By Charlotte Lawson
Monday, December 01, 2025
On November 19, some 200 masked and keffiyeh-clad
protesters gathered
outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue to chant, “From New York to Gaza,
globalize the intifada,” and “Resistance, you make us proud. Take another
settler out.” Some shouted anti-Jewish slurs at people attempting to enter the
house of worship, while one demonstrator repeatedly yelled, “We need to make
them scared!”
The open calls for violence rattled Jewish communities
across one of the world’s most Jewish cities. But perhaps equally concerning
was the response from New York City’s own mayor-elect. In a statement provided
to several
news
outlets,
a spokeswoman for Zohran Mamdani, a vocal anti-Zionist, said that he “has
discouraged the language” used at the protest before offering a soft defense of
its participants: “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house
of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be
used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
What violation of international law, you ask? The night
of the demonstrations, the synagogue was hosting an informational event held by
Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel,
but, contrary to the protest organizers’ claims,
does not sell “stolen land” in violation of international law. Mamdani’s
deference to those demonstrators sent a clear message to Jewish New Yorkers:
You’re welcome here, provided that you don’t support the state of Israel.
That’s a tough standard. Eight in 10 Jewish Americans say
that caring about Israel is an “essential or important” part of their identity.
Nearly
half of the world’s Jewry lives in Israel. Virtually all religiously
observant Jews pray in the direction of Jerusalem. But Mamdani’s attempt to
whitewash antisemitic harassment on the basis of alleged international law
violations also has roots in a familiar historical pattern on both left and
right: We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their
Marxist ideology. We don’t hate the Jews, we
hate their support for the capitalist West. We don’t hate the Jews, we
hate their embodiment of the progressive agenda. We don’t hate the Jews, we
hate their lone state.
In many ways, Israel has emerged from two years of war
stronger than before. Yet internationally, October 7 and the war that followed
unleashed a wave of antisemitism unmatched in most of our lifetimes, with the
Anti-Defamation League recording a 140
percent spike in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023.
The figures speak for themselves, but so too do high-profile
acts of violence against Jews and Israelis, including the arson
attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the
murders of two employees of the Israeli Embassy outside of the Capital
Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the deadly firebombing
of demonstrators marching on behalf of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
That resurgent antisemitism coincided with the longest
war in Israel’s history is no mistake. Nor is it simply a reflection of outrage
at the prosecution of that war. A shaky, U.S.-brokered truce has held since
early October, yet efforts to delegitimize Israel and its inhabitants continue,
exposing much of the “ceasefire now” movement for what it is—a thinly-veiled
call for the destruction of the Jewish state. This phenomenon masquerades on
the left as peace-minded advocacy and on the right as “just
asking questions,” but both iterations are part of a decades-long
conspiracy theory: the idea that peace will elude the Middle East as long as
the Jewish people govern themselves, itself an offshoot of a much older,
equally sinister tradition. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur often notes,
antisemitism isn’t merely anti-Jewish bigotry—it’s the notion that the Jews are
what stands between your society and redemption.
***
The surge of anti-Jewish hostility is particularly
concerning in light of what sparked it: meticulously planned pogroms in
Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the abduction of hundreds of
innocents. The hostages were condemned to terrorist captivity, where they
endured physical and psychological torture for the crime of being born Israeli.
Each of their stories has left an enduring wound on the nation’s psyche, just
as their captors knew
they would. Hamas broadcast its crimes during the initial attack and
continued to do so throughout the war, releasing hostage videos in a concerted
effort to break the spirit of the Israeli people.
In Judaism, preserving human life is a principle held
above all others. This idea, known as pikuach nefesh, is as lived as it
is theoretical in Israel. The nation that once supported the release of 1,027
Palestinian prisoners to free one
Israeli soldier (perhaps misguidedly, as hindsight shows)
embodies this ideal of individual sacrifice for the collective in smaller ways
each day. During my two years in the country, I saw this ethos in the
outpouring of volunteerism in support of the more than 200,000 residents
of Northern and Southern Israel displaced from their homes over the course of
the war, as well as in the readiness of hundreds of thousands of protesters to
drop everything each Saturday night to demand that the government prioritize
securing the hostages’ release.
So, when a deal to bring home the abductees was
announced, the outpouring of joy on the streets of Israel that followed came as
no surprise to me. What did was the muted response from the most outspoken
critics of Israel, who for the first time were forced to confront an
uncomfortable truth: Most Israelis meant it when
they said the war was about bringing their people home. The posters of
hostages adorning benches and buildings across the country were not moral
cover, but rather an urgent reminder of those in peril. Hundreds of
soldiers gave their lives for that cause, not for the far-right
vision of annexation and ethnic cleansing so often treated as
representative of the broader Israeli public.
And they did so on one of the most challenging
battlefields of the 21st century. For more than a decade, Hamas
devoted its resources to building an elaborate underground network beneath Gaza
in preparation for just such a war. The dense urbanity of the Strip, sprawled
atop layered networks of tunnels and subterranean bunkers, protected terrorist
operatives while leaving Gazan civilians exposed. Unable to beat its opponent
in a conventional war, Hamas relied on a strategy of maximizing international
pressure to weaken and isolate Israel.
The result was a deadly and destructive war. Each and
every innocent death over the last two years is a tragedy deserving of the
name. Yet very rarely has blame for those tragedies fallen on their main
orchestrator: Hamas. Nor has the world’s outrage over the scale of human
suffering in Gaza been extended to devastating conflicts elsewhere, such as in
Sudan, where a campaign of ethnically
motivated violence has left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead since
April 2023.
While Hamas’ strategy of generating international
pressure on Israel partially worked, culminating in arms
embargoes and the decision by several U.S. allies to recognize
a Palestinian state, it also served to prolong the war. With each surge of
anti-Israel protests in capitals and on college campuses across the West, Hamas
negotiators grew
more
intransigent in
their demands for any eventual ceasefire. Only regional and U.S. pressure,
together with a looming Israeli siege of Gaza City, finally forced the group to
come to the table in a meaningful way.
But even though the war has ceased, anti-Israel sentiment
has not. “This is not the world of the Zionist, this is not the world of
Netanyahu, this is not the world of Trump, this is not the world of the Western
Empire. October 7 told us this is our world, it is the people’s world,” a
speaker at a Seattle rally proclaimed
on the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack, amid reports
of the forthcoming truce. “We can’t ever, until liberation, adopt an attitude
of defeat and hopelessness.” The anti-Israel advocacy group Samidoun, despite
hailing the ceasefire as a victory for the “resistance,” insisted
that the fight for liberation is not over: “This is our moment to escalate, and
to make clear, that we will become a strong bulwark of support for the
Resistance as it continues the struggle, as we stand for nothing less than …
the complete international isolation and dismantling of Zionism and the Zionist
entity.”
Have the “ceasefire now!” champions abandoned their
guiding slogan? Or do many of these purported human rights activists share
Hamas’ belief that the armed struggle is not over until Israel ceases to
exist—from the river to the sea?
***
The latter theory grows more convincing by the day, but
the writing has been on the wall since October 7.
The growing international popularity of this
eliminationist goal should’ve been evident in the outbreak of anti-Israel
protests in cities across the West after October 7, featuring
chants of “gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House before the besieged
southern kibbutzim had even finished collecting their dead.
And it should’ve been evident in the rapid
rise of Holocaust inversion and an
accompanying upsurge in Holocaust denial. The two phenomena are
incompatible: The former claims that the Jews are doing to the Palestinians
what was done to them, while the latter posits that the Shoah was either
exaggerated or wholly fabricated. But their simultaneous prevalence
demonstrates the lack of a coherent logic guiding the anti-Israel movement.
Today, it’s now mainstream to identify as an
anti-Zionist, particularly among young people. In a Harvard
Harris poll conducted in August, 60 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24
said they supported Hamas over Israel in the war. In other words, the majority
of Gen Z Americans have sided with a terrorist group that espouses an
explicitly genocidal ideology—and acts
on it. Indeed, in its 1988 founding charter,
Hamas said judgment day will not come until Muslims “fight the Jews and kill
them.”
Opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition
isn’t antisemitism, nor should it be treated as such. But it’s well past time
to confront anti-Zionism for what it is—not measured political criticism, but a
call for the annihilation of the country that represents a sanctuary to the
world’s most persecuted religious minority. The rising tide of anti-Israel
sentiment has spillover effects for Jews in diaspora not because the war in
Gaza inspires antisemitism, but because anti-Zionism is often antisemitism’s
more immediately palatable outgrowth. And its biggest purveyors on the American
far
left and far
right have found a convenient opportunity to plunge into the mainstream,
buoyed by an array
of malicious
state
actors.
In October, left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan, an
outspoken critic of Israel, noted his
surprise at finding himself in agreement with Candace Owens, perhaps the
right’s most outspoken peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories (among them,
her description
of Judaism as a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons … [and]
child sacrifice”). Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently hosted white nationalist
Nick Fuentes on his online talk show to
discuss the threats posed by “these Zionist Jews” (prompting Heritage
Foundation President Kevin Roberts to come to Carlson’s defense against the
so-called “venomous coalition” daring to criticize Carlson’s softball interview
with an open
Hitlerite).
The growing legitimacy of figures like Owens and Fuentes
has consequences for Jews in diaspora and in Israel. Jewish communities in
Western countries long considered “safe” are now confronting ever more threats
of violence. And Israel, which relies heavily on the U.S. for diplomatic
and military support, must reckon with the likely possibility that future
American leaders—driven by souring public opinion toward Jerusalem—will be less
inclined than Donald Trump and Joe Biden to stand by its side through another
long war.
In a recent
sketch by Eretz Nehederet, a satirical Israeli comedy show, an
American woman and an Israeli man meet by chance at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion
Airport. Suitcases in hand, they both appear to be fleeing somewhere: “You know
us Jews, if history has taught us anything, it’s knowing when it’s time to
leave,” the American remarks. The Israeli agrees, before realizing that his
acquaintance is not leaving Israel but arriving there from New York—his
destination. “Wait a second,” he says, “you’re telling me you’re coming to
Israel? Now? Are you crazy?” They part ways, each muttering about the absurdity
of the other’s decision.
To many people, the war and its international
reverberations underscored the necessity of a Jewish state. To others, they
underscored Israel’s unique vulnerability. May it continue to thrive despite
the rearing of history’s oldest hatred.
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