Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians
For Jews, the events of October 7—the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—were horrifying and traumatizing. But what has happened in the three months since is also deeply unsettling, though in a different way. Much of the world, rather than offering empathy and compassion for Israel, has turned on it.
Hamas’s malevolent actions helped produce a sharp rise in anti-Semitism and in anti-Israel rallies in cities across the world. Earlier this month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas, launched in reaction to the massacre.
Israel was the victim of depraved attacks by an Iran-backed terror group determined to annihilate the world’s only Jewish-majority country—and yet it is Israel that is in the dock.
We’ve seen this perverse phenomenon play out in other ways as well. During the Christmas holidays, Jesus was pulled into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an Instagram post, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew parallels between the persecutors of Jesus and modern-day Israel. Jesus was “part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust. “Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians.” She continued, “The high Christian holiday is about honoring the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians,” she continued.
