Extinguish the Gaslight Forever

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, May 22, 2025

 

No one ever shouts “Free Palestine” while holding up a copy of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements Including Its Annexes and Its Agreed Minutes.

 

The Oslo accords, as they are better known, are not of much interest to the Palestine movement in the West. When activists in this movement hold maps, they do not look like the one Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas, a detailed illustration of every demand Abbas made that shows Israel and Palestine living side by side.

 

“Free, free Palestine” were the words shouted last night by the anti-Zionist who was arrested for the murder outside the Capital Jewish Museum of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, a young couple who were about to travel to Jerusalem and get engaged to be married. It is the chosen phrase for a great many people, none of whom—not one—envisions a peaceful outcome to this conflict. Yaron and Sarah were the opposite—budding diplomats with a bone-deep desire for peace and coexistence. There is no room for such people in “free, free Palestine.” They worked for the Israeli embassy, where there is always room for such people.

 

What we owe ourselves, as a community, after this monstrous act is to stop playing along with the gaslighting of those forever trying to wipe us off the face of the earth. May we stop saying or hearing the endlessly insulting formulation that “many Jews interpret” various Hamasnik slogans as threats or incitement or justification for violence against innocents. They are not ambiguous. We don’t interpret these slogans at all. We simply hear them.

 

“Globalize the intifada” cannot be “interpreted by some Jews as a call for violence.” It simply is. We do not say that when Elias Rodriguez allegedly pointed a loaded gun at Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, his actions were “interpreted by some Jews as a threat.” When he allegedly squeezed the trigger, it was not “interpreted by some Jews” as murder. What he was doing at that moment was globalizing the intifada, just as he’d been told to do for the better part of two years by everyone with a Ph.D.

 

We Jews can have granular Talmudic discussions on just about anything. The reason we don’t have such debates over “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is because there’s nothing to discuss. Contrary to what you might read in mainstream newspapers, there is no disagreement over what it means. Everyone knows what it means—it is a slogan explicitly (the original phrasing, changed to rhyme in English, is “Palestine is Arab”) calling for genocide. It’s true that some people lie about what it means, or might mean. But that’s not the same thing as there being a genuine debate.

 

All of these slogans, meanwhile, became more popular with every article citing the negative way “some Jews interpret” them. In other words, this is the message those who use the phrases mean to send. Telling a “pro-Palestinian” activist that Jews hear a call for their own mass murder in those words is the surest way to get that activist to repeat them.

 

So among other lessons from last night’s globalizing of the intifada is this: Extinguish this insipid gaslight forever. Anti-Semitism is the only kind of hatred that Western society encourages to be smuggled in through euphemism. We are the people of the book; let’s stop letting the world fool us into self-delusions. Let’s stop swallowing the postmodern bunk that holds there are no universal truths, only personal truths.

 

And perhaps the first universal truth of the oldest hatred is this: Our enemies mean what they say.