On October 7, most Jews worldwide had a sick feeling in the stomach. Instantly identifying with the Israelis fighting for their lives, they recognized how the viciousness Go-Proed and shared online echoed throughout Jewish history. Call that realization – and identification – a peoplehood moment.

Many Jews and Israel supporters mobilized. They texted Israeli friends and relatives. They doom-scrolled, following the news obsessively. They raised money – over one billion dollars in October in America alone. They protested – joining America’s largest pro-Israel gathering ever, in November, 290,000 strong. Some lost friendships or Instagram followers. Some young Jews, the New York Times reported, decided to marry Jewish or have another baby – to help replace the 1,200 murdered. Call that activism, that proactive response, that resistance to Jew-hatred – Zionist movements.

Israelis experienced parallel peoplehood moments – the solidarity forged by recognizing the murderers’ zeal as anti-Jewish, not “just” anti-Zionist. And Israelis’ Zionist movements countered the assault immediately – fighting back heroically, spiritually, and militarily.

Increasingly, however, Diaspora Jews felt caught between three powerful forces. First, Israel was fighting tough, nefarious foes including Iran, over one thousand miles away from Israel, Hezbollah in the north, and Palestinian terrorists in the territories, not just Hamas. Many Jews stayed stuck in the trauma of October 7, as Israeli casualty-numbers mounted, and Hamas kept holding – and abusing – hostages. Second, the Gaza warfare was bloody, difficult, heartbreaking. The justifications for Israel’s actions, while standard among democratic militaries, sounded heartless on social media. Finally, the obsessive coverage of Gaza, along with the systematic pro-Palestinian protests, created a Sanctimony Cyclone, a storm of accusations, exaggerations, lies, unkind judgments, and sweeping repudiations trying to make Israel, Zionists, Jews – and their supporters – radioactive.

Objectively, there has been a disproportionate fascination with this war. In the first six months after October 7, 2023, the New York Times published 4,191 articles about the Gaza War. That compared to 80 articles about the American-led battle to free Mosul over nine months in 2016-2017, 198 articles about the Tigray War in Ethiopia, which killed 600,000 in a year, and 5,434 articles during the first 13 years of Syria’s civil war. One Microsoft Copilot Artificial Intelligence analysis found 25,000 articles about Gaza worldwide in six months – compared to 1,000 articles about Mosul in nine months.

The Silenced Majority Supports Israel – Especially Initially

Most Americans rallied immediately around their Jewish friends, the embattled Jewish state, and President Joe Biden. A December Harvard CAPS Harris Poll found 73 percent of Americans branding Hamas’s massacre “genocidal,” with 84 percent calling it a “terrorist attack,” and 81 percent supporting Israel over Hamas. Surprisingly, as late as May, 2024, 69 percent recognized that “Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties” in Gaza – defying the media exaggerations caricaturing Israel’s self-defense campaign as brutal.

These poll numbers echoed Gallup polls over 20 years showing consistent support for Israel, between 70 and 80 percent – no matter the hysterical headlines.

From coast to coast, Americans cheered Israel. On October 9, the White House National Security Council spokesperson, John Kirby, choked up, live on CNN, while discussing the scenes of rape and murder he saw. A record 425 members of Congress co-sponsored a resolution supporting “Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.”

Six weeks later, dozens of senators went silent while watching the Israeli government’s summary film depicting the carnage Palestinians unleashed. Some ran from the viewing-room, weeping. With such support, a steady flow of American weaponry kept Israel fighting.

Madonna was devastated, declaring during a London concert: “I turn on social media and I want to vomit. I see children being kidnapped, pulled off motorcycles; babies being decapitated, children at peace raves being shot and killed.” She posted a video of the invasion on Instagram, proclaiming: “My heart goes out to Israel” and “I am aware that this is the work of Hamas.”

Over 700 leading Hollywood actors, producers, and screenwriters, including Jerry Seinfeld, Jamie Lee Curtis, Amy Schumer, and Deborah Messing, embraced Israel. In New York, when two non-Jewish construction workers, identifying themselves as proud Americans, confronted a neighbor tearing down hostage posters, the videoed confrontation went viral.

A Rabid Minority Demonizes Israel

Nevertheless, Jew-hatred has surged globally against Israelis, Jews, and their supporters. Pro-Palestinian hoodlums have attacked synagogues, schools, federation buildings, even popular restaurants serving Israeli food. Anti-Zionist threats forced Madonna to beef up security. The number of incidents of American Jews harassed, of Jewish institutions vandalized, jumped 337 percent in the two months after October 7.

A small well-organized group of anti-Jewish anti-Zionists dominated the headlines. It’s a structural problem – extremists command attention. There’s a passion gap. Too many decent, hard-working, pro-Israel Westerners, are passive. This Silenced Majority made it too easy to overlook the bipartisan consensus recognizing that Israel and Western democracies share common values, interests, challenges, enemies, and a common fate.

Time and the Palestinian casualty-count took its toll. With each week, the bloody images and the world’s impatience drained Israel’s support – even in America. The vast scale of destruction in Gaza, the relentless media coverage, the growing tension between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the impossible dilemmas Israel faced, changed the conversation – and blackened Israel’s reputation.Jews experienced four particular forms of betrayal: radicals’ thuggish delight; organized feminism’s silence; illiberal liberals’ moral confusion, and, the greatest atmospheric disturbance triggering the Sanctimony Cyclone, the remote-control morality of those safely insulated from Israel’s difficult dilemmas. It’s the Triple-Double-Cross: These fanatics betrayed the Jews – yet again – liberal ideals, and themselves, their core identities.

The Radicals’ Thuggish Delight

Admittedly, the images of dead Palestinians are searing, the arguments justifying Israel’s tactics, inelegant. But many critics started bashing Israel on October 7, with bodies still smoldering. The bashers’ glee showed a hatred for what Israel is, not what it does, shifting the conversation from Israel’s tactics to Israel’s existence.

On October 8, the Democratic Socialists of America co-sponsored a rally claiming “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” Some protesters stomped on an Israeli flag and flaunted a swastika image – merging antisemitism and anti-Zionism just as the Gazans had. Others shouted the number “700” – the first estimates of Jewish dead – while making slicing gestures with their fingers on their necks.

Various professors announced themselves “exhilarated” by the “awesome” events or exulted: “this is what decolonization looks like.” Over thirty Harvard student organizations held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine preached. “Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”

Thus began months of protests, often targeting Jews, Jewish sites, and patriotic icons too. In America, shouting “from the River to the Sea,” protesters splashed red paint on the Lincoln Memorial Plaza – although the Washington Post didn’t even cover it. They blocked Christmas-time traffic to JFK and LAX airports. And, as the Houthis in Yemen started attacking Israeli ships, then other internationally protected freighters, they shouted: “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.”

Caught in a binary world, even when Iran launched 320 missiles against Israel, activists with the “AntiWar Committee, Chicago,” cheered, and shouted “death to America” in Farsi, as well as “death to Israel.” One young woman explained to a Free Press reporter: “Iran and Yemen and Hezbollah are all… part of the arc of resistance, because the enemies are Israel and the USA.”

Many thugs turned violent. One stabbed a Jewish woman in Lyon. Others shot at Jewish schools in Montreal. In Los Angeles, a Palestinian computer science professor knocked down a Jewish counter-protester, who died from the fall. In New Orleans, a protester tried burning Israel’s flag. In the scuffle, pro-Palestinian demonstrators broke a Jewish student’s nose. Helping the victim, Natalie Mendelsohn sighed, “I had Jewish blood on my hands, and that’s something I never thought I would encounter.”

The Silence of the Feminists

On October 6, most Jewish leaders would have assumed that young women were more passionate about their feminist identities than most young Jews were about their connection to Israel. Yet, on October 7, scrolling the same news, many Jews felt personally assaulted and mobilized. By contrast, many feminists went silent.

Gradually, some women denounced this massive, highly publicized, self-promoted act of gendered violence. But the formal feminist community remained unconscionably silent. It took two months to hear from Planned Parenthood and UN Women. The National Organization of Women’s belated statement condemned sexual violence generically without mentioning Hamas.

By comparison, in May 2021, when Israel defended itself against yet another Hamas bombardment, over 120 gender studies departments denounced the Jewish state. Two years later, despite seeing Palestinian rape culture spawn Hamas’s rape cult, despite teaching “Believe Survivors,” not one gender studies department defended one of these victimized women. Anguished signs in London proclaimed: #METOO – UNLESS YOU’RE A JEW.

Some, when pressed, even doubted the testimonials – and the voluminous evidence of stripped women, broken pelvises, mutilated genitalia, and bloody jeans. Clearly, the demand to demonize Israel was so great, it ignored victims of systematic sexual violence.

In singling-out women, the terrorist-rapists tried stripping Jewish women of their dignity. And they tried humiliating Jewish men, treating them as so helpless they cannot even defend their women and children. “The suffering of Israeli women and girls cannot be swept aside, as the world has been so eager to do,” the law professor Susan Estrich wrote. “Who treats a teenage girl like this? How do you tell her parents that these were the last minutes of their daughters’ lives?… And what does the world say to Israel? Stop fighting? Let them get away with it? Would you?”

THE ONGOING MORAL CONFUSION OF ILLIBERAL LIBERALS, ESPECIALLY IN UNIVERSITIES

Although the most aggressive attacks on Jews made the headlines, the thugs were a relatively small, marginal group. Far more distressing was watching progressives, whom many Jews considered their natural allies, equivocate about Palestinian atrocities – while condemning Israel’s self-defense efforts.

Again and again, the spaces Jews most worshipped – the media, academia, the art world, hosted the most vicious Israel-bashers, bullying others into silence.

In October, at this moment of Jewish agony, university leaders went silent – or mealy- mouthed. Harvard’s president, Dr. Claudine Gay, was “heartbroken by the death and destruction” – obscuring the guilty party. Even the New York Times found the statement “tepid.” At the Oscars, some celebrities wore red pins with bloody hands, evoking a violent double-murder, when Palestinians lynched two Israelis in Ramallah in 2000, and one murderer showed-off his blood-soaked hands. Somehow “the violence” was treated like a natural phenomenon, not carefully planned Palestinian war crimes. Cornell University’s president, Martha Pollock declared: “The loss of human life is always tragic, whether caused by human actions such as terrorism, war or mass shootings, or by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires or floods.” With donors revolted and revolting, she apologized.

By the time, President Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s president, Liz Magill, and MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, told a Congressional panel they would judge calls for genocide “in context,” such temporizing had become scandalous.

The half-heartedness contrasted with the intense Jew-hatred and periodic violence too many Jewish students encountered – over 1,000 incidents on North American campuses alone in the first six months of war. Israel’s critics claimed American Jews had to choose between their liberalism and their Zionism – in fact, embracing the anti-Zionism spreading on the streets and on campus meant choosing to ally with an illiberal, oppressive, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-American, anti-Western Hamas.

By springtime, hating Israel had become so ingrained in so many student-activists, that dozens of campuses across America faced disruptive protests. Escalating, the activists bullied Jewish students, openly embraced Hamas, not just the Palestinian cause, and threatened “the Yahoodim” with more and more “October 7th-style” attacks. Jewish students watched in dismay as Israel-bashing unleashed waves of Jew-hatred and became the identity marker of their progressive peers. Many universities had classes disrupted, exams postponed, even commencements cancelled or changed, as this small minority claimed to speak for their generation.

The Remote-Control Moralists

It’s too easy to sit six-thousand-miles away from Gaza and mourn Gazans’ deaths. The Sanctimony Cyclone left no room to answer Amos Oz’s question “What would you do?” – or “What has America done?”

The world mindlessly echoed Hamas’s death toll – which by incorporating the terrorists killed absolved every terrorist of guilt or implied that the evil Israelis incompetently only killed innocents. Few credited Israel for its unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian deaths. Instead, that word “unprecedented” was used to describe the numbers killed – despite death tolls in other conflicts in the hundreds of thousands. Few seemed to have patience for the IDF’s genuine dilemmas. Officers often had seconds to decide whether to abort legitimate, military missions to minimize civilian casualties. And higher-ups had to decide whether it was worth risking their soldiers’ lives to preserve this or that building, or deploy the infantry not the air force.

The Small Anti-Zionist Jewish Groups Commanding Outsized Attention

Reporters loved claiming that the few Jews denouncing Israel represented a growing anti-Zionist trend dividing Jewish communities in half. In the “Ceasefire Now Coalition,” Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow (INN) collaborated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to denounce Israel as “genocidal” and an apartheid regime.

The night after 290,000 Jews massed on the Washington Mall, 150 members of the coalition so menaced Democratic National Committee members on Capitol Hill, the protest turned violent. Few reporters noted that the pro-Israel rally was two-thousand-times larger.

Many IfNotNow activists are children of rabbis and Jewish day-school graduates. Using their Jewish fluency, they blow the shofar at anti-Israel rallies, hold freedom seders in Jew-hating, pro-Palestinian campus encampments, and brazenly say the mourner’s prayer for “all” Palestinians “killed by Israel,” including Hamas terrorists. This went far beyond anti-Zionism – it violated Jewish sensibilities. In a letter, over 500 Jewish students attending Columbia University wrote, these Jews “tokenize themselves by claiming to represent ‘real Jewish values,’ and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism.”

In a divided America, lines blurred. Some progressives denounced the Democratic president, Joe Biden, as “Genocide Joe.” Meanwhile, most Republican legislators supported the president in re-arming Israel – while opposing him on most other issues.Still, the partisan polarization, as the 2024 presidential campaign intensifies, sometimes confuses the debate. Jewish liberals continue defining “antisemitism” as coming from the Trumpian right and white supremacists. In parallel, Jewish conservatives harp on the left’s antisemitism.

October 7 confirmed that both right-wing antisemitism and left-wing antisemitism are evil – and spreading. The violence also blurred anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Hamas harnessed traditional antisemitism to intensify its anti-Zionism, while pro-Palestinian thugs harnessed critiques of Israel to justify traditional Jew-hatred.

Right-wing Jew-hatred was simpler to fight intellectually. It revived old-fashioned stereotypes of Jews – and now Israel – as greedy, power-hungry, threatening, part of a worldwide conspiracy undermining whatever they held dear from moment to moment. Left-wing Jew-hatred came wrapped in the language of human rights and a progressivism many liberals applauded, weaponized by a critique of Israel’s bombing campaign and its right-wing government.