NEWS WEEK
Israel and its people are being asked to do something unprecedented in history: commit suicide.
Nothing else will satisfy the nation’s enemies. The end of the Jewish State and the death of the Jewish people are in the Hamas charter, in Iran’s chants, and projected onto the walls of George Washington University in downtown Washington, DC.
It comes from the normal array of antisemites, bearing the usual array of flags. It comes from the younger generations of our own families, taught that survival is privilege, and that their parents’ success is a reason for shame.
How did the simple words, “Free Palestine,” become chilling? How did scrawling those words on a piece of metal across the street from a synagogue become an act of hate?
It’s because these words aren’t said in a vacuum, they are said with a megaphone, amplified by unthinking intellectuals caught up in a miasmic vision of misunderstood colonialism. The price of questioning their orthodoxy is so brutal that it would put the old British Empire to shame.
“Glory to our martyrs,” screamed the words at GW, warming a cool evening with the fires of hate.
Whose martyrs?
Certainly not the spoiled college kids sitting there watching the show before the police and decency came to switch this beacon of darkness off.
On Oct. 7 and the days immediately after, social media was awash in images of Hamas’ brutality, carried out in a nation just 75 years old—a nation created in the wake of horror by a guilt-ridden West that had done everything to keep the Jews of Europe within easy reach of Adolf Hitler. The fact of the Holocaust was slow, and then it was sudden—but it was always knowable. It was advertised in words redolent of those shouted across the Middle East and on American campuses, today.
But it wasn’t long before Oct. 7th’s images of anguish—broadcast by the Palestinian murderers and rapists themselves—were replaced by images of hate generated across the world under the flag of Palestine.
Even as rockets from Gaza continue to rain down on Israel, children and adults alike, most of whom wouldn’t be able to find Gaza on a map of the Palestinian Territories, have taken up a cause they know nothing about. Online, you can see them running through the hallways of schools, grabbing kaffiyehs they don’t know how to wear and going far beyond merely calling for freedom for a people who have refused—over and over again—to be free.
One video shows a girl, her face torn by rage, wrapping a checkered scarf around her neck and, in a shrill voice, calling not for freedom, but for genocide: “From the river to the sea!”
Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lies Israel. For the land to become the mirage of Palestine, Israel must cease to exist. The Jews, it is understood, will cease to exist with it.
This is not to say that innocents in Gaza aren’t paying the highest price in the wake of Hamas’ actions. We cannot deny them sympathy, nor refuse to weep for their children. We must apply higher standards to ourselves that we expect from our enemies.
But expecting the Jewish people to self-immolate rather than fight for their existence is insanity.
Jews like me, living in the diaspora are naïve to believe that Israel’s end would mean more safety for those of us living in already dwindling numbers in Europe and elsewhere around the world. With the “irritant” of Israel gone, all refuge is also lost.
On Oct. 10—three days after the murder of 1,400 Jews in Israel at the hands of terrorists—security at synagogues around the world had tightened, with at least four police cars, lights spinning, painting one house of worship in Washington blue, white, red. Extra guards manned the metal detectors. Parents thanked the police while their children looked around in awe.
Despite the sense of threat, more than 2,000 people stood up for Israel at a vigil that night, in this single holy space. Everyone in the crowd knew someone in living in twice-promised land, and many had relatives who live between the river and the sea. Many had visited the Jewish State, some over and over throughout their lives.
Those in attendance had spent their day on their phones, on WhatsApp, drenched in the news and worry. They came to remember those killed and the more than 200 Jews still held hostage in Gaza, and to hope, and to pray. Clergy from all over the region joined us and we found some comfort in each other.
Instead of “Free Palestine,” that night all we heard was “Am Yisrael Chai”—The People of Israel Live.
I cried.
Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
