Make California Post a Preferred Source This week marks three years since the worst day in the history of the State of Israel and the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
We will never forget those massacred on October 7 or the broken hearts of their families.
But too many, from Hollywood actors to post-colonial studies professors, seem determined to forget, or to twist, the truth of that day.
In addition to Hamas’ brutality, something else was unleashed that day. Terrorists were still slaughtering Israelis when Jews around the world were hit with a barrage of hatred so seething and violent it caught many by surprise.
Within hours, organized demonstrations, student groups and social media accounts were blaming Israel, accusing it of “genocide,” and calling kidnapping Holocaust survivors a matter of “context.” They chanted “free Palestine,” “by all means necessary,” “from the river to the sea” and even “gas the Jews.”
This was no accident. It’s the product of a deliberate campaign decades in the making that united a wide range of social and political movements, aided and abetted by Islamist states and groups, around a common cause: hatred of Israel.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s enemies realized they could not destroy it militarily. They shifted their strategy toward delegitimizing Israel’s existence. Universal Images Group via Getty Images After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s enemies realized they could not destroy it militarily. They shifted their strategy toward delegitimizing Israel’s existence.
An entire ecosystem of anti-Israel, antisemitic hate was created. It was ready to be activated with a simple message. Israel: the oppressor, an “apartheid state” and “the last bastion of colonialism.” Palestinians: the perfect oppressed underdogs, unbound by personal agency and immune to any moral scrutiny. The Jews or Zionists are cast as agents of evil.
On October 8, 2023, thirty-three Harvard student groups signed a letter that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
That’s not a normal response when terrorists massacre and kidnap young people at a music festival and murder families in their homes. It’s a moral inversion. Hamas committed a despicable atrocity, Israel was attacked, and like any other country in its place, would have to fight back and fight back hard.
Many people saw that reality clearly. But as the war in Gaza continued, many became confused. Increasingly, Hollywood celebrities lined up to flip morality on its head.
On October 7, they refused to call Hamas terrorists. Now they demand we call the war that followed a “genocide.”
A pro-Israel rally is held at UCLA on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images But there is no “genocide” in Gaza; Israel was forced to fight a war it did not choose, and war is ugly. Civilians who have suffered deserve our compassion. Mistakes should be investigated. But that does not constitute a “genocide.”
This abuse of language has become a Hollywood purity test: Call Israel’s war of self-defense a “genocide,” or else you will be harassed, attacked, canceled — and placed on a new blacklist.
Just look at Ed Sheeran. He tried to show some balance, and they’re still coming for him
No one is allowed to say this war started when terrorists committed an act of mass murder, violence and rape as brutally sadistic as any in history.
We cannot become confused. Jews should not internalize the hatred we face, and non-Jews should understand that the threats Israel is fighting are a threat to them too.
We Jews are not a religion. We have a religion. As bestselling author Dara Horn has said: “It’s not complicated, it’s just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland and culture. That’s a whole sentence in English. But in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am. We are Am Yisrael.”
The moral inversion squad say they love Jews; they just hate Zionism. They are spreading a false idea of who Jews are. They tell Jews that if we just call the war a “genocide,” and agree Israel is evil and should be destroyed, they will accept and embrace us.
The implied threat: Bend the knee to Macklemore, or get bullied out of work.
Throughout history, Jews have been told that we can be accepted as individuals if only we renounce the reality of who we are as a people. There have always been some who capitulated. Some do today. It didn’t work before, and won’t now.
This isn’t about whether Israel is perfect. No country is. This isn’t about whether you can criticize its government: You can, and we do.
That is not the purity test demanded by Hollywood and others. They demand that Jews separate themselves from their people, history and land, and define our Jewish identity on their terms and not our own.
The Jews are a people with an indigenous homeland in the Land of Israel. We have stood up to tyrannies for millennia and outlived them. We will stand up to the tyranny of the moral inversion squad too, whether they are Hamas terrorists or their keffiyeh-wearing fans in Hollywood.
Noa Tishby, Israel’s first Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization, is a best-selling author and the founder of Eighteen, an institute to combat antisemitism and inspire Jewish pride.
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