It is a beautiful time to be Jewish.
While crowds around the world chant slogans stripped of any rational meaning; while the phrase, “From the river to the sea,” is repeated without regard for geography, history or consequence; while “genocide” is used to describe a conflict in which the Palestinian population has grown from roughly 150,000 in 1948 to around two million today; while the language of human rights is turned on its head to defend movements that oppress women and execute homosexuals; while newspapers amplify invented and unverified casualty figures—there stands a tiny people, just 0.2% of humanity, some 15 million souls worldwide, that does not lie.
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.
This is the new Jewish message.
It is no longer the desperate cry of persecution that echoed through centuries of exile. Jews have often debated how to interpret their own history. In 1928, the great historian Salo Baron challenged what he called the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history, arguing that even during the Middle Ages, Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity flourished.
Today the message is different.
Yes, there is shock, disappointment, anger and legitimate fear. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the world has witnessed not only the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust but also the rapid construction of a vast, well-funded machinery of antisemitism. It stretches from fashion campaigns displaying maps that erase Israel to murders in Manchester and Sydney’s Bondi Beach; from Jews driven off university campuses, festivals and sporting events to antisemitic patrols in Thessaloniki and manhunts targeting Jews in London.
But those who believe this campaign will break the Jewish people are mistaken.
We will fight with our fingernails if necessary.
We did so after what seemed an unbearable catastrophe 1,000 days ago. Since then, alongside the physical horrors of massacre, rape and attempted genocide, Jews have also endured psychological warfare intended to isolate us—to convince us to mourn not only our dead but our very identity, to believe that Jews everywhere would once again become defenseless targets.
Instead, something else has happened.
In Israel and throughout the Diaspora, the meaning of Jewish identity has become clearer than ever. The civilization that first gave humanity the Ten Commandments and the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” will endure. The effort to destroy Israel and the Jewish people will fail.
There are no longer Jews with trembling knees.
As Golda Meir famously reminded Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, after he remarked that he was first an American, second secretary of state and third a Jew, she replied: “Henry, you forget that in Israel we read from right to left.”
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—not for conquest, but because survival has required it from the day the Jewish state was born.
The historical record is unmistakable. The Arab rejection of Israel was never fundamentally about borders or statehood. From the beginning, the goal was the elimination of the Jews—Yehud—and later of the Jewish state itself.
Israel’s military strength has always reflected the scale of the aggression directed against it. Anyone who understands modern warfare knows that when terrorist armies hide beneath hospitals, schools, mosques and apartment buildings while operating extensive tunnel networks underneath civilian neighborhoods, destruction is tragically inevitable.
Even so, many of the casualty figures repeated globally remain highly disputed. Studies by military analyst John Spencer and the Henry Jackson Society have challenged key claims circulated by Hamas. Sensational accusations involving children have repeatedly collapsed under scrutiny, including The New York Times’ publication of a photograph of a child suffering from cystic fibrosis that was widely—but incorrectly—presented as evidence of starvation caused by Israel.
Yet facts increasingly matter little to an alliance of radical Islamist ideology and Western woke activism determined to delegitimize Zionism itself.
The old antisemitic libels have simply acquired new vocabulary.
Instead of accusing Jews of poisoning wells, they are called “colonizers.” Instead of depicting them as racial conspirators, they are accused of “apartheid.” Instead of alleging global domination, they are charged with “genocide.”
The labels have changed. The objective has not.
But after nearly three terrible years since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has demonstrated extraordinary resilience.
It has dismantled Hamas’s military leadership, eliminating figures including Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar. It has broken Hezbollah’s strategic position, killing Hassan Nasrallah and reaching a new security framework with Lebanon. It has established strategic positions along Syria’s unstable frontier, strengthened relations with the United States despite inevitable tensions, expanded ties with Arab, Balkan, Latin American and Indian partners, and confronted the Iranian regime directly, striking deep inside Iranian territory before the United States joined in targeting Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
Is the work complete? Of course not. It never will be.
The Jewish people, perhaps more united today than at any time in recent history, understand both their 3,000-year-old heritage and their responsibility to confront radical Islam before much of Europe is willing to do so itself. Across the Diaspora, Jews increasingly recognize that attacks on Israel are often merely the newest expression of hatred toward Jews.
Since Oct. 7, the United Nations has condemned Israel hundreds of times while largely ignoring those who openly seek its destruction.
And yet life continues.
Schools have just closed for the summer. The children who spent two years running to bomb shelters are once again playing and singing in the streets of Jerusalem.
This year. Next year. With our fingernails if we must. In Israel and throughout the world.
