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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/whole-world-is-wrong-natan-sharansky
Just Because the Entire World Believes Something Does Not Make It True
(Tablet) Natan Sharansky - On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navi Pillay, who led the 2025 UN commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. Of course, the accusation was a lie. A very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be? A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do on Oct. 7, 2023. The great cultural Zionist Ahad Ha'am wrote in 1892 that there is no lie that cannot obtain universal acceptance if the circumstances favor it. In our time, the combination of Islamism, neo-Marxist ideology, Western apathy and appeasement, and primitive antisemitism have combined to create the perfect soil in which the new blood libel could grow. The soldiers in Israel's people's army come home every few weeks and report how much time and energy they spend on mitigating civilian harm: messaging and emailing about impending attacks, knocking on doors, halting strikes, and transporting people from one part of Gaza to another to separate them from the terrorists in their midst. What kind of genocide is it when the population of Gaza is larger today than it was three years ago? Of course, the sight of Gaza in ruins is horrific. But every Israeli understands how and why we got here. We remember how the Oct. 7 terrorists returned to cheering crowds as they paraded the bodies of their victims in the streets. We recall who hid our hostages. Just because the entire world believes something does not make it true. Our goal should not be to convince the rest of the world that we are right. Our existence does not depend on a vote in the UN. It depends on our own belief in the righteousness of Jewish civilization. When our children and grandchildren ask us how the whole world can believe there is a genocide if, in fact, there is no genocide, we should stand firm in the conviction of what we know to be true. Only through such conviction will we outlive those who believe Israel is the closest evil to Satan. The writer is a former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, former minister in Israeli governments, and former Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.