WhatsappIsrael’s defenders need to be smarter and more strategic, calling out the haters for being the very things that they purport to hate.
May 29, 2025 / JNS)
Traveling in America over the past three weeks to speak about my new book, I found a Jewish community in shock, bewilderment and, after the murderous attack last week on a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., gripped by rising fear.
Some of the most poignant reactions came from liberals who, on Oct. 7, 2023, had been mugged by a sickening reality. Their belief in achieving harmony between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs—a badge of their liberal identity—had been shattered by the barbaric and depraved attacks mounted upon Israelis that day by the people of Gaza.
Far worse had been the reaction to this by people they had assumed were friends and colleagues who thought like them but were instead demonizing Israel, regurgitating the lies of Hamas and ending their friendship simply because they hated not just Israel but those who supported it. And some were openly anti-Jew.
Among young people, this is particularly heartbreaking. Having gained coveted spots at elite universities, they have run a gauntlet of threats and intimidation on campus; their hard-won careers have been placed in jeopardy if they don’t go along with lie after lie about Israel, the most recent being about starvation in the Gaza Strip.
Eager for the verbal ammunition with which to fight back, they haven’t found it. They possess neither information nor a strategy that could help. “What on earth do I say in this situation?” they repeatedly asked me. “No facts or evidence seem to make the slightest dent in how these people think.”
Individuals can’t fight this on their own. These Jews under siege have, in effect, been abandoned—with some heroic exceptions—by leaders of the Jewish community. As in Britain, these leaders are simply failing to address the lies.
Unfortunately, this is because too many of them believe some, if not all, of the falsehoods. The relentless media saturation in Palestinian propaganda, which receives so little informed pushback, has drawn them into that poisonous echo chamber.
In America, the fact that so many Jews are ideologically attuned to liberal shibboleths means they have bought heavily into the narrative of Palestinian Arab oppression that is now the default position of Western progressives. The result is an absence in the public square of truths people desperately need to hear, but which many Jewish leaders find uncomfortable and dismiss as extremist positions.
For example, they should be saying loudly that everything Israel does is in accordance with international law, and that the Jews alone have the legal and historical right to the land many times over.
That the Jews are the indigenous people of the land; the Arabs are colonizers, and Zionism is a supreme decolonization movement.
That there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. Palestinianism was invented purely to destroy Israel and to steal the Jews’ own history in the land from them. The Palestine cause is a glaring example of cultural appropriation.
And that anyone who supports the Palestinian cause is incontrovertibly supporting an agenda of Nazi-style demonization of the Jews, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Just to list these key statements of reality—so rarely voiced—is to realize the shameful silence of the Jewish community’s leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the lethal vacuum they’ve allowed to develop in public debate. They have effectively abandoned individual Jews and activist groups trying to counter the falsehoods and sound the alarm over such hate-mongering, leaving them to struggle against this onslaught alone.
Those involved in the defense of Israel, moreover, need to understand a particularly devastating characteristic of this current madness. It draws its astonishing traction from the very fact that the Israel-haters are often idealistic people who hate aggression and are committed to justice. And it’s why the claim of antisemitism not only has no purchase but makes the onslaught even worse.
This is because there’s an infernal progression of thought that follows inexorably from the false premise of the Israel-haters. If you really do think that the Jews of Israel not only stole another people’s land, not only have driven out and oppressed its rightful inhabitants but are also now wantonly killing Arab babies in Gaza, then you must think that the Israelis are evil people. You must think that any Jews who support Israel and Zionism are therefore also evil.
If a people or their cause is evil, it’s not only permissible to detest them and try to remove them from the world. It’s a moral obligation to do so. If Israel, Zionism and the Jews are evil, then it’s a moral obligation to detest them and try to remove them from the world.
So the truly horrifying situation is that to the Western liberal—for whom Zionism is racism and Israel starves babies to death—antisemitism is therefore not just the shield behind which the Jews sanitize Israel’s crimes.
It’s not what it actually is: a uniquely murderous and deranged creed that all people of conscience must oppose. Unbelievably, for the Western liberal, antisemitism has become a moral obligation. The destruction of the Jewish homeland and the abuse of Jews have become an expression of liberal conscience.
And that’s why the entire humanitarian establishment—the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the whole apparatus of human-rights law, and NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch—all of this is focused on singling out Israel and the Jews to be demonized and dehumanized.
It’s why the most “progressive” countries—Britain, Canada and Australia—are the most viciously hostile to Israel. It’s rank, murderous, racist bigotry, all in the name of conscience and justice.
It’s as if Stalinism and Nazism are finally winning against civilization, destroying the Jews through frying the Western brain. This is why so many feel they have stepped through the looking-glass into a living nightmare.
So what is to be done? Clearly, the Jewish world is up against the old evil, but of an unprecedented type and scale. And, of course, against such derangement, reason doesn’t work.
It’s important, though, to put the facts into the public domain for those who are not immune to reason but are simply ignorant of Judaism, the Middle East and the history of the Jewish people. That, unfortunately, includes many Jews.
As for the haters who are indeed beyond rational argument, there is a strategy that would be effective. This involves recognizing their Achilles’ heel.
What they most care about is not the oppressed Palestinian Arabs whose cause they so noisily proclaim. They care, above all, about their image to themselves and to others as moral, compassionate and smart. There’s no point calling them out for antisemitism. And playing defense is worse than useless because it’s to argue on the mind-twisting terms they have set out and so is bound to fail.
Israel’s defenders should instead put these people on the back foot by calling them out for being the very things that they purport to hate.
So, for example, they should be accused of promoting imperialism, in supporting the Arab conquest of another country and extinguishing the rights of its indigenous people; of being stupid, sloppy and credulous in writing and broadcasting manipulative falsehoods; and of being racist.
Arabs comprise about 20% of Israel’s population. By demanding that the “settlers” be removed from the disputed areas of Judea and Samaria because this supposedly prevents the creation of a state of Palestine, the Israel-haters are supporting ethnic cleansing and promoting a doctrine of racial purity. They should be told that their progressivism is bogus.
Jews in America and Britain should stop presuming to lecture Israel about what it should be doing. If they don’t live there, they have no right to do so. Their task—and it could not be more urgent—is instead to start educating Diaspora Jews about Judaism and the Jewish people, and then take the fight to the enemy in a far smarter and more strategic way.
