Who we are
What's unfolding in Israel is making it clear
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists infiltrated Israel in an unprecedented attack.
They slaughtered entire families, killing children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.
They slaughtered babies in their cribs.
They gunned down young people who had gone to the desert to enjoy a music festival in cold blood.
They raped women next to the corpses of their murdered friends.
They burnt people alive.
They kidnapped hostages into Gaza, including mothers with babies.
They filmed themselves as they murdered grandmothers and posted the killings onto the victims’ own Facebook pages to make sure their families could see it.
You may or may not know all this already, depending on what media outlets you watch or read or who you follow on social media. Social media especially has been pretty enlightening in recent days. Many folks who rushed to display Ukrainian flags or post their solidarity for whatever else was the latest cause of the day have been…oddly silent. But there are some things worse than silence.
Chapters of “progressive” organizations rushed to declare their solidarity with Palestinian “resistance,” tweeting jaunty graphics of paragliders in tribute to the Hamas terrorists who took to the skies and landed in Israel to butcher Jews. Crowds in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews.” Dozens of student groups at the storied Harvard University signed onto a statement blaming Israel for the attack on its own people. These are just a few examples.
Bari Weiss summed it up in
better than I could:Now we know who would have looked at Jews shoved onto cattle cars and said, “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” Those are the people today saying: “This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing.” Now we know whose politics are rooted not in conservatism or liberalism or anything else other than simply hating Jews. Now we can see exactly how people manage to always come up with a reason for why the Jews deserved it.
I’ve thought about this kind of thing a lot and for a long time. In our culture, the Holocaust has become a symbol for catastrophe and suffering, and the Nazis for evil. And with the overuse and abuse of Holocaust and Nazi metaphors, a symbol is all they are for many people. We have dozens upon dozens of books and films (some of them excellent, some abysmal) about the Holocaust. We’ve seen politicians comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi laws and young people entering into coronavirus lockdowns comparing themselves to Anne Frank.
Anne Frank herself has become a potent symbol for whoever wants to co-opt her memory for their particular cause. Or as an example of hope and inspiration, of someone who never lost faith in humanity.
But here’s the thing about Anne Frank that those people forget (or ignore, or just don’t care about). The story didn’t end with Anne declaring her undying optimism and living happily ever after. It ended with her getting murdered for being a Jew.
I think most people (except for literal self-declared Nazis who actually proudly declare their antisemitism) watch movies about the Holocaust and cringe at its horrors. They wonder how the Nazis and their allies could have sunk to such depraved depths. They imagine that if they had lived in that time and place, they would have been among the rescuers, never the murderers or the bystanders.
The horrors of the Shoah happened because of hatred of Jews. I’m sure in the 1940s, the people who herded Jews into ghettos or lined them up to shoot them alongside their families in the killing fields of the east or marched them into gas chambers figured those Jews had it coming, anyway.
That hatred is still alive. In 2023, Jews are still being tortured, raped, kidnapped, and slaughtered because they are Jews. Antisemitism never went away. As my friend
says, there was a grace period after the Holocaust when antisemitism became unfashionable in public spheres. That time may be over.Anyone who can look at the savagery of what terrorists did to innocent Israelis on October 7 and has even the impulse to justify or explain why those Jews, too, probably had it coming should at least be honest about their antisemitism.
Because of the nature of my work, I’ve seen and heard things in recent days that I can never unsee and will never forget. This doesn’t feel like the same world that we lived in on October 6. Things are different now. Or maybe it’s just clearer that we’re still in the same world we have always lived in, that nothing has changed.
In any case, the choice is clear. We have looked into the face of evil. Whether we call it by its name or not will show us who we are.
Brilliantly stated. As a Jew, I cannot fathom the barbarism that Hamas has proudly unleashed on innocent Jews. Unfortunately many of those antisemites probably see the video of the carnage, the blood-soaked floors and lines of wrapped corpses, without batting an eye -- but they all probably gasp in horror at the video from the kibbutz showing a dog get gunned down. The world would be united in horror if 1,000 puppies were murdered in a day. But in this case, it's just Jews.