(Free Press) Amb. Michael Oren - It wasn't the chants of "gas the Jews." Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240%), the U.S. (400%), and London (1,353%) convinced me. It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews. It wasn't the press' insistence on calling mass murderers "militants" or citing Hamas and its "Health Ministry" as a reliable source. I've long known that the terrorists are "militants" solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible. Instead, it was the media's predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 1,400 butchered Jews bought us a little less than two weeks' worth of positive coverage. Hamas opposed the Oslo process and every subsequent peace initiative. Hamas assassinated not only Jews but also Palestinians who supported the two-state solution. The reason most Israelis now oppose that solution is because they know that Hamas would take over the nascent Palestinian state in a day. I tell this to journalists but they are seldom, if ever, convinced. Much of the press, I've learned, has internalized the ultimate antisemitic myth: that Jews just have it coming. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hatred of the Jewish nation-state cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. The war between Hamas and Israel, involving the largest and cruelest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, is a war against Jews everywhere. The writer was Israel's ambassador to the U.S. and a deputy minister of diplomacy in the prime minister's office.
2023-10-27 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive