I know I’m supposed to say how hard this year’s been. I mourn our many losses and ongoing hostage agony. Still, remember our fears a year ago – we were sure the looming war against Hezbollah would cause great harm, before we ultimately triumphed. Israel is much safer today, having crushed Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, and helped Syria’s regime collapse.
This year, headlines screeched about Israel winning the war but losing its good name. If it’s a zero-sum game when Jews defend themselves, better this way! Reputations can revive. Wars can’t be un-lost. Israel must win decisively.
Few wondered: Why is Israel’s PR suffering? Even if we acknowledge the government’s public diplomacy vacuum, Israel, by fighting its enemies too “aggressively” for the world’s taste, upset many friends, while spurring the delegitimizers-in-waiting.
This is a war of deterrence, not vengeance. The slur stirs primeval Western prejudices treating the Jewish God as vengeful. But I keep echoing Amos Oz’s question from earlier Gaza wars – what would you do? As a historian, I ask how did America and the West fight jihadis? Don’t judge Israel by its enemies’ behavior. But don’t judge it unfairly either, imposing standards America and the West didn’t meet in Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone World War II.
Truth-telling can be tedious. But I’ll keep mentioning Israel’s lower combatant-to-civilian kill ratio, Israel’s warnings sacrificing the element of surprise to save Gazan lives, and the unprecedented importing of over 100,000 truckloads of aid into Gaza.
Criticizing Israel's war
That raises the question of the year: Why this pile-on? Is it paranoid to blame antisemitism or delusional to ignore how this prejudice even shakes Jews’ confidence in the Jewish state?
As I argue in my new e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-Hatred, distinguishing legitimate criticism from hysterical antisemitism is easy. Use the TEST test: Ask, is it “Totalizing”? – going essentialist, demonizing everything related to Israel, Jews, Zionists. Is it “Exaggerated”? – the more extreme the criticism, the more it smacks of bigotry. Is it “Sweeping”? – using Israeli missteps to justify outright denial, not just attacking what Israel does, but that Israel is. And what’s the “Tone”? The harsher the criticism, the more it smells like bigotry.
Many critics blast Israel’s war effort and the government. That’s legitimate. Such condemnations echo some Israelis’ Bibi-phobia.
Critics become demonizers by plunging into delegitimization derby, escalating from reproaching Israeli actions to repudiating Israel and Israelis. Consider the pro-Palestinian movement’s vocabulary, characterized by hyperbole charging “genocide,” and the movement’s violent exterminationism: “Globalize the intifada!... From the River to the Sea....” and, rationalizing October 7, “Resistance is Justified When People are Occupied.”
Trace the history of Palestinian antisemitic anti-Zionism. It’s not our fault – or Jerry Seinfeld’s – that “Free Palestine” or the keffiyeh telegraph Jew-hatred. It’s theirs. They’ve been doing it since Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1940s, then gaslighting when they’re called on it.
Even the starvation accusation often reflects bias. Why excuse Hamas for stealing from its own people, and for sacrificing thousands of their own people for PR gains? And why exaggerate about Gaza, while ignoring famine in Mali, Haiti, South Sudan – where 25 million people starve?
Since October 7, I add the word “obsession” when defining antisemitism. “Obsession” involves disproportionately focusing on Israel, putting little Israel in the center of the world’s problems, judging Israel in ways no other Western country is judged.
Celebrating on Rosh Hashanah
Nevertheless, as almost every Israeli Jew plans to attend Rosh Hashanah dinner, joined by millions of Jews worldwide, we have much to celebrate.
Israel continues leading the world in altruistic kidney donations per capita. Israel’s countrywide innovation hub continues bettering the world, from ForSight Robotics developing micro-eye surgery technology saving underserved developing world populations to a “peer-to-peer” tutoring platform some Afula teens launched.
As Western worries spike about violence, anger, loneliness, intolerance, drift, toxic partisanship, AI-onset rejection of truths, social-media-fueled alienation, Judaism offers a great cure, the ultimate counterculture. Jews remain the people of community, continuity, history, identity, debate; of meaning-seekers and purpose-finders.
Welcome this Jewish new year not just by buying new clothes or the biggest brisket. Instead, read one of our great books, study our sages.
On a seemingly lighter note, lobby your local film festival to premier Floaters, a charming new indie comedy, produced by my friends Becky, Lily, and Shai Korman. Set in a fictional Zionist camp, Camp Daveed, filmed in Young Judaea Camp Tel Yehudah, this is the film for anyone who ever came home hoarse from youth group or thought summertime meant sitting around debating Zionist ideology and the meaning of life, morning till night.
The nostalgia-inducing film ends on a profound and relevant note. The Floaters – misfits – mount a characteristically wacky camp play. Amid primitive aluminum-foil props, out pops a once-alienated cool kid in tallit and tefillin, explaining: “The wrappings help me contemplate my connection to my community.”
Suddenly, your gaze shifts from the interpersonal dynamics shaping every communal adventure – and teen movie – to the transformational power of realizing you’re “part of the whole,” of becoming “comfortable” in your “own skin,” and of redeeming humanity, one “good human,” one worthy deed, one eternal idea at a time.
That’s how we thrived last year, these past 3,500 years. Our lives have so much noise, so many distractions. But, on Rosh Hashanah – and every day thereafter – our mission remains to transcend everyday headaches, solve whatever problems we can, then live, act, pray, believe, and dream, in forever-time, too. Shana Tova.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. Last year, he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-hatred, was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI website.