological infrastructure. Those coalitions should be built now, while the rules around AI are still being written. AI companies are already devoting enormous resources to shaping the political environment in which they will operate, and civil society needs to approach the task with comparable seriousness.

Jewish philanthropy has a particular reason to understand this lesson because, for too many years, much of the Jewish communal world was absent from the technology accountability debate. We subsequently watched social media become an extraordinarily effective vehicle for antisemitism, conspiracy theories, extremist recruitment and harassment. Jewish organizations have since spent enormous sums responding to those downstream harms, but we had far too little skin in the game when it came to advancing the policies, coalitions and regulatory efforts that might have held the platforms accountable much earlier.

By the time much of the Jewish communal world recognized that technology accountability should be a serious priority for philanthropy and advocacy focused on countering antisemitism, the architecture and incentives of the social internet had already been built, and we have been paying for that late arrival ever since.

Jewish philanthropy cannot afford to make the same mistake with artificial intelligence. Funders should be strengthening the organizations, coalitions, researchers and policy advocates working to regulate both social media and AI, while Jewish institutions should be sitting alongside children’s advocates, civil rights organizations, democracy groups, educators and others whose interests overlap with ours.

Jewish philanthropy cannot afford to make the same mistake with artificial intelligence. Funders should be strengthening the organizations, coalitions, researchers and policy advocates working to regulate both social media and AI, while Jewish institutions should be sitting alongside children’s advocates, civil rights organizations, democracy groups, educators and others whose interests overlap with ours.

This does not require creating some separate Jewish AI agenda. It requires recognizing that technology policy is now inseparable from many of the issues Jewish philanthropy already spends enormous amounts of money addressing, and that continually funding organizations to respond to harms downstream while ignoring the systems helping to produce and distribute those harms upstream is neither sufficient nor particularly strategic.

We can spend the next decade funding organizations to combat AI-generated antisemitism, synthetic propaganda, extremist recruitment, harassment and whatever other manifestations emerge after the technology has already reshaped society, or we can invest now in the coalitions and policy infrastructure capable of influencing the rules before the architecture becomes nearly impossible to change. In reality, we will probably have to do both, but our experience with social media leaves us without an excuse for ignoring the second.

I remain agnostic about whether artificial intelligence will ultimately save civilization or destroy it, and I still find much of that debate remarkably boring. What concerns me is something far less theoretical: a relatively small collection of extraordinarily wealthy companies is racing to make its products indispensable to billions of people while governments, civil society and the public are once again struggling to keep pace.

We should view these companies with the same healthy skepticism we would apply to any other industry asking society to trust that it can police itself while pursuing enormous profits in a brutally competitive market. Their executives are not elected representatives, they have no special mandate to determine how much risk society should tolerate and assurances about responsible innovation should never substitute for enforceable rules created by institutions accountable to the public.

The failure of the social media era was not simply that we failed to predict what would happen. It was that we continued giving technology companies the benefit of the doubt long after there were compelling reasons not to, allowing products and business models with profound consequences for public life to become deeply entrenched before imposing anything approaching adequate accountability.

Having lived through that experience once, we have no excuse for handing AI companies the same freedom and hoping that this time they will somehow police themselves. 

Coby Schoffman is a Los Angeles–based serial social entrepreneur and the founder of The Nation Foundation (TNF), which operates project zones across East Africa. Schoffman holds an MSc in Transnational Security from New York University and a BA in Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution from Reichman University. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of any affiliated organization.

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.