Hating Jews Is Fun And Easy, Isn't It?

Are you pro-Palestine, or anti-Jew?

Via Getty images

by Justin Rosario

I haven’t written about the horror unfolding between Israel and the Gaza Strip that started on October 7th because I have nothing useful to add to the conversation. Hamas launched a monstrous attack resulting in over 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians, massacred and hundreds more abducted. The Israeli military retaliated with its own massively disproportionate slaughter of civilians, now possibly passing 10,000. This will soon spiral much higher as food, water, and power, all tightly controlled by Israel, run out for over two million people. 

As far as I’m concerned, there are no heroes here. Just two extremist governments who demonstrably do not care about the people, their own or otherwise, caught in the middle of their bloodlust. 

That’s all I have to say on the topic and I have refused to engage with most people about this. Everyone has strong opinions and most of them lack any kind of nuance. Which leads us to the problem with the “Free Palestine” protests.

Pro-Palestine? Or anti-Jew?

“I thought you weren’t taking sides!” You are correct. I am not. While Israel has to respond, killing thousands of civilians and committing war crimes to destroy Hamas is not the way to do it. That being said, if you have been frantically screaming “Free Palestine!” while tearing down posters of kidnapped children or threatening to kill Jews, you need to step back and reevaluate your life choices. 

I get it. It’s a terrible situation and what’s been happening in Gaza (and the West Bank) for decades is terrible. You’re angry and you want to protest. I’ve been openly critical of Israel and it’s increasingly horrific policies for years, inviting no small amount of anger from blindly pro-Israel partisans. 

On the other hand, I didn’t do this:

This is not being critical of Israel. This is celebrating an attack that, again, left over 1,300 dead. 1,300 mostly civilians. Unarmed civilians. Children. Babies. It doesn’t matter if the babies were decapitated or not. Babies were murdered. What part of that should be celebrated?

Do you want to argue that this is the chickens coming home to roost? Sure. OK. Do that. Do you want to argue that this was inevitable? That you can only push a people so hard and then they’ll push back? You can, in fact, make that argument without condoning the attack in any way whatsoever.

But in the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was a level of glee I have never seen in my life. I can’t recall a single time people in the United States celebrated the death of civilians in a terrorist attack in any country. Not a grim sense of “This was inevitable,” but a sense of joy that a mighty blow had been struck against, let me check my notes, 1,300 or so mostly civilians at a music festival and families living nearby. 

Then came the rage from those same people when Israel retaliated, as if this were somehow beyond the pale. Is there something in the last half-century of Israel’s existence that suggested they wouldn’t respond with overwhelming force and as little regard for civilian casualties as Hamas?

This is where the truth rears its ugly head. The joy over the October 7th attack stemmed from unadulterated anti-Semitism. The Washington Post has some of the ugly details:

At Cooper Union in Manhattan last month, protesters “swarming at the entrance to the school’s downtown building … gained entrance despite the guards’ best efforts walked upstairs to the library, where Jewish students, some wearing yarmulkes, took refuge.” Like something out of 1930s Europe, “when guards barred the library, the protesters banged on the doors for at least ten minutes while shouting. One Jewish student heard calls for the ‘murder of Jews.’” The university took no action against the students, and its president misrepresented the action as “peaceful.”

This goes way beyond displays of the Palestinian flag or slogans such as “Free Palestine.” Antisemitic incidents are up on college campuses by nearly 400 percent, including incidents of swastika graffiti, arson, assaults, physical intimidation and property damage. 

It gets worse as people who fancy themselves to be progressive go all in on a “colonizer” narrative, meaning that it’s OK to murder hundreds of unarmed civilians, including, this cannot be repeated enough, children:

That’s Devan, a troll of mine who proclaims himself a mighty leftist. He was incredibly excited about the 10/7 attack and rushed to crow about how angry I would be as, he assumed, a hardcore pro-Israel establishment Democrat. We had never actually discussed Israel and Devan knew nothing about my opinions on the topic but he couldn’t restrain himself. He needed to rub the piles of dead Jews in the face of someone. Since then, he’s been outraged outraged at Israel’s response. Because colonizers and oppressors deserve to be slaughtered but are not allowed to retaliate. Yes. A very progressive and realistic worldview.

Just to make it absolutely clear this is about hating Jews, even when they protest the brutal actions of the Israeli government, Jews are still the bad guys:

Devan’s mentality that Jews are the problem regardless of which side they are on is far from an isolated viewpoint. Since literally no other ethnic or religious group is held to this standard by the left, the only conclusion possible is that Jews are being targeted because they are Jews.

There’s a word for that. A few actually. Racism. Bigotry. Anti-Semitism. 

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, please answer this question: after 9/11, when people were targeting American Muslims for harassment and violence, was it acceptable? The left raged about it for years and when Trump’s first action as president was to ban Muslims, we took to the streets.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, was it OK to target Russian-Americans and their businesses? Perhaps the ones that were openly cheering the invasion (and not targeted with violence), but anyone else? Of course not. The actions of the Russian government are not the responsibility of random people living in other countries. 

But that doesn’t appear to apply to Jews. Jews can be a target for people’s rage against Israel and be told they deserve it. No one can explain how that works. Did the Asian-Americans assaulted during Covid deserve it? Kind of weird that Jews and only Jews are subjected to this kind of thing with the blessing of people who believe themselves enlightened progressives.

If these people want to be racists it is their right to be one as an American. But they don’t get to pretend they’re the good guy by “re-contextualizing” their hate as a struggle against “oppressors.” Republicans used to try to dress up their racism in intellectual trappings and we didn’t accept it then. Why is it different for the left?

Hating Jews sure is fun and easy though. It’s so simple to give in to a prejudice woven so deep into the fabric of society that most of us refuse to even acknowledge it’s there — until we’re screaming for Jews to go home. But we are rapidly approaching an inflection point and the morally superior are going to have to face some difficult choices about who they want to be going forward.

The pogroms have returned and history will judge you

“Jews aren’t really a persecuted minority” is a strange belief to hold. The Tiki Torch Nazis weren’t chanting “Blacks will not replace us!” or “Immigrants will not replace us!”, were they? No. They were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” 

The right rails against Blacks, Latinos and the LGBTQ community for causing crime and social decay. But they rarely ever talk about eliminating all Black people or erasing every Latino. 

They do, however, talk about killing Jews. How Jews are the root cause of every problem and if they were all gone from the face of the Earth, things would be better. We are, after all, the supervillains of the stories they tell themselves about why their lives are so miserable. 

This is not the right side of history. It is, however, the side many of the “Free Palestine!” people have chosen to be on.

A person capable of distinguishing the difference between murderous Hamas and Palestinians who then refuses to do so for Jews and the sadistic Israeli government is making a choice. The question is, will they be able to live with that choice when the pogroms claim their first victims?

You remember pogroms, right? A pogrom is a race riot where mobs of non-Jews hunt down and beat and/or kill Jews. It was such a frequent occurrence in history, they made a word for it. Another example of racialized violence being so prevalent it needed a name is lynching. You may be familiar with it. I don’t know of any other words like this but, honestly, the fact that even two exist does not speak well of us as a species.

After decades of anti-Semitism waxing and waning, pogroms are back in style. There are arguments for and against labeling the 10/7 attack as a pogrom. What happened in Dagestan, though, is not up for debate. Hundreds of Muslims in Russia tore through an airport looking for Jews to kill. That was a pogrom. The attack at Cooper Union? When a mob of students trapped a group of Jews in a library and screamed hate at them? That was a pogrom.

They weren’t successful pogroms in that no one was killed. But this state of grace will not last long. One protestor has already killed a 69-year-old Jewish man because they didn’t like what he was saying. Are you as angry about that as you are about the little boy killed because he was Palestinian? If not, why is one hate crime more acceptable than the other? Do you see the problem yet?

Sooner or later, an angry mob of “righteous” pro-Palestine protesters will find some Jews and kill them in a blind rage. It’s very easy for an angry mob to lose control and become violent, it’s why Republicans are forever trying to create angry mobs in the first place.

When that happens, and I promise you it will, how will you respond? Think very carefully about this. You are staring at a line in the sand. Once you cross it, there’s no going back. Will you be appalled at the mindless violence and speak out? Or will you hide behind empty phrases like “oppressor” and “colonizer” that cannot possibly be applied in good faith? Did the 69-year-old Jew “deserve” to die because he was an oppressor? 

If you choose to look away because, well, “it’s just a Jew,” you have taken that first step down a very dark path. Today, it’s the Jews. Tomorrow, maybe it’s trans people because they always made you a little uncomfortable. Maybe you don’t like men kissing in public. Maybe there are a few too many immigrants in your community. Can’t happen to you, right? You’re a good person. Except here you are, condoning the murder of Jews because they’re Jews. 

Hate is so easy. Hate is fungible. Hate feeds on itself. Once you’ve fed it, it wants more. If you’ve learned nothing from watching the Republican Party turn into a haven for white nationalism and fascism, you should have at least noticed that.

If that’s a road you want to travel, cool. But stop lying to yourself. If you are OK with Jews who have nothing to do with the conflict in Gaza being hunted and harassed and assaulted, eventually murdered, you are not the hero of the story. You’re the villain and history is replete with villains just like you. History judges them by their actions and inaction and that judgment is harsh. It will be for you, too.

Please consider supporting The Banter. We are 100% independent and do not run advertising. Banter Members get access to all premium articles, The Emergency Meeting podcast, and exclusive member chat threads. Your contribution is greatly appreciated:

Read the latest on The Banter (out for free):