The massacre did not create a new anti-Israel politics. It exposed one that was already there.<\/p>\n
With the recent elections in New York City, we may be witnessing not the birth of a new leftward turn, but the unveiling of one that has been underway for some time. What this portends for familiar notions of American exceptionalism, for the political center\u2014if that term still has stable meaning\u2014and for Jews, Israel, and their supporters is not yet clear. But one thing no longer seems theoretical. A change many had feared is here.<\/p>\n
What interests me most is not simply the fact of that change, but its speed\u2014and its eerie coherence. Its ideas did not emerge gradually through persuasion or patient argument. They seemed ready-made, awaiting a rupture through which they could suddenly pour. And once they did, they did not remain confined to New York, or even to the United States. Given the strange symmetry of protests across the globe\u2014in the streets, on campuses, in city councils, and at the United Nations\u2014one begins to wonder what, exactly, had been lying in wait.<\/p>\n
The first date that comes to my mind is October 7.<\/p>\n
Some will say this is my Jewish myopia: why are you still harping on October 7? Was it not, in the larger story of global politics, merely a footnote? A terrible one, perhaps, but still a footnote.<\/p>\n
I do not believe chronology permits that dismissal.<\/p>\n
Because whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, Zionism, colonialism, or the moral vocabulary that now dominates so much of public discourse, it is worth asking what changed after October 7\u2014and what did not. It is worth asking why the massacre of Jews in Israel did not merely provoke condemnation, grief, or even political dispute, but instead seemed to unlock a pre-assembled worldview: one in which the dead could be absorbed almost instantly into an argument against the Jewish state; one in which the oldest hatreds, dressed in the language of liberation, could present themselves as moral sophistication; one in which a pogrom did not interrupt the narrative, but served it well.<\/p>\n
That, to me, is what felt new. Or perhaps not new, but newly visible.<\/p>\n
Within hours of the slaughter, before Israel had mounted the military response that would become the subject of global outrage, the anti-colonial script was already in hand. The massacre was then contextualized, translated, metabolized. The rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and murder of civilians could not be allowed to stand as an obscenity. It had to be folded back into a prior story, one in which Israel was already cast as the oppressor, the colonizer, the uniquely guilty party, and in which even the butchery of its civilians could be made to serve as a footnote to its own indictment.<\/p>\n
That chronology remains relevant to me. Not because timing alone resolves every ethical dilemma, but because it reveals what was already loaded in the chamber.<\/p>\n
One of the clearest signs of this came from institutions that, in theory, should have been least capable of averting their eyes. Consider the long delay\u2014and in some cases the near-silence\u2014of major women\u2019s organizations, including UN bodies ostensibly dedicated to the protection of women, in acknowledging the rapes, mutilations, and sexual torture committed against Israeli women on October 7. One need not be a champion of Israel to recognize the significance of that failure. It was not mere diplomatic caution or simple bureaucratic inertia. It suggested something deeper and uglier: that within our reigning moral framework, even sexual violence against women may cease to register as fully real when the women in question belong to the wrong side of the ideological ledger.<\/p>\n
That ledger is by now familiar. The world is divided between oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized, the powerful and the powerless. Once those roles are assigned, ethical perception itself begins to warp. Strength becomes evidence of guilt, while suffering is filtered through prior political judgment. Some victims are granted immediate humanity. Others are treated as inconvenient complications in a story whose conclusion has already been written.<\/p>\n
This helps explain why October 7 was not received, in certain quarters, as a rupture in conscience, but as a challenge to an existing narrative. The atrocities had to be absorbed, minimized, contextualized, or hurried past\u2014not because they did not happen, but because to dwell on them too honestly would threaten a worldview in which Israelis, and perhaps Jews more broadly, had already been cast in the role of historical wrongdoer.<\/p>\n
The roots of that worldview are not hard to trace. In the West, it draws some of its force from genuine guilt: over slavery, the destruction of indigenous peoples, the brutalities of European colonialism, and the hypocrisies of liberal empires that spoke the language of rights while denying them to millions. That history deserves remembrance and serious inquiry. But guilt\u2014especially guilt inherited at a cultural distance\u2014can curdle into a totalizing framework in which every conflict is forced into the same template, every people assigned a role in advance, every event interpreted less on its own terms than as another iteration of the West\u2019s original sin.<\/p>\n
Israel, having come into being at the tail end of the colonial era, serves as a uniquely useful vessel for such guilt. Yet Israel was hardly the only state to emerge from the imperial dismemberment of the Ottoman world. Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon were also carved, mandated, and brought into being through the same postwar settlement and its aftermath. But only Israel is persistently treated as though its origins render it uniquely illegitimate\u2014as though the empire-haunted circumstances of its birth disqualify it in a way they do not disqualify its neighbors. It can therefore be made to stand in for empire, settler colonialism, white domination, militarism, capitalism, and the sins of Europe and America alike.<\/p>\n
To become anti-Israel, then, is not merely to adopt a position on one nation-state in the Middle East. It is to announce an entire moral identity in a single stroke\u2014an antipathy to empire, hierarchy, nationalism, the West\u2019s historic crimes, the strong over the weak, the colonizer over the colonized.<\/p>\n
That much of this framework rests on distortions scarcely matters. It matters little that Israel is not a white country in any coherent sense; that more than half of its Jewish population descends from Jews driven out of Arab and Muslim lands; that its story includes not only power but refuge, not only sovereignty but statelessness, not only military strength but historical vulnerability. Israel\u2019s actual complexity is a hindrance to the role it has been assigned. Symbols work best when stripped of detail.<\/p>\n
This is one reason anti-Israel politics has become such an efficient vehicle for the self-display of virtue. It allows participants to feel aligned with the overthrow of empire, the dismantling of hierarchy, the liberation of the marginalized, the moral correction of history itself. The emotional rewards are considerable. One is no longer merely a student, an academic, a bureaucrat, or a professional-class Westerner with all the comforts that status implies. One becomes, at least imaginatively, part of the resistance.<\/p>\n
This may also help explain the class contradiction at the heart of so much contemporary radicalism. Many of those most fluent in the language of decolonization, anti-capitalism, and anti-hierarchy are themselves products of privilege\u2014educated in elite institutions, supported by affluent families, often insulated from the material consequences of the upheavals they romanticize. That does not make every conviction insincere. But it does suggest that for some, radical politics functions less as a program of sacrifice than as a mode of absolution.<\/p>\n
Still, to explain the fixation on Israel solely as a form of psychological absolution would be too easy. A critic might reasonably ask: Why Israel? Why do campus quadrangles and European capital squares erupt over Gaza while remaining eerily quiet over the mass death in Syria, the subjugation of Tibet, or the mass internment of Uyghurs in China?<\/p>\n
The activist answer is institutional complicity. For a Western citizen, Israel is not just any nation-state; it is an extension of Western power, fortified by billions in direct US and European military aid, protected by diplomatic vetoes at the United Nations, and woven into the strategic fabric of the West. To the protester, this is not a distant foreign tragedy. It is a subsidized one. The focus on Israel is justified as an act of domestic democratic accountability, a refusal to let one\u2019s own tax dollars underwrite a brutal urban war.<\/p>\n
There is truth in that argument. But it does not explain the full moral asymmetry. It does not explain the ecstatic singling out, the appetite to reserve for Israel a vocabulary of evil that is rarely applied with equal fervor to China, Syria, Iran, Russia, or to jihadist movements that openly target civilians as a matter of principle. Nor does it explain the speed and fervor with which anti-Israel ideology has spread to nations that have little or nothing to do with the United States or its policies. Nor does it answer the more difficult question of how the massacre of Jews could be digested so quickly into the language of \u201ccontext\u201d and why the murder of families in their homes, the rape of women, the kidnapping of children and grandparents, and the filming of atrocities for triumphal distribution could be treated not first as barbarism, but as a public-relations inconvenience to the anti-colonial script.<\/p>\n
And that is where this becomes personal.<\/p>\n
Because I am tired of pretending that what happened after October 7 was merely another violent disagreement about Middle East policy. It was not. It was a moral test, and millions of people failed it with astonishing speed.<\/p>\n
They failed it in the streets, where crowds tore down posters of kidnapped children and chanted for \u201cresistance\u201d before the bodies were even counted. They failed it on campuses, where administrators and faculty who can detect microaggressions at forty paces suddenly discovered a taste for ambiguity when Jews were butchered. They failed it in activist spaces where rape was contextualized, kidnapping romanticized, and Jewish fear treated as a species of bad faith. They failed it in the feminist world, where many of the same institutions that can issue instant declarations on behalf of women everywhere found reasons to look away when the violated women were Israeli. And they failed it in the language itself.<\/p>\n
They did not stop to ask what on earth had happened that day, but how quickly it could be folded back into the standing indictment of the Jewish state.<\/p>\n
I am tired, too, of the semantic games. I do not accept the now-common pretense that one can repeatedly brand Israel genocidal, apartheid, colonial, uniquely criminal, and morally illegitimate\u2014and yet somehow remain merely a concerned critic of its policies. At a certain point the distinction collapses. To accuse the world\u2019s only Jewish state of genocide is to place that state outside the bounds of moral legitimacy, to cast it not as a flawed democracy waging a brutal, existential war, but as a singular evil. That is anti-Israel politics, whether it is spoken by activists in the street, by candidates for office, or by public figures attempting to remain relevant in a Democratic Party whose progressive wing increasingly treats hostility to Israel as a moral litmus test.<\/p>\n
The recent New York primaries offered a useful test case.<\/p>\n
In races decided by a tiny fraction of registered Democrats, candidates aligned with Zohran Mamdani and the city\u2019s ascendant far left were not shy about advertising the worldview to which they belong. Some appeared at pro-Palestinian rallies immediately after October 7. Some accused Israel of genocide. Some treated opposition to Zionism as a sign of political enlightenment and distance from Israel as proof of it. What would once have sounded like ideological excess now functions, in parts of the Democratic left, as a credential.<\/p>\n
Zohran Mamdani is the most visible political vessel for this posture, but he is no longer alone. Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the recent primary winners aligned with his movement, attended a pro-Palestinian rally immediately after October 7 and later made ending US support for Israel\u2019s war effort central to her campaign while accusing Israel of genocide. Claire Valdez ran in similarly open solidarity with the activist left\u2019s anti-Israel politics. Brad Lander, though temperamentally different and still inclined to call himself a liberal Zionist, has also described Israel\u2019s war in Gaza as genocide and built coalition with activists for whom anti-Israel politics is not incidental but central.<\/p>\n
I see no reason to play euphemistic games about this. If you accuse Israel of genocide, if you describe the Jewish state as a colonial abomination, if you reserve for it a vocabulary of evil you do not apply with anything like the same fervor to China, Syria, Iran, Russia, or Hamas, then you are not merely \u201ccritical of Israeli policy.\u201d You are trading in anti-Israel politics.<\/p>\n
Even more telling is the way this pressure now extends beyond the activist left and into the Democratic establishment itself. Rahm Emanuel is not a man who arrived at his politics through sentiment. He was Bill Clinton\u2019s political operative, Barack Obama\u2019s first chief of staff, and a two-term mayor of Chicago\u2014a figure whose career was built on the premise that Democrats could be tough, pro-business, and unapologetically pro-Israel without paying a political price. For years he embodied a muscular Democratic centrism that treated solidarity with Israel not as a liability to be managed but as a conviction to be defended. That he has lately sounded as though he, too, understands the direction of the wind\u2014speaking in ways that suggest sympathy with conditioning or withholding military aid to Israel\u2014is not merely a policy shift. It is a harbinger. When a figure like Emanuel recalibrates, one senses not personal conversion but weather-reading: the recognition that in important Democratic circles, public distance from Israel has become a useful marker of relevance and political hygiene.<\/p>\n
None of this means that every criticism of Israel is unserious, or that every Democratic voter now thinks this way. It means something more precise and, in its own way, more consequential: that in influential precincts of American political life, anti-Israel rhetoric has become a shortcut to radical credibility, and radical credibility an increasingly valuable currency.<\/p>\n
Even though Israel is the chosen vessel, the matter is larger than Israel. What is at stake is not simply the fate of one small country, but the corruption of ethical judgment itself\u2014the ease with which ideology can train otherwise civilized people to explain away murder, sexual sadism, kidnapping, and open Jew-hatred so long as the victims occupy the wrong category.<\/p>\n
Still, Israel\u2019s particularity cannot be brushed aside. The world has chosen as its symbolic repository for colonial guilt, Western sin, and revolutionary fantasy the one Jewish state\u2014a nation that came into being in the aftermath of history\u2019s greatest assault on the Jews, and that has spent nearly every year since defending not only its borders but its legitimacy.<\/p>\n
There is something more than ironic\u2014something deeply distressing\u2014in this. Survivors of the Shoah are still alive. Their children and grandchildren are still here. And yet the state built, in part, so that Jews would never again depend entirely on the mercy of others has become, for much of the world, the preferred object of moral disgust. That reversal ought to shame more people than it does. But shame requires a vocabulary capable of recognizing what is in front of it. And that, perhaps, is the deepest problem now before us.<\/p>\n
What October 7 exposed was not only the vulnerability of Israel, nor only the persistence of anti-Jewish hatred, but the distortion of the moral imagination of much of the West. A culture that can watch the rape and murder of civilians, then rush to explain why the victims somehow had it coming, has done more than lose its bearings on Israel. It has begun to lose the ability to distinguish barbarism from justice, malice from virtue, and accusation from truth.<\/p>\n
Jews are not the only people endangered by that confusion. But they are very often the first to discover how dangerous it is.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tPeter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated rock and roll performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. He has been profiled in Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Jerusalem Post, The Times Of Israel, and NPR. His newest book is: Suspended By No String: A Songwriter\u2019s Refections On Faith, Aliveness, and Wonder (Regalo Press\/Simon and Schuster)
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\nFor more of his writing follow Peter at peterhimmelman.substack.com\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The massacre did not create a new anti-Israel politics. It exposed one that was already there. With the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1897,111,85,87,46,155681,43],"class_list":["post-512321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-american-jewry","tag-antisemitism","tag-il","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-israel-at-war","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}