Israel, Influencers, and Dominican Bias
Despite the overwhelming and well-documented evidence of the horrific and unforgettable events of October 7, 2023, it seems that even such undeniable human suffering has not been enough to remind the world that Israeli society and Jewish communities cannot be reduced to a single political identity or held collectively responsible for the actions of a government. Yet distorted narratives and selective information continue to fuel harmful stereotypes, particularly in developing countries where access to quality education and the tools necessary for critical thinking often remain more of an aspiration than a guaranteed right.
As the world entered yet another cycle of political arguments, competing narratives, and social media outrage, I found myself confronting a deeply troubling question: Have we become so consumed by the narratives we choose to believe that we are losing sight of the human beings behind the headlines? When did the murder of young people attending a music festival become something that could be pushed aside in the name of political arguments? And perhaps most troubling of all, how did humanity reach a point where centuries-old hatred could find such a comfortable home in the palm of our hands?
Antisemitism did not begin on October 7, nor did it emerge with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 or the political and territorial disputes that followed. Hatred toward Jewish people has endured for centuries, surviving the rise and fall of empires, religious conflicts, revolutions, and generations of political transformation. Yet, what makes this ancient prejudice particularly troubling today is not merely its persistence, but its ability to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world.
Stereotypes that once spread through printed propaganda, political rallies, and state-controlled newspapers now travel across digital platforms with unprecedented speed and reach. In an era when popularity is often mistaken for credibility, centuries-old prejudices can find new audiences through something as ordinary as a smartphone, an influential public figure, and a message accepted without the slightest effort to question its origins or accuracy.
I was born in the Dominican Republic, a country of extraordinary cultural richness, creativity, and human potential. Still, like many developing nations, my country continues to confront inequalities in educational opportunity and access to resources that encourage critical thinking. This is not a question of intelligence. It is a question of educational opportunity and the tools people need to evaluate information independently.
Today, young people encounter international affairs through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and countless other platforms. A thirty-second video can create an impression that takes years of historical study to challenge. An emotional statement can travel around the world before anyone asks whether it is accurate, and a person with hundreds of thousands of followers may be treated as an authority on subjects that require far more than popularity to understand.
I worry about what happens when the ability to influence becomes more powerful than the responsibility to inform. When did we begin confusing visibility with knowledge? When did having followers become equivalent to having expertise? And when did repeating something on social media become a substitute for investigating whether it was true?
The problem is not that young people are incapable of thinking. Our information environment too often rewards immediate reactions rather than patient reflection. The consequences become especially dangerous when the subject is a people who have endured centuries of organized prejudice.
The Danger of Hatred Without Intention
One does not need to begin with antisemitic intentions to contribute to an environment in which antisemitism can flourish. This distinction matters enormously.
A public figure may believe that criticizing a trip to Israel is simply expressing a political position. The intention may be to question an organized visit, its sponsorship, or the image it seeks to communicate, but what happens when the message reaches an audience that has never studied Jewish history, never met a Jewish person, or never learned to distinguish between a government and the people within its borders? What happens when criticism is presented without context?
Some listeners may begin to associate an entire population with the actions of political leaders. Others may encounter older prejudices disguised as contemporary arguments, and still others may gradually accept collective suspicion as a reasonable response to political disagreement.
The original speaker may never have intended any of those outcomes, but public influence carries responsibilities that extend beyond intention. That is why I believe those who influence public opinion should be especially careful when discussing Israel and Jewish communities. Political criticism must remain possible, but it must not erase individual humanity or turn Jewish identity into a source of collective guilt. Young people around the world must not forget.
This brings me to the criticism surrounding Dominican influencers invited to visit Israel. I find myself asking a simple question: why should the opportunity to encounter a society firsthand be treated as something inherently shameful? A visit to Israel does not automatically endorse every decision made by its government, nor does an organized trip guarantee that visitors will understand the country’s full complexity.
Influencers should disclose sponsorship, ask difficult questions, examine what they are shown, and recognize the limitations of any curated experience, but they should not be discouraged from learning. They may encounter Jewish families whose histories include persecution, displacement, survival, and the rebuilding of lives after unimaginable losses. They may meet people who disagree passionately about their own country’s future. They may discover that the word Israeli describes human beings whose experiences cannot be reduced to a political slogan, and perhaps they will return with something more valuable than photographs or social media engagement.
Perhaps they will return with questions. Perhaps they will discover that a nation is more complicated than the images circulating online. Perhaps their followers will begin asking questions of their own. Is that not what education should encourage?
A Society Reduced to a Stereotype
There is a particular cruelty in reducing millions of people to a single identity imposed upon them by others. Jewish history offers countless examples of what happens when stereotypes replace human individuality.
For centuries, Jews were described not as neighbors, teachers, physicians, musicians, or families, but as a supposedly threatening collective. The accusations changed. The mechanism remained remarkably similar. First, a population is simplified, then its members are assigned collective characteristics. Eventually, individual innocence becomes irrelevant because belonging to the group is treated as sufficient reason for suspicion.
That is why language matters; that is why education matters, and that is why misinformation cannot be dismissed as harmless entertainment. A stereotype repeated often enough may begin to feel like common knowledge. A false accusation repeated across generations can become part of a society’s inherited assumptions, an old prejudice, presented in the language of a new political controversy. It can reach people who would never consciously identify themselves as anti-Semites. The danger is not only deliberate hatred, but it is also the normalization of ideas whose historical consequences we should already understand.
We have a responsibility to recognize antisemitism when it appears in familiar or unfamiliar language, and we have a responsibility to teach younger generations that historical knowledge cannot be replaced by whatever appears first in a social media feed. Education must do more than transmit information.
It must cultivate the courage to question popular assumptions, investigate evidence, recognize manipulation, and resist the temptation to condemn entire communities. A society that abandons those responsibilities becomes vulnerable to the very prejudices it believes belong to the past.
I do not believe the answer to misinformation is to tell people what they must think. I believe the answer is to give them the education, historical context, and intellectual freedom necessary to think for themselves.
Let influencers visit Israel. Let them ask questions. Let them meet Jewish families, hear personal histories, and discover realities that cannot fit into a thirty-second video. Let their audiences encounter perspectives they might otherwise never hear, and let us demand that public figures recognize the extraordinary responsibility that comes with shaping the opinions of young people because antisemitism is not merely a chapter in a history textbook. It is a prejudice that has survived centuries by adapting to the fears, frustrations, and political languages of each new generation.
Today, it can travel through an algorithm; it can hide behind a misleading headline; it can emerge from a message whose author never intended to encourage hatred, and it can flourish when people stop asking questions.
If we cannot recognize humanity without first asking which political narrative they represent, then perhaps the most urgent question is not what social media has taught us about Israel. It is what we have allowed social media to make us forget about being human.
Those influencers, comedians, television panelists, and other public personalities who have criticized the visit of Dominican influencers to Israel should understand something fundamental: words carry consequences, especially when spoken before audiences that may not have access to the historical context necessary to question them. We Dominicans should know better.
Our own country has repeatedly been criticized by international organizations over its immigration policies and treatment of Haitian migrants. Some of these criticisms raise legitimate human rights concerns, but defending a nation’s right to regulate immigration should not automatically be equated with racial hatred.
Our public health system faces serious financial and institutional pressures. According to official Dominican statistics, approximately 36 percent of births recorded in public hospitals in 2024 were to Haitian mothers. These figures have become part of an increasingly difficult national debate about immigration, public resources, and the Dominican state’s responsibility to its own vulnerable population.
But statistics require context, just as international accusations require careful examination. The Dominican people know what it means to struggle for national identity and sovereignty. Our independence was not handed to us. We achieved it through sacrifice, suffering, and the determination of generations who refused to surrender their right to self-government. My own ancestors were among those whose lives were marked by that struggle. Some paid the ultimate price, leaving behind families overwhelmed by grief. For me, sovereignty is not an abstract political expression. It is part of my family’s history, written through loss, sacrifice, and the memory of those who never returned home.
Our history also bears the scars of the Haitian occupation of the eastern part of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, as well as earlier episodes of violence, including the killings in Moca during the Haitian military campaign of 1805. These historical events cannot be understood without their context, nor should they be used to assign inherited guilt to people living today.
In 1937, the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Historians differ on the exact number of victims, but the atrocity remains one of the darkest chapters in Dominican history. That crime was carried out under a dictatorship. Its responsibility must be examined honestly, without erasing the victims or treating every Dominican, past or present, as personally guilty.
Yet during that same dictatorship, the Dominican Republic offered refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. Sosúa became a place where Jewish refugees could begin rebuilding lives threatened by extermination.
That humanitarian outcome deserves remembrance, even as history requires us to acknowledge the political and racial motivations behind Trujillo’s refugee policy. How can one nation carry such profoundly different chapters in its history? Because a nation cannot be understood through a single event, a single government, or a single accusation, and that is precisely my point.
If Dominicans object when our entire society is reduced to a stereotype, how can we justify doing the same to another nation? If we understand that our historical struggles for sovereignty cannot be reduced to prejudice against another people, why should we deny others the right to explain their history, identity, and fears?
I am not suggesting that the histories of the Dominican Republic and Israel are identical. They are not. Their political circumstances, historical origins, and conflicts are profoundly different, but they raise a common moral question: how easily can public discourse turn a complex society into a simplistic image that millions accept without examining it?
We should know better. We should understand that national identity is shaped by history, memory, language, culture, and the sacrifices of generations, and above all, we should recognize that the words of influential people can either help dismantle inherited prejudices or give them new life.
A nation is more than its government; a people are more than the accusations made against them, and history becomes dangerous when we use it not to understand one another, but to justify refusing to listen.
