Antisemitic rhetoric has become a mainstay of public discourse in the West more than at any point in the last 50 years

October 09th, 14PM October 09th, 14PM

If Israelis have lived for the last three years in a perpetual October 7, in a doom loop of trauma and mourning, many Jews outside of Israel live in an unending October 8.

October 8 was the day the shape of a new world was revealed. As images of Hamas’ atrocities circulated online, people who had previously postured as human rights activists reacted to the gruesome murder, burning, maiming and kidnapping of civilians not with horror but with adulation.

Even while the Hamas gunmen remained in the towns and kibbutzim of Israel’s south, left-wing groups in New York and around the world held rallies where speakers celebrated the attacks with breathless enthusiasm. At least one attendee of such protests is now even running for office in New York State.

In her powerful tract “Le 8-Octobre: Généalogie d’une haine vertueuse” (“October 8: Genealogy of a Virtuous Hatred”), sociologist Eva Illouz observes that when it comes to most situations of mass killing – say, Sudan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Syria or Ukraine – the typical response of Western progressives and liberals is compassion. Yet that was not the case on October 8 because the people being killed were Israeli Jews, and Israeli Jews – held collectively responsible for their government’s actions in a way the citizens of Putin’s Russia or, dare we say, Trump’s America, are not – have become the acceptable objects of a virtuous and apparently invigorating hate.

Such hatred debilitates the faculty of reason, which is also why – even as Israel launched its devastating response that left Gaza in ruins, displaced most of its people and destroyed their homes – many of those who imagined themselves as Palestine’s advocates continued to speak of October 7 as a glorious day and hail Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar as a hero.

On the first anniversary of October 7, I found myself in Athens, where demonstrators flew banners proclaiming that “October 7 is the first day of the liberation of Palestine.” Never mind that in reality, on the bloodstained ground, Palestine’s liberation never looked more unlikely.

Since October 8, antisemitic rhetoric has become a mainstay of public discourse in the West more than at any point in the last half century. And I do not mean here criticism of Israeli policies, or even the vague, fashionable anti-Zionism common in elite opinion, which dreams of Israel’s replacement with a single Palestinian state, but which is too cowardly to declare outright the way to get there: Israel’s military defeat, a scenario that would almost certainly involve killing on a scale dwarfing that of the last three years.

Instead, I mean what we might call old-school antisemitism – conspiracies of exorbitant Jewish power, of the Rothschilds, of a “Zionist-occupied government,” of Jews fomenting race treason. There are also lurid newer variants: an “emancipatory” antisemitism that imagines Israel’s destruction as the key to liberating the world from capitalism and racism, a “post-secular” antisemitism that attributes Israel’s allegedly unique malevolence to the texts of the Jewish religion.

These are not pathologies confined to the swamps of the internet; they can be found, for instance, on the lips of employees of the United Nations or of some of America’s leading universities.

Still, antisemitism alone cannot account for the perverse triumphalism that has persisted in the last three years in certain bien-pensant circles and in academia. Nor, contrary to this part of Illouz’s argument, is the rise of postcolonialism and post-structuralism largely to blame.

One way to understand why the Hamas fighters acted as they did – beyond unbridled, libidinal sadism for its own sake – is that they hoped to provoke an enormous, disproportionate Israeli response by broadcasting to the world the brutalization, humiliation and violation of Israelis in their most intimate spaces.

That is why, for instance, at Kibbutz Nir Oz, Hamas gunmen killed 74-year-old Bracha Levinson in her home and then uploaded on her Facebook page video of her bleeding body. Or why, at Kibbutz Holit, after killing Adi Vital-Kaploun in front of her children and rigging her body with explosives, Hamas gunmen videoed themselves feeding her 4-month-old and 4-year-old before abducting them. Or why, at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Hamas attackers killed 18-year-old Maayan Idan, then broadcast on Facebook live video of her family held at gunpoint, her father Tzachi’s hands still stained red with her blood.

When protesters in New York praise “the resistance,” this is what they are celebrating. And part of what has turned October 8 into a kind of perpetual present condition is that this rhetoric has become pervasive and unchecked, and, simultaneously, is often denied or minimized, at times by the very people present when such slogans are chanted.

Israel ultimately did what Sinwar seems to have hoped it would. In destroying Gaza and killing 70,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israel has wrecked whatever remained of its international standing for quite some time and gotten bogged down in a costly multifront war spanning from Iran to Lebanon to Yemen. Israel’s actions have also given those who seek to harm Jews around the world – from Bondi Beach, Australia, to Manchester, England, to Washington – a righteous screen to hide behind.

For their part, die-hards in the Palestine solidarity movement and the radical left abroad generally seem to think that October 7 and its aftermath produced salutary results, breathing new life into moribund sectarian movements and providing a unifying cause for a left badly demoralized by Donald Trump’s return. Certainly, the Gaza war has been a great boon for left-wing candidates running in Democratic primaries. For Palestinians in Gaza, much less so.

It should not require saying but unfortunately does: Nothing Hamas did justifies how Israel prosecuted the war in Gaza. The Israeli government – its leaders, chief among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – waged an unjust war driven by blind vengeance, seemingly absent any coherent objective beyond the collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza. There is no victory here, either, only moral, strategic and military failure. Perhaps this, too, is why Hamas and its apologists feel they have won. To have denied Israel a triumph is enough.

There is no easy way out of this condition. There is no going back to how things were. What was said cannot be unheard, what was seen cannot be unseen. This is the new normal: a climate of opinion in the West in which Jews are blamed for their own deaths, whether they are killed in the towns and kibbutzim of southern Israel or on the streets of a major city.

In Israel, October 7 has not really ended. Each day reveals more testimony from those who survived, more grotesque details of the ways people were killed, more revelations about the prime minister’s criminal negligence and ignoring of numerous warnings. Even with the surviving hostages back home and the dead buried, there is no public catharsis, no sense of closure. The work of mourning has yet to begin.

Likewise, in the Diaspora, it is still October 8.