There is a reason Israel cannot win the communications war. Brandolini’s Law holds that refuting a falsehood takes vastly more effort than creating one, and nowhere is that truer than with the accusation du jour: genocide.
One word takes a second to say. Answering it requires a history course.
You have to excavate everything buried beneath that word: what genocide actually means; Oct. 7 and the hostages; a country’s obligation to protect its citizens; Hamas’s goals, its tunnels and the military infrastructure it embeds among civilians; the laws of urban warfare; Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Hamas’s election and takeover and the blockade that followed; decades of failed peace talks; 1967, Egyptian and Jordanian rule, 1948, partition and the British Mandate; and finally, the Jewish people’s connection to the land, which long predates all of it.
One accusation, 20 explanations; by the third, the audience is gone. It is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations, laying out the case to rows of empty seats.
Our mistake is to believe that this is primarily a communications problem. If the problem were ignorance or confusion, more facts and better graphics would solve it. Some criticism of Israel is like this, and it deserves an answer. But an accusation that no evidence can dislodge is something else, and we should have the courage to name it: antisemitism.
Antisemitism has always spoken in whatever language its age considers respectable, and it always casts the Jew as the opposite of whatever that age calls good. Once it spoke the language of religion, later of race; today, it borrows the moral vocabulary of our time: human rights, anti-racism, decolonization and social justice. The words have changed, but the Jew is still in the dock.
If we fail to see this, then we will spend our lives answering accusations that were never really questions. Explain Gaza, explain Hamas, explain the tunnels and the hostages, explain why Jews are (or aren’t) allowed to fight back, explain 1967 and 1948, explain why Jews are allowed to have a country. It’s endless, tiresome and clearly ineffective.
At some point, we must stop this undignified groveling. Here is what I say, and it is what I think every Jew should say, no more and no less:
We obviously see the world very differently, you and I. I could spend 20 minutes giving you a history lesson you have no interest in hearing, but I am not going to waste my time.
We are the Jewish people, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Our connection to the Land of Israel began with them, some 4,000 years before the United Nations existed, and it does not depend on anyone’s approval.
For nearly 2,000 years after most of us were murdered or driven from our land, we lived as minorities under the rule of others, dependent on your goodwill, which was always scarce. We were persecuted, expelled and killed. A remnant always stayed in our homeland, and the rest of us never stopped praying to return.
We did not arrive in this land as strangers; we came back to it and restored Jewish sovereignty, but that did not end Jew-hatred. There are still countries, movements and individuals committed to killing Jews and destroying Israel. We no longer have to depend on anyone’s fickle goodwill. Thank God, we now have the ability to defend ourselves. We are doing exactly that, and I can see that it bothers you.
We are confident in who we are and in our love for our homeland. We are confident, too, in the moral tradition by which we judge ourselves—a tradition that helped shape the foundations of the West: that every human being is created in the image of God, that murder is forbidden, that justice is obligatory and that power is subject to moral law.
We will hold ourselves accountable. But we will not outsource our moral judgment to societies that spent 2,000 years persecuting Jews and that still hold the Jewish state to standards they apply to no one else, least of all themselves.
We do not need your permission to live in our homeland. We do not need your permission to defend our children.
I see the double standard and old prejudice returning in a new vocabulary. I understand the mechanism, and I’m not going to participate in it.
You may fool a great many people, and you may even fool yourself. But you don’t fool me.
You have a problem with Jews. I don’t have a problem with being one. I am good.
