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1,000 Days after Oct. 7, the Jewish People Stand Proud
(JNS) Fiamma Nirenstein - While crowds around the world chant slogans stripped of any rational meaning; while "genocide" is used to describe a conflict in which the Palestinian population has grown from 150,000 in 1948 to 2,000,000 today; while the language of human rights is turned on its head to defend movements that oppress women and execute homosexuals - there stands a tiny people, just 0.2% of humanity, some 15 million souls worldwide. Faced with an avalanche of falsehoods, Jews simply tell the truth. They continue to defend the fundamental principles of Western civilization: risking everything to protect their children, fighting for democracy and believing in the justice of their national mission, no matter how many missiles they endure, how many fashionable intellectuals denounce them, how many absurd headlines appear, or how many old acquaintances turn away. The Jewish message is no longer the desperate cry of persecution that echoed through centuries of exile. Those who believe that the campaign by a vast, well-funded machinery of antisemitism will break the Jewish people are mistaken. We will fight with our fingernails if necessary. In Israel and throughout the diaspora, the meaning of Jewish identity has become clearer than ever. In just eight decades since the Holocaust, a people that emerged decimated, orphaned and broken rebuilt its ancestral homeland into one of the world's most dynamic democracies. Israel has become a global leader in medicine, agriculture, technology, literature, music and scientific innovation while building one of the world's most capable militaries - because survival has required it from the day the Jewish state was born. The writer, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, served as vice president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.